PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
I suppose something like the energetics of the living world. The way a forest actually vibrates when you're standing in it, the specific quality of light in a particular place at a particular hour, how that changes as you stand there. I am trying to engage with a moment of vitality, the feeling that the world is staring back. Van Gogh understood this better than almost anyone: the mark is how you electrocute the looking.
I grew up in Toronto, a city that no longer resembles the place I was born into. I've spent most of my adult life nomadic, between Berlin and various parts of Europe, far from anything that should feel like home. That restlessness is in the work.
In terms of painters: Munch and Franz Marc for colour as emotional necessity. Some of the Group of Seven for the conviction that engaging modern cultural forces through nature is serious work. Sky Glabush for helping me find my footing in landscape painting. Lois Dodd for the radical honesty of just looking at what's there.
I grew up in Toronto, a city that no longer resembles the place I was born into. I've spent most of my adult life nomadic, between Berlin and various parts of Europe, far from anything that should feel like home. That restlessness is in the work.
In terms of painters: Munch and Franz Marc for colour as emotional necessity. Some of the Group of Seven for the conviction that engaging modern cultural forces through nature is serious work. Sky Glabush for helping me find my footing in landscape painting. Lois Dodd for the radical honesty of just looking at what's there.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
It starts outside. I make small hand-held sketches on site, everything fits in my hands at once: the backing board, the paper, the pastels, the box. That physical constraint matters. What gets made is limited by what the body can hold and what the moment allows.
I carry those sketches sometimes for years. Back in the studio, I pin them up and live with them, sometimes for months, before anything becomes a painting. During these reflective moments I am building stretchers, priming and sanding canvas, preparing the work like I'm toiling the soil. When I finally start, I work in oil on canvas, building the painting up through weeks of layering: typically with glazes over glazes, wet into wet, dry over dry, marks dissolved and rebuilt, colour arrived at rather than planned. The palette on the table becomes a living thing, producing colours I couldn't have mixed deliberately. It's an alchemy.
The painting is finished when it starts talking back. When I can't make another move without breaking something that's already working. This kind of sticky cohesion.
I carry those sketches sometimes for years. Back in the studio, I pin them up and live with them, sometimes for months, before anything becomes a painting. During these reflective moments I am building stretchers, priming and sanding canvas, preparing the work like I'm toiling the soil. When I finally start, I work in oil on canvas, building the painting up through weeks of layering: typically with glazes over glazes, wet into wet, dry over dry, marks dissolved and rebuilt, colour arrived at rather than planned. The palette on the table becomes a living thing, producing colours I couldn't have mixed deliberately. It's an alchemy.
The painting is finished when it starts talking back. When I can't make another move without breaking something that's already working. This kind of sticky cohesion.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
A kind of pause. Or, not pause exactly. More like a charge. A silent charge. A slice of the living world held still long enough to stare back at you. My paintings ask you to stare rather than glance. If someone stands in front of one longer than they expected, and leaves feeling the ordinary world has become slightly more electric, that's the exchange working.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
Today, I would say Andrew Cranston, Stanley Whitney, or Sturgill Simpson, and I genuinely can't decide between them. Cranston for what it feels like to hold silence and solitude inside a painting without sentimentalising either, we've talked about this directly and I'd want more of that conversation. Whitney for how he found a language so completely his own that colour became structure. Simpson for proving that depth and reach aren't opposites, that you can go completely inward and come out the other side with something that moves a lot of people. I'd want to know from all three how they learned to trust the thing they were actually doing rather than the thing they thought they should be doing. I love to talk about the organic process of following ones work, always following the work. For better or worse.