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Work doesn’t quite seem like the right word. Maybe it is. Whatever. This gallery consists of sketches, paintings and images I produced during my first year in Canada. Most of these were done in the first six months I was there: stir crazy with isolation and trying to get through my first rural Ontario winter with a large dose of culture shock. Its at this point I start to dabble more with digital imagery and start to combine it with the cut and paste/mixed media approach I had become comfortable with. And then I even tried the unthinkable… painting.
I actually warmed up to painting after initially being rather put off by all the stigma and preciousness surrounding it. Its not that I don’t have respect for people who hone their brushwork skills and colour theory so carefully, I just like to use paint as a medium where it works, no big philosophy. And I don’t think its any more respectable or important than say writing things on the backs of bus tickets and planting them in peoples homes; sometimes it feels right, sometimes it doesn’t. What I like about paint is its versatility, you can rummage around in the gap between real and imagined so easily. Diatribe on painting aside, this was my first jump into it without too much of the structures that put me off, and from here on in it started to settle neatly with other methods and media at my disposal.
Some of these images I consider finished, others are just ideas and sketches. I’m not saying which are which but it has nothing to do with whether they’re a painting or a pencil sketch.
