I wanted to post at least one more blog before my show, Everything
AND Nothing, opens next week. There are so many great artists who've inspired and influence me over the years. It would be impossible to list them all.

I've made the distinction between influence and inspiration. There are artists who have impacted the way I work. Seeing their work changed or influenced the way I make art. There are other artists who inspire me. Their style or themes haven't necessarily impacted the way I work but they feed my imagination, excite me, inspire me.

What I like about Frida's work is the emotional honesty, combined with sardonic humour, cooked up in a cauldron of magic realism. Seeing her work recently at the AGO in Toronto, I was struck by the delicacy and subtly of her brush work. That's not something that comes through in photographs. I've always thought of her work as stiff and a bit primitive in execution. Photos just don't do them justice. Healing and transformation have been important themes for me, and Frida's work has it in spades.

This is one of my favourite Stanley Spence paintings. About twelve years ago I began work on a series of dream-like narrative paintings called Manifest Density. Along with Steven Campbell, Stanley Spencer was one of my biggest influences. The light in this painting is so perfect, so intoxicating. The composition, in my opinion, is also perfect. Your eye enters along the edge of the fence up into the centre of the scene, touches upon the various characters, out along the ridge of trees and escapes out through that little smidge of blue along the horizon. I love Spencer's large crazy narratives as well. I love the fact that he's re-staged famous biblical scenes in the neighbourhoods he lived in. I'm not so fond of his quirky sausage-shaped people, but at the time, was inspired by his attempts to go beyond classical figuration to create something personal and eccentric.

I was first attracted to Paula Rego's abstract work. Especially the acrylic collaged paintings from the 1960s and early 70's, then her loose expressive figure work in the 1980's. At first I wasn't so keen on her pastel drawings of figures. I appreciated their masterful execution but wasn't drawn to them (pun intended). Nowadays, though, I find myself returning to those amazing pastel drawings like the one above. I'm a real sucker for large scale, multi-figure narratives and this one fits the bill.

I don't know much about Julie Heffernan but have been seeing  a lot of her amazing surrealistic narratives lately, on the internet and in magazines. I love the combination of traditional renaissance painting with modern, utopian/apocalyptic themes.

Joe Coleman is one of the most famous and celebrated "outsider" artists in the world. His whacked out fever dreams are wild and extreme. They can be autobiographical, about historic figures such as Sigmund Freud, Charles Manson or Hank Williams, or horror movie scenes. While his themes don't always speak to me, I find his fearlessness inspiring. A painting can be about anything and everything.

Two weeks to go until I install my show at loop gallery. I continue to struggle with the nagging obligation of writing an artist's statement and preparing for an artist's talk.

Here's the thing. I make art (drawing, painting, sculpture, digital imagery) to explore the world that lives just beyond the boundary of words, the ineffable, I suppose. It's not that I don't like to write, because I do. It just feels wrong to have to explain in words what needs to be expressed in images. It's like making a really tasty meal, and instead of eating it, you're given the recipe to read.
 
The show probably should be called Everything and Nothingness, but I didn't want to get too deeply into the Buddhist doctrine of nothingness.
There's very little about my work that is overtly Buddhist. However, at the core of these drawings is the paradox that is stated in  The Heart Sutra;

form is emptiness, emptiness is form

If you click on (this red) Heart Sutra you can read the full text. The paradox cannot be understood in any logical way. It must be experienced through meditation and devotional practice. Having said that, here's my superficial understanding of the Sutra. All form arises out of the limitless void (nothingness). They have relative meaning depending on what co-arises with it, but, ultimately, has no inherent meaning. All forms rise, dissolve, only to rise again as another form. Not sure if any of that comes through in the drawings, but it's there, lurking between the lines.

Another Buddhist concept that informs my work is that of Interconnectedness. I am especially interested in the notion of life unfolding simultaneously in many dimensions. These drawings are teaming with figures, images, beings, activities, cells, words, shapes... interdependently co-arising and dissolving. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

OK, so I'm starting to see the value in writing about art. It's like taking a lump of wet clay (thoughts) and forming them into some semblance of structure (meaning).