March Break In Maynooth 2015 (large version)

March Break In Maynooth 2015 (large version)
Soft pastel on cotton rag paper
127 cm x 89 cm/50″ x 35″
Available

Background Noise

My journey through art and life has been marked by many “interruptions”. Between my battles with alcoholism, drug addictions, a couple of encounters with cancer, and a few heart attacks, it’s been a bumpy road, and it has impacted my life and my career in many direct and indirect ways. As a result, I arrived at the half century mark last year very much as an outlier in the world of art and in life itself. If it weren’t for the internet, I could easily be seen to be a hermit by now.

The fallout from those interruptions coninues to not only affect my life, but to shape it–and it does so to a larger degree than I like to admit. Each morning, I awake and begin to take stock of how my body feels. That’s because of the constant, chronic pain I experience throughout my lower body as a result of the spinal cord injury I was left with from my second battle with cancer. That pain fluctuates, sometimes to the point that I’m incapacitated from it even with the industrial sized dosages of pain medications I rely on just to be able to walk. On those occassions, the fear of relapse that lurks in the back of all cancer survivors kicks in, too. Needless to say, this combination plays havoc with my mental state, as does the delicate dance I perform with my pain medications.

As someone who has addictions issues, I’m constantly engaged in a balancing act when it comes to the small arsenal of meds I have at my disposal for dulling the various sensations I experience in my hips, legs, and feet. I take gabapentin and cyclobenzeprene on a daily basis without worry, but when I have elevated levels of pain, I have to rely on codeine and hydromorphone (morphine in pill form). And that’s where things can get tricky if I let my guard down. To help you understand this issue, a short history of my personal background is needed.

Throughout the late 1970s, the 1980s and early 1990s, I was a heavy user of both alcohol and street drugs. My drugs of choice were hashish, LSD, amphetemenes, and anything belonging to the opiate class of narcotics. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-nine, I was on a rollercoater ride through life. The craziest thing about that blurry period is that I pretty much managed to get away with my lifestyle without paying any immediate price for my choices and actions. School came easy for me, and I continued to play sports and music while at school. I was offered a scholarship to study music at Queen’s University, and gradauted with relatively high marks (I think my graduating average was 88%). I was also approached by scouts from the OHL until I told them to fuck off when I was fifteen, ending my prospective hockey career–which was no big loss for the hockey world, as I was valued for my pugilistic skills as much as my work as a defence-oriented right winger.

untitled, ongoing, 2015 

I was also readily accepted at the art schools I applied to following high school. In all,, I dropped in and out of three art schools and two other universities before abandoning any further attempts at academia. Throughout this period, I supported myself by working in bars and restaurants, which is a big part of the reason I managed to continue feeding my habits. Back then, a lot of the people who I worked with in the industry mainained habits and a lifestyle similar to my own. In those pre-corporate days, a lot of people I worked with wound up in the business because, like me, they had fallen through a few of the cracks in their suburban upbringing. Bars and restaurants used to be the place many functioning alcoholics and drug dependent/addicted people found employment, because back in the days before celebrity chefs and tv stations dedicated to food and cooking shows, service industry employment was considered to be less a career choice and more the result of academic or career failure. If you bombed out of school, or if you weren’t cut out for a career in one of the traditional professions or trades, you knew you could always find work in a kitchen or behind a bar as long as you could keep your habits to a minimum during working hours.

Which is how I became a lifer in the industry.

From my first shift as a dhiswasher at Chez Piggy during my high school years, I was hooked. In addition to being surrounded by a few people with similar habits, I also found myself in the company of aspiring musicians, artists, and actors, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I had found my own vrsion of home. As I dropped in and out of schools in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Montreal, I continued working in restaurants and bars, until I found my best bartending gig at The Only Cafe, Too, in Peterborough, Ontario in 1990. It’s still going, and is owned by a Jerome and Charon Ackhusrt, a couple who met at acting school in England. They opened The Only (as it is commonly known) around thre weeks before I began working there, and within a couple of weeks, I knew I was going to be working there for the long run. My employers were accomodating of not only my alcohol and drug use, but of everything that came with that territory, in large part because I could work from 8:30 in the morning until closing time at 1:00 (and later, 2:00) a.m. without, for the most part, getting too far out of control.

It was an amazing time in my life. For the first time I was making a lot of money, and I was again surrounded by artists of all kinds. We basically had the run of The Only and of the emerging core of Peterborough’s downtown core. There was an experimental theatre a half block from work, and there was a large and nationally prominent parallel art gallery, ArtSpace (part of a national network of artist run galleries), that granted me a residency during the summer and fall of 1991, kick starting my career as a local artist. Beteen 1990 and 1993, I continued to paint, exhibiting my work in Peterborough and Toronto, while continuing to work at The Only. I also fell in love during that time, becoming engaged in 1992. Yet throughout those years, I continued drinking my face off and doing whatever drugs I could find.

That feeling of home stayed with me when my lifestyle inevitably caught up with me. After losing everything I valued–my fiance, my job, and my self-respect– and hitting bottom, I cleaned myself up with a great deal of help from my friend and colleague Rocky Green and his late partner Bert Thompson. And around a half year later, I managed to get my bartending job at The Only Cafe, Too, back. I was still working there, as a sober husband and father when I was diagnosed with cancer in both 1999 and 2004.

