Blog

Anonymous Influences Graffiti - Stencils - Street Art I wrote this blog years ago and am posting it for the first time in 2021.I hope you enjoy one artist's now historic slice of Montréal's anonymous creativity. Thursday, October 11, 2012 When I'm working in my Montreal studio, twice a day, (in between focused painting  sessions with refined gouache on Italian paper!) I pound the pavement,taking long walks through the quartier, camera in hand, down the ruelles, the laneways of hidden gardens, garages, back balconies between each street.  That's where the anonymous art is and I have developed an addiction to collecting it. There are currently close to 400 [...]

“Dreams of Paradise: Non-Essential Travel in the Time of Covid” is a new series of paintings which arose out of a period of personal loss and grief into a gradual return of optimism and joy. View exhibition photos at Galerie Vieux Forgeron HERE. As humans, we can each imagine what paradise might mean for each of us. Non-essential travel is always possible in our imaginations!  As artists, we can take our dreams and translate them into communicable images and sounds. Begun in the black and white of our covid confined winter, tropical colours called out to me, as well as the sensation of [...]

“Enchanted Forest” is a project of 22 paintings, painted between June 2017 and June 2018, on the interior of pieces of maple bark.   My friend Winnie Jones is an important collector of my work and has commissioned several interesting painting projects. In 2016 her mother passed away. For comfort afterwards Winnie asked me to create a painting inside a curved piece of maple bark she had found.  The painting would be called “Sanctuary” after a song by Carrie Newcomber.  This emotional starting point and the unexpected pleasure and inspiration in working with this unusual surface as well as my already deep connection [...]

My work is layered, detailed, colourful and complicated.  It's reflective of the incredible detail in the natural world and my personal enjoyment of the sensual pleaures of "deep looking".   Life is fast these days.  Fast, and it seems, loaded with an infinity of flashing images and sounds. For many years I have been intrigued by the work of deep listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros. From the Deep Listening website, "The practice of deep listening is intended to heighten awareness of sound, silence and sounding". Why not also "Deep Looking"?  Let's say a practice of deep looking is to heighten awareness of form, depth and [...]

SHIELDS March 6 to June 5, 2011 at the Musée Beaulne in Coaticook, Quebec, Canada I was gifted the beautiful, luminous, second floor gallery at the Musée Beaulne in which to display this project.  (See exhibition photos here) “Shields” is an installation of 22 round paintings which integrate sacred geometry, mandala and the colour symbolism of Tibetan prayer flags. The rich primary colours of the paintings are connected to Tibetan Buddhist colour symbolism and its' associations with earth, air, fire, water and space. The imagery is mandala-like or draws from observations of nature and the cosmos or, as with “Cell Tower Shield”, our technological influences [...]