Artist's statement - current work
My current body of work explores themes of loss of control and violence – but often violence at a remove. Building on parallels I observed between sports imagery and war imagery (that informed my previous body of work), I began collecting images of young men engaging in violent behaviour in and around (but not restricted to) urban sporting events.
This in turn led to an interest in images of fire, oil, playground violence, airplane crashes, wild dogs and other symbolic examples of conflict and tension. These paintings often focus on two entities coming together, or pulling apart.
Stylistically I cannibalize imagery that I feel is either symbolic or emblematic and recycle these parts in subsequent reworked narratives. My paintings owe to the source material – the found photos pulled from the internet – however the source material is often altered or juxtaposed with other images in order to speak to the idea of memory, context, and storytelling. This body of work recounts a narrative of real violence re-imagined.
Artist's statement - figurative work
The last two series of figurative paintings explored notions of the self, and particularly concepts of male identity and social identity as depicted in pop culture imagery. The first examined the cultural phenomenon of posting one’s picture on the Internet; the second dealt more specifically with male soldiers who posted their images in similar fashion, but where the environment became integral to the story being told.
Because digital cameras, webcams, and cellphone cameras are ubiquitous tools, taking a picture – and particularly taking a picture of oneself – has become commonplace. Unlike a traditional studio portrait, the photographs on these sites are taken at home, or at least in private, and are fairly spontaneous. Gone is the cost of developing film, or the need to hire a professional photographer — or an artist, for that matter. These paintings are in some manner, an expression of the 21st century portrait.
Artist's statement - landscape
Like many Canadian painters, the landscape is a subject I cannot shake. Like Paterson Ewen and David Milne, or the American painter Richard Diebenkorn, I am interested in some form of representation, yet am equally interested in the subjective aspect of painting — in the application of paint, and the balance of colour, scale, line and movement.
Recently, my landscape work has become smaller and more explicit. These images are from in and around Alberta’s major cities, and focus at times on the intermingling of landscape and industry.
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