The second encounter with cancer changed everything.

Due to the spinal cord injury caused by the tumor that surrounded my spinal cord within the vertebrae running from my L4 vertebra to the bottom of my spine, I have greatly reduced mobility and chronic neuropathic pain in my lower body, as well as a correspondingly limited time I can remain on my feet at any given time. Because of this, and because my physiotherapy took 2 1/2 years to regain my strength and coordination, I was unable to return to my job at The Only. Between 2007 and 2011, I worked part-time at a small pub that afforded me shorter shifts, but by 2011, I could no longer continue my work as a bartender due to increasing pain. But considering I was expected to lose my left leg back in 2004 even if I could beat very long odds (less than 15%) just to survive, I’m doing ok.

Fortunatly for me, 2011 is when I started selling work on a more or less regular basis, and it’s allowed me to pursue painting on a full time basis. But even so, I have to manage my pain, working with and around it in order to get work done. And part of that includes my dance with codeine and morphine.

I was fortunate to have been referred to a pain management specialist in Kingston a few years ago, and to have been able to address with him the issues that come with my history of drug abuse. Over the course of a couple of years, we settled on my current doses for both drugs. I have just enough of those two drugs to compliment the high doses of gabapentin and cyclobenzeprene I take three times a day, but even so, this means I have a daily prescription 120 mg of codeine and 8mg of morphine available to me. My approach takes into account three main factors.

The first factor is centered on dog walking. We have a two year old husky/German shepherd, which gets me out walking most days, an activity that is good for me in many ways, not the least of which is in helping to regulate my neuropathy while also scheduling and accounting for part of my intake of codeine and morphine. For each walk, I take 30-60mg of codeine and 2 mg of morphine. Following the walk, I go to work in the studio, taking advantage of the added pain relief to get on with painting. Sometimes I have to continue to take codeine and morphine in an affort to extend my working time, sometimes not. The danger I have with taking additional opioids is that they act as both a pain reliever and a stimulant of sorts for me, as I don’t feel the fatigue many people experience when taking such drugs, and if I’m on a particularly good run during one of these sessions, I can easily find myself awake and working for anywhere from 24-60 hurs at a stretch, follwing which I will sleep for up to 16 hours. Though this isn’t my usual working method, it is als not uncommon.

The second factor is simply gauging my pain and deciding whether or not opiods are necessary. As much as is possible, I try to avoid taking opiods for anything more than walking the dog, and I have a rule that I can’t take them for more than four days straight–including dog walks. Even so, there’s a yoyo effect on my mental state that comes with the territory of opiod use for managing my pain. But given that the alternative is to be rendered immobile, I’ll take my chances with the opiods. It’s a calculated risk, but there you go.

The third factor is the knowledge that comes from experience. I know there will be days, sometimes stretching for 3-4 days at a time, during which my pain level will be severe, so I ensure I keep as many doses in reserve as is possible for those occassions.

So why am I telling you all of this?

Mainly to give you an idea of my rather picaresque history, because that history influences my approach to painting by influencing the subjects and technical/formal approaches I choose for my paintings, just as it influences my thinking about the nature of consciousness itself. The people, places, and objects that inhabit my paintings all have personal significance for me, more so now that my mobility is limited, and they help me in my efforts to make paintings that, I hope, encourage and reward repeated exposure.

 

Go Time

It’s taken me a long time to become a full time painter.

I spent close to three decades working in the bar business to support my painting habit, during which time I dropped in and out of three art schools before establishing my own studio practice. I have since had numerous gallery and cafe exhibitions in cities and towns across four provinces, but only modest commercial success. My painting (and bartending) career and overall life were interrupted and significantly impacted by two run-ins with cancer during those years, and I continue to be affected by a spinal cord injury related to my second encounter with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I mention these things as background for what’s been going on in my mind lately, for what it is I’m trying to let go of, and for what changes I’m trying to embrace and move toward.

It has now been three years since I left the life of a bartender behind me to concentrate exclusively on painting, during which time I’ve been regularly selling enough work to remain increasingly gainfully self-employed. I’m encouraged by the response my work has received since I began making use of social media to widen and increase my potential and actual commercial audience during the last couple of years, but it’s time to jump back into the world of galleries and social connectivity. More importantly, it’s time to take my show on the road to see what kind of reception it gets from audiences consisting (mostly) of strangers.

This means getting busier, and it means continuing to learn from and challenge myself with each painting I make, building an ongoing body of work that will reflect the standards I have set for myself as I enter what I consider to be the prime and fully mature years of my life and career. I want my work to have greater impact and more substance, to contain birth and death within each drawing and painting I make, and to convey these and other qualities with an elegance born of blunt honesty. And I want it to be beautiful even when it’s not. I want my paintings to outlive me, metaphorically and physically. I want them to matter after I’m gone gone gone.

I want to extend/expand my online presence, and to arrange gallery exhibitions in both Peterborough and Toronto for 2015 and 2016. I want to be pushed by external as well as internal forces. To that end, I’m currently finