alphabet city, 36 x 36 inches, oil on canvas, 2009COLOUR, MOVING AND STILL
A painting is a monument. It serves for engagement, consideration, contemplation. It celebrates as an object of desire, a provocateur, a companion. My paintings exist to honour the act of painting by focusing on formal elements, working to achieve perfect tonal balance, harmony and rhythm. The placement of equally intense colours within color families is an effort to achieve a lyrical pleasure, vibration, tension or halation. By reducing subject matter and external references, warm and cool associations can be explored along with motif, patterning, compositional movement and saturation.

The paintings clearly present themselves as paintings, but toy with idea of bed covering, a suedey textile, a worn and stretched work of craft. In this reference I'm blurring the distinction between high art and craft, between the realms of domesticity and precious objects. I strive to create a place to "go" in my paintings, to be calm while experiencing pleasure in their rhythm, disappearances and their allusions to nature.

 

georgia, 36 x 36 inches, oil on canvas, 2009SIXTY DAYS OF LIGHT
In the summer of 2008 I swapped my studio in New York with an American writer who has been living in Italy for nine years. Lucca is a jewel, surrounded by the most preserved Renaissance walls in Europe. The walls are crowned with Plane trees, and because they make an ellipse around the little former Roman colony, they see every shadow, and each moment of light and darkness under Tuscany's big dome. Included in my swap was a bicycle, (named Rilke)...Rilke made a perfect thinking, idea gathering, getaway accomplice and painting partner. I stacked those square linen boards onto the back end, along with the Italian acrylics, and set out in the evening for the delicious hours of dappling and blinding and cloud and sky pockets.
The paintings served as studies when I returned in the Fall to New York and then Vancouver to develop them into large scale colourfields. The palette got reduced and quieted, I switched to oil and amped up the brushwork, letting it take over for light raking, soaking and saturation. I had a dream to do them all in white, because riding a bicycle into sunlight blasting from low in the sky blows out the iris and flips all those contrasts.

 thirty-five, 9 x 12 inches, watercolour on arches paper, 2008

PERFECT PLACES TO HANG OUT IN THE WOODS
An Inukshuk is a stone landmark used as a milestone by the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. Though varying in shape and size, most are comprised of rocks placed and balanced on top of one another, and symbolize safety, hope and friendship on the barren tundra of the Canadian North.

"Obos" is a Japanese term for a pile of rocks on top of one another. The obos merely says, "I was here." A balanced, obvious rock pile, the obos is the creation of human hands. Also, if it is knocked down or desecrated, it is easily rebuilt. It serves as a symbolic sanctuary, a place of refuge and contemplation, a hideout, a shrine, a place of new direction.


 

j.e.h's love letter, june 28, 11 x 14 inches, acrylic on canvas, 2007A LAKE O'HARA MASTER CLASS 
I took myself down a notch by climbing to a mountain top. How does one get her brush around a subject so big (literally), with so much legacy (Canada), with a my Dad, a mountain-master for a companion? Check known skills at the trail head. Carry paintboxes, water and sandwiches. Close mouth at mountain awesomeness, put head down and wobble through inclement weather sketches, sundrying gradations and tender tips from a master Dad. We hiked and painted for a week, stalking the locations of J.E.H Macdonald, who painted there for seven autumns between 1924 and 1930.
Yoho National Park sits nestled on the western slope of the continental divide, in southeastern British Columbia. The name Yoho comes from the Cree word expressing amazement. Yoho and all of the Canadian Rockies Parks are a world heritage site. "I had a little cabin, with cedar walls and floors, with mountains in the window, and spruces at the door." (J.E.H. Macdonald, journal entry, 1927)

 

stalking francolins, 9 x 12 inches, pastel on canson paper, 2007

BIG ISLAND PASTELS
It wasn't the first time I visited the Big Island, and I went out in search of good fields and steep, wooded, secretive spots. Moody sky, liquid rainbow. All the turbines at the southern tip were stopped. James suggested they had been damaged by exuberant winds, but turbines need wind. There were kids jumping from cliffs, screaming and giving themselves wedgies. There were fishers throwing fish back, the fishes clicking their gills in protest - they're not natural cliff jumpers. I remembered years before when, out of necessity, I was making pastels on the lid of a Coleman cooler in a campground in rural France. There was no place to dry oils, there was no room in the car for a stack of canvases.  It was the greatest gift to be forced to try something new. "The creative mind plays with objects it loves." (Carl Jung)