Galerie Sans Nom: Été / Summer

“Summer is my favourite season, the heat, the long evenings, and the little trips! Last summer, during the Pandemic, I started “Bodies of Water”, a series of Live Plein Air paintings. These are paintings of the Wolastoq (a.k.a. the Saint-John River), and adjoining waters. I paint them on location, over multiple sessions, with the changing elements in the environment, developing in each one a central visual idea, with the goal of Contemporary Impressionist-Realism. “
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« L’été est ma saison préféré, la chaleur, les longues nuits, et les petits voyages! L’été dernier, durant la pandémie, j’ai commencé « Corps d’eau », une série de peintures en Plein Air en directe. Ses peintures sont de la rivière Wolastoq (Rivière Saint-Jean), et des espaces aquatique en périphérie. Je les peins à l’extérieur, durant plusieurs sessions, avec les éléments changeants de l’environnement, développant en chacune d’elles une idée visuelle centrale avec un objectif de réalisme-impressionniste contemporain. »

In a Dakota ceremony, I had a vision of an owl. I asked my Elder the significance. He suggested that I paint an owl, because this was my way of understanding things. I made an owl painting, on a 20” x 16” canvas that had been painted black earlier. I saw how this owl was a mirror. I saw how the eyes faced forward, how much they are like us. I saw how in my painting, my heart had not been painted, and I wondered if I wasn’t feeling my heart. 

I then found myself in a place where after having been a dedicated abstract painter for 20 years, I was consciously moving away from abstraction, and felt like a fish out of water. This series began by asking the question: “What would figuration look like in my creative universe?” And also: “What is the meaning of the owl?”

I decided I would paint an exhibit of owls. Some were the same format as the one described earlier, I called that series Howl, after the Ginsberg poem, and hung them with what I now only remember as the Big Babies, though I know they had another name. Those are colourful 48” x 48” paintings with bold backgrounds in the colours of the Dakota medicine wheel; Black, Red, Yellow, White. 

I started learning about the different owls, and later committed to painting all the species of Canada, and Turtle Island, and when the Howl collection was wrapping up, I looked at my source materials, and found what I thought were interesting shots of screech owls in their nests, and I thought I could do a collection exploring the effects of camouflage, and I would see if I could try make the owls disappear in an optical illusion. These final pieces became the Hidden series. 

The owl paintings were made over a period of four years, during which I was doing all sorts of experimentation on other projects, as I was asking myself many questions about painting representationally. I also started painting in oils, and not without difficulty, until everything came together and I found myself saying: “I don’t think I could ever go back to acrylic”, a starling thought after so many years, and having such an bond with it. The final, small series Hidden is oil on canvas rather than acrylic, like the other paintings.

I have found many deep meanings in the subject of owls: their ability to see in the dark, their quiet flight, the ones who live in the night, the sacred feminine of the new moon, the dark night of the soul, grief and mourning (black), wisdom, protector, seeing 360 degrees around, our brother/sisterhood with other living beings, a family oriented bird, and an apex predator…

I want to thank the Saint-John Arts Center for exhibiting my work, and the photographers who generously shared their photographs with me as reference materials, without them there would be no owl paintings.