Grand Valley Silo, 1993
I wanted to work with huge sheets of colour. And I wanted to escape the rectangular architecture of galleries, rooms, apartments and houses. The idea of nurturing abandoned spaces fascinated me. Barbara Fischer and Kim Adams helped me find this silo just south of the town of Grand Valley.
This painting was made with very thin washes of artists’ acrylic paint—more than 60 where it’s darkest. It took the entire summer to do. The groundhog protested against my incursion into his space. The swallows weren’t terribly upset.
I attempted to make the painting feel as though it curved away from you at your feet and above your head, and bulged towards you about a person’s head height. The silo curved around you, while the painting curved towards and away from you. The silo was 24 feet tall. The painting was gradually extended up until it felt right. That turned out to be 12 feet high, which was exactly the diameter of the silo.
Two Cells for Fra Angelico, 1993, St. Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre
The St. Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre occupies building that once served as a Trappist Monastery. (St. Norbert was a small francophone community south of Winnipeg. It has been absorbed into the city.)
The site for the work was two rooms in the former monastery. Together they recapitulate the history of Western painting. The two rooms were opposite in the kinds of painting that appeared.
In one room, the walls themselves were painted, like frescoes. The wall painting was a deep blue—darkest by the window that admitted light, brightest at the point furthest from the window. This imitated the flow of light into the small room. A sheet of canvas was stapled to the wall. I had seen this in San Marco in Florence, where the canvas sheets protected the walls of the monks’ cells.
In the second room were small paintings on canvas rather than frescoes. Each was a small intense monochrome, painted in the same blue hue as the walls in the other room.
Georgetown Curve, 1994, 7 feet x 70 feet, acrylic on concrete
Outside of Georgetown I found an abandoned industrial building. I made a long painting there, and successfully avoided being arrested. I’m not sure that it shows in a photograph, but I attempted to make the painting recede in the centre, as though the painting section of the wall bent away from you in the middle. I was surprised to see that sometimes it looked this way—the darker area would seem to recede. But sometimes it flipped—the darker areas would appear to advance because they were so much more intense and saturated.
Like the Grand Valley Silo, the painting is made with coat after coat of very dilute acrylic paint. It was more than 60 coats where it’s darkest—and something like 25 where it is lightest. I used two different shades of the same Golden Phthalo Blue acrylic pigment: a red shade and a green shade. The whole painting looked blue but had it had internal contrasts that acted on the eye and made the experience perceptually intense.
The whole light of the sky/Toute la lumiere du ciel, 1994, Oboro, Montreal. Painting was 10’ x 66’
This huge wall painting modulated from dark to light to dark to light. The Oboro gallery had natural light flooding in through four skylights. The wall was aligned with the skyights—becoming lighter where sunlight flooded in and darker in the areas between the skylights.
As an introduction to the exhibition, I wrote:
What interests me most in these wall paintings is not so much colour but light. I think of them as paintings trying to become ambient, or an image of the light of the sky brought indoors - its endless continuous modulation through the sequence from light to darkness, which we refer to as "day" and "night".
Two Curves, 1995, Acrylic on gallery walls. Each wall 7’ x 55’
This was an attempt to bring the Georgetown Curve indoors, but doubled, so that one wall would bulge out in the centre while the other one bent inwards at the centre. The two painted walls were mirror opposites. On one wall, the gallery architecture allowed the painting to appear as though it passed behind a white column.
The Civil Ordering of Night, 14’ x 96’, 1996, University of Western Ontario, London.
This painting was made in the ArtLab, the gallery of John Labatt Visual Arts Centre at the University of Western Ontario in London.
The walls of the gallery were painted so that the darkest area was in the northeast corner of the space. The wall painting grew lighter and lighter as it reached the opposite corner.
Barragan, 1997, 4 feet x 20 feet, acrylic on concrete.
This painting was made in the loading dock of the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre at the University of Western Ontario in London. I had been fascinated for decades by the architecture of Luis Barragan, the Mexican modernist. I thought his use of colour was astonishing—and the equal of any artist. This is a homage of sorts to hi, using a colour from his range. Here I tried to tilt the space, making one wall feel as though it leaned out over you at the top while the other one leaned away. It was unsettling to stand between these two intensely coloured walls that felt tilted.
Displaced Wall Painting, 1998, 8 feet x 24 feet, acrylic on dry wall
This wall painting was made for ALLM’s series of solo exhibition on Charlotte St. in Toronto.
Each artist was required to leave one element from their exhibition in the space. The next artist to show would have to incorporate that element into their work. I followed Nestor Kruger, who left a small shelf in a corner of the gallery.
The wall painting was exactly the length of the end wall of the exhibition space. But it was displaced to include the section of the neighbouring wall taken up by the little shelf.
Door to the Window, 2002, goodwater, Toronto. Acrylic on gallery walls.
goodwater was an interesting experimental gallery run by Roger Bywater and John Goodwin. The wall painting grows from light to dark along the entrance wall, then gradually darker along the main wall that was parallel to the windows, then darker still along the last wall. It was an attempt to amplify the way that natural light illuminated the space.
The mullions of the three large windows are projected across the gallery onto the wall opposite the windows. The same thing happens with the window by the entrance door; it is projected down the length of the gallery and onto the wall furthest from the entrance.
Chemist’s House, 2003-2004, enamel paint on existing walls.
Chemist’s House was impossible to document in photographs. I used wall painting to make an imaginary room hovering above the ground floor and below the second floor, cutting through them. Black paint (with green divisions) defined the interior walls of a room longer than the actual room on the ground floor and wider than the actual room on the second floor. Grey paint designated the backs of the walls in the virtual room. It was necessary to walk through the house and mentally assemble the room in your mind.
The narrow green lines carried information about the architecture of the ground floor up to the second floor—and information about the second floor down to the first floor.
Sant’Apollinare in Brampton, 2006, acrylic on concrete blocks, each 16” x 8”
I found an abandoned silo at what were then the far edges of Brampton. Farms were gradually being replaced by vast suburbs.
This silo had not been made by casting a tall cylinder in concrete. The way the Grand Valley silo had been made. This one, more recent, had been made by cementing concrete blocks vertically.
I selected nine blocks at head height, prepared them and then painted them in a range of greens from very light to quite dark, attempting to make the painting appear flat while the wall of the silo curved. It was only partially successful: the blocks’ clearly defined edges make it clear that the wall curved.