Lot 2
Fair Market Value $2500
hand-tinted gesso on Mayfair
45.5″ (w) x 15.5″ (h) 116cm x 39cm framed / spacer
museum matted / UV glazed
In the late 1990’s – I started working on a series of paintings titled A LOSS FOR WORDS for solo shows with my dealers in Toronto and Vancouver. I was experimenting with different tinted gesso that allowed temperatures of colors to register, similar to how one perceived music or sound.
Silent. Loud. Delicate. Bold. Close. Far.
I was also intrigued by how graphic novels often aligned images into a storyline, inviting the scenes to be traversed by the reader’s interpretations of abbreviated image and text elements alone.
I took the text fragments from stories found in daily newspapers, and although they were never together originally, they operate as a constructed set of touchstones that include:
a turned-away man / a pruned plant / a cross / a field / a woman standing in water / a coiled material.
I built this set of paintings on paper as a way to have pictorial images function like words in a sentence.
The brain attempts to draw associations between things that are aligned, and I found this a fascinating possibility to put together sets of five to six images, like parts from a film, that by association, from which the viewer could construct some kind of personal narrative.
Almost in the way language systems are only words, but how they are organized can give quite different meanings…
Donated by the artist