SOURCE MATERIAL

SOURCE MATERIAL: 

• The foundational materials from which something is derived or created.
• The initial content, ideas or information that is transformed and/or built upon.
• Essentially, it’s the starting point or basis for a new work

The four painters in this Exhibition create their paintings from sources they have each mined over several years as working artists. All search for ideas in the matrix of life as we live it in the 21st. century, often guided by the execution of painting itself and by the History of Art.  While personal and family history and a sense of place may inform one painter, natural processes, often ignored or hidden may inform another.  Social Issues, Climate Change and Technological Disasters are central and journalistic images from mass media and the internet are also central concerns. Different painting media, Acrylic, Oil. Watercolour and Mixed Media are utilized 

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Simone Labuschagne, Paulette Melanson, Barbara Brown Conrod and Anthony Clementi.

POOL RESCUE, 2022

” I had to go in because the Lifeguards weren’t doing it.”

Andrea Fuentes

At the world Aquatic Championship in Budapest on June 23, 2022, Anita Alvarez fainted and sunk to the bottom of the pool and remained there for two minutes until USA Team Coach Andrea Fuentes jumped in to rescue her. Because of the presence of cameras and film recording the contest, the event was recorded and made headlines around the world. When I spent time with the film and photos, I marvelled at the courage and skill by Fuentes in the dramatic rescue, In the reports. She told Spanish Newspaper Marca:

“I had to go in because the Lifeguards weren’t doing it . “

I began to see the event as a metaphor for the plight of woman in the world in 2022 after the Supreme Court Decision, Dobbs versus Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the Women’s’ heroic Protests in Iran, and the rape of women in Ukraine by Russian Soldiers;Todays headlines report that the Taliban are prohibiting women in Schools and University. The “Lifeguards” in all these cases weren’t doing it!

The quote stayed with me and I started a small painting of Fuentes swimming to the bottom of the pool to pull out Alvarez. Three Larger paintings followed. The images are taken from the event and other pictures of rescues combined and sometimes in composite compositions taken advantage of colour and texture.

They came from all over the country united by the belief that something valuable had been taken away and they were determined to get it back. They believed that if they didn’t come that day , the country would fall to Communist, Child-raping Democrats who had stolen an election and of course, Jews and Blacks. They were going to kill the Speaker of the House and erected a gallows for the disobedient Vice President. They were from all walks of life , cops, firemen, mothers and bar owners, and peppered throughout were militia members and Proud Boys all aching for the fight. Of course, none of this was legitimate or even true but they had been inoculated from truth and in an Alternate Reality created by a fat Old Man who was afraid to be known as a loser and his enablers inside the Capital who stretched the law and reality to suit their beliefs. A year later, some have gone to jail and some even pleaded guilty, but the Old Man and his Capital minions have yet to face justice.

Recently the draught in Kazazchstan had led to the death of Horses who have expired because of the extreme heat and lack of water. The images reminded me of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Raskalnakov’s dream of a peddler beating his dead horse. The image comes up agin in Catch-22 when Yosarian wanders alone on the streets of Rome in the middle of the night. Below are two Works on Paper.

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The  Destruction of a Conception, 1986. Screenptint

In the 1980’s ,  I was working on my graduate thesis and had recently began to do a series of drawings that featured “house” forms. The drawings led to a sculptural Installation that was sited at Ward’s island as part of the Sculpture Park.

This  was a time  between my work that used photographs exclusively  and now drawings, construction and installation and then eventually painting. 

In those olden days, Computers were not generally available as graphic devices and “cutting and pasting” had to be done by hand. I sent my model, Geraldine who at the time was acting in plays to a Photo Booth (It may have been the one in the Chinatown Arcade) and hand -cut the edited photos from the rolls and used an IBM Selectric typewriter to type the characters on paper and then glued the whole thing down using a nine square grid, which I had employed in the Sculpture at Ward’s Island and several drawings and constructions I had made at the time, then inked on paper. Of course, this would be very easy today but in 1986 it was time consuming and tedious.It was photographed and made into a silkscreen.

