I painted these during the summer of 2010 in Montreal, on 20” x 15” Peterboro illustration board with Turner Acryl-Gouache. Out of the thousands of images I’ve worked on they’re my favourites, since they mark the peak of my creative and technical skill mixed with a youthful disregard for commercial appeal. They started my career as a professional artist, and the circumstances of their creation were so perfect that it felt like the universe was finally throwing me a bone after bathing me in melancholic brine for so many years.
They were commissioned by Michael, a private collector that reached out to me online. I didn’t even advertise my availability, I only sold some student work, and he happened to solicit me just as I had moved out of my parents’ house for the first time, to a totally new city, having graduating from art school.
I asked my insanely talented friend Stefan White to write his impressions:
Music for eyes. As if someone, upon revealing with a flourish an extraordinarily complex and fanciful instrument with ladders of strings and tiers of organ-pipes and crazy-angled staircases of keyboards, then meticulously played for you every song this fantastical instrument could produce, weaving them into one psychedelic melody-blanket all audible in a single instant. In this riotous symphony of shapes & shades & spaces & aspects, perspective is merely a suggestion, but if you do choose one, you’ll be immediately contradicted and offered ten alternatives. It’s as if you’re looking at every interpretation of a scene simultaneously… A face turns to you, and each instant of its angle fights for visual space. A space-aristocrat flickers between contradictory states, from magic-capped scholar to battle-stanced shieldman, like a glitched hologram or a quantum probability wave that crashed and resolved into all its possibilities. As if the thousand smaller attempts at representation scattered throughout a more sober and realistic drawing—the contours and hues and values, the curvilinearity of a forearm or the deluxe meltiness of sunset clouds—are each exploding into juxtaposed detournéments of themselves, each atom bursting into spirals and colors and faces.
A courtier makes six expressions at once, a flapper poses like a dollar-bill profile from a utopian society, and an impossibly lofty baroque gentleman, modeling for us the latest in extradimensional fashion, coyly blends into the patterns from his own dress. These drawings are deep dream by hand, before the first program ever tossed in its sleep. But they also look as if hundreds of seeds of pictures were strewn over the illustration board, and these prismatic seeds flourished and propagated out crazily until they meshed boundaries into the disunited states of hallucination. One man’s face has split into several warring autonomous zones each flying its own flag. Inside an ear-whirl a world grows. Within a nostril seethes a universe. It’s as if you’ve shown up to a friend’s house expecting a discrete meal with balanced portions of carbs to fats to proteins, sugar to salt, only to find that he has cleaned out the grocery store and cooked and spiced every possible combination of food, has placed dishes not only on every square millimeter of the table but also on the chairs and chair backs and the light fixtures, and you’d best believe that every dish tastes different—even those in the mirrors. It’s as if you’ve acid-tripped down to the ice-cream emporium and been treated to all 108 flavors on a table-sized plate, divided by barricades of waffle-cones and confederated by melted caramel: Mt. Ice-Cream. You’re a kid again. The sugar will clean you. Go swim.
I transformed another segment of the Femmes piece into a 3D setting. This is a sort of shrine to the patron saint of dentistry, in honour of the many cavities I need to get fixed: it’s Saint Apollonia, a third century Christian martyr who got all her teeth bashed in for refusing to renounce her faith, and then burned alive for it
This one is just the sheer joy of having my painting become translucent like stained glass.
