Recent Photographic Work

During the past six months I have been working on a series of photographic images that combine photographs I have taken of the landscape in rural Newfoundland with paintings I have done there in my studio. The paintings, as I have mentioned before, were not conceived of as landscape images but as the body of work has grown there is no denying the influence the landscape has had on the iconography.  Over five years I have taken perhaps as many as twenty thousand pictures from more or less the same point-of-view on the east side of my house and that series has documented in detail what is visible throughout any given day with changes in the light and the weather. This is not a new concept. Monet first began to paint in series from a fixed point-of-view as far back as 1870 recognizing how the changing light influenced what was visible. He was interested in grand structures like Rouen Cathedral which he painted many times and mundane forms like the hay stacks in the fields near where he lived. His approach to painting was called Impressionism. With the photographs I am still surprised by what I see at different times in the day and through the different seasons. Some of the images are beautiful and resonant and others just capture an aspect of nature like the height of the tide in October or the texture of a cliff face at dusk. In juxtaposing an image of the landscape with an image of a painting I began to see how I could create a unique image and one that was unabashedly modern in the now classical meaning of that term with its implication of a flattened picture space as the painted image defeats any illusion of depth that might occur in the photograph.

Living Colour Continued

Living Colour is the name of a series of paintings, all 4'x3,' done last year, 2012, between September and November. Three of the paintings, see below, were shown this past summer at Two Whales Coffee Shop, in Port Rexton Newfoundland, during the month of August.

That series had a  formal approach to composition and I decided in September of this year, 2013, to continue with the idea of pure painting but to break opened the compositional constraints. Here are five of the recent paintings. Untitled 1 is 6'x4', Untitled 2 is 4'x3', Nothing Like Jack Bush and The Breughel Shuffle are 4'x3' and Paradise By The Dashboard Light is 6'x4'. They will appear in this order.