It  was a period when I was interested in Gestural Behavior and one day in the Barnes and Nobel Annex on Fifth Avenue , I found a copy of Beaux Gestes by Harvard French Scholar, Philip Wylie and Photographer Rick Stafford for $1.49. Wylie devotes a chapter to Le Jemenfoutisme which he defines as Indifference raised to a “national lifestyle”in France and describes under the heading WHO CARES, a more dramatic gesture which includes a stream of air and a final “Bof” sound! I understood at the time that the less dramatic Siciilian gesture forged behind the backs of invading armies and foreign occupiers was more discrete , a shared secret language —but no less a “lifestyle”. I started to experiment with formats and combining words with pictures. I was influenced, of course by Conceptual art and Pop which employed words and pictures. 

I was interested in the intersection between visual ,discursive non-verbal language and words. In my research at the time I became fascinated with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and its central idea that a proposition is a “picture”. The Philosopher had come upon this idea during World War I when he saw in a newspaper a diagram of a automobile accident. It occurred to him that the map was a proposition, and therein lied the essential nature of any proposition, to picture reality. As part of my research, I came upon Norman Malcolm’s memoir of Wittgenstein. It was only 100 pages but Malcolm, an American was a friend of Wittgenstein and had attended his early lectures at Cambridge in 1939 and remained friends throughout his life. I wanted to understand why Wittgenstein had abandoned his thesis in Tractatus and had never completed a book again. Instead his lectures were published as the Blue and Brown Book and show him confronting the simple notion in his later thinking.

On page 69 ,Malcolm describes the moment when Wittgenstein  that led to as he called it “the destruction of the conception”. One day Wittgenstein was riding on a train (or it may have been another conveyance) with Pierro Sraffa a lecturer on economics at Cambridge. They often argued over the ideas in his book and Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same “logical form” and same “logical multiplicity”. 

Writes Malcolm: Sraffa made a gesture familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of the chin with an outward sweep of the fingers of one had. And he asked: “What is the logical form of that?”

Malcolm writes, “This broke the hold on him of the conception that a proposition must literally be a picture of the reality it describes.”

This paragraph profoundly moved me. I thought I understood how pictures became “games” in Wittgenstein’s later writing. But also how non-verbal communication in the form of an Italian gesture changed one of the founders of “Language Philosophy”.

Then when in looking up the gesture that Malcolm describes as being Neapolitan and I had understood from my experience was also Sicilian, I found two other instances where he gesture figures in. History:

In Luigi Barzini’s The Italians , Barzini talks about being in a library alone in Naples and finding a book by an Italian monk who compiled a book of Gestures; He knew he would never find another copy , so he stole it; a remarkable confession by any author!

In reading about Garabaldi’s campaign to unite Italy into a republic I came upon a description of the hero on his horse going into a southern Italian village to recruit fighters where he came upon a young man sleeping in a field; “Paison, Join us in fight for the Homeland”. shouted Garabaldi. The young man brushed his chin.

https://www.gallea.ca/en/artists/anthony-clementi

I recently joined Gailea, my prices are listed for my latest works and will be updated.

https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1913815

As the effects of Global Warming melts the ice at the Poles, crews from several countries are reviving the idea of a northern passage. Several countries have sent crews.

History Painting:

I began this painting on a large canvas and then I abandoned it for more than three years and stored in my basement so I did not have to look at it everyday. Recently while retrieving a tool from the basement , I saw it and thought I would give it another try. Based on the documentary photo by Zach D. Roberts of the assault of DeAndre Harris by six men in a Parking Garage in Charlottesville Virginia. The assault followed an “exchange of words” by the assailants and s few counter protesters as the police pushed them toward East Market Street. I tried to capture the afternoon light streaming into the darkened Parking Garage and the shock of sudden violence. The video repeated again and again at the time and cell phone images and videos taken by the participants and witnesses were used in the making of the painting. As in events of this kind, the identity and even number of assailants has changed over time. The seemed to be six. In my painting although three men are beating Harris with an umbrella, shield a pole and boards , three men, one hidden behind the ticket entry at right and two coming toward them from East Market street are shown. As I was doing the painting, it made me reflect on the event itself but also of Art History; I thought about how Manet assembled carte du photography for his Death Of Maximillian and how Goya painted his Napoloeanic Soldiers in the shadows in his Third of May, 1808. The title was influenced by Goya’s painting.

Saturday January 23-Sunday February 28, 2021

16080 Highway 19Inverness NS Canada

https://www.invernessarts.ca/exhibition/measures-of-absence