Artist's statement - figurative work

Digital cameras, webcams, video cameras, and cellphone cameras have become ubiquitous tools. As a result, we are able to photograph and document ourselves on a routine basis as we do any number of mundane things. Gone is the cost of developing film, or the need to hire a professional photographer — or an artist, for that matter.

My figurative work examines the cultural phenomenon of posting one’s picture on the Internet. Using sites like HotorNot.com, where men and women submit photographs of themselves (to be judged and rated on a 10-point sex appeal scale), I have enlarged and reproduced these low-res snapshots in the traditional medium of oil on canvas.

On HotorNot.com men and women (ranging in age from their teens to their fifties and sixties) post snapshots of themselves in poses designed to highlight their physical or personality traits. Unlike pornographic sites, the images posted on HotorNot.com are meant to be (as the site boasts) “fun, clean and real”. Although some people choose to remove a shirt or strike a more suggestive pose, no one is ever naked, and most of the time the pictures are mundane, or bizarre, or simply ridiculous. Unlike a traditional studio portrait, where the sitter might brush his/her hair and sit in one of a few standard positions, the photographs on these sites are taken at home, or at least in private, and are fairly spontaneous. All of the images are there for you, the viewer, to evaluate — and in the case of the website HotorNot.com, they are to be rated on a scale of one to ten (ten being the “hottest”).

The photographs I gather from HotorNot.com are self-portraits — even those taken by someone else become self-portraits once they have been doctored and posted on the web. In that light, I have also produced a series of small self-portraits to contrast these larger works. Done in oil on board, and the size of an average computer screen, these paintings are based on digital photographs of myself that mimic the often hastily taken images seen on the Internet.

Artist's statement - landscape

In the tradition of many Canadian artists, I fell in love with the landscape as a subject matter for painting. Like Paterson Ewen and David Milne, or the American painter Richard Diebenkorn, I am interested in some form of representation, yet equally interested in the subjective aspect of painting — in the application of paint, and the balance of colour, scale, line and movement.

Most of these works were inspired by the Tantramar marshes and the flat landscape of eastern New Brunswick. Others were made in Alberta, where there is often a wonderfully similar geography.