I am currently examining the intersection of the natural and the constructed environment. After seeing a documentary titled “Life After People” in April 2008, my concepts and techniques combined to initiate a new series of work. The film presented the viewer with some possible answers to the question of what would happen to our planet if human beings simply disappeared. The resulting paintings follow my explorations into the use of different visual approaches and painting techniques to portray structures, both rural and urban, under environmental stress.
The “Fault Lines” series, paintings of Northumberland County and Pontiac County, explores an idyllic rural world where buildings from our agricultural past reveal unsettling elements of distortion and deconstruction. The “Urban Archaeology” series, paintings of downtown Toronto and the Gardiner Expressway, focus on city buildings and expressways. In some pieces, glass facades act as reflections of an altered version of reality or as a filter of a past or future landscape. In others, the Expressway disintegrates under an environmental onslaught. These evolving urban barriers limit our perception of the natural.
The under-painting in my work consists of diluted poured fluid acrylics on gessoed canvas, which is then manipulated in various ways. As the image of the structure is added, the under-painting is exposed in some areas, and glazed over or covered in others, as the natural world invades the man-made one. In my most recent pieces I use a more monochromatic palette, and add the structures using transparent glazes. The process has parallels with archaeology and with painting and photograph restoration, as the image is drawn to the surface from beneath layers of detritus. The result is a “photograph” of a constructed environment exposed beneath a distressed scrim that is showing the ravages of environmental decay.
I explore the aesthetics of environmental interference and disintegration.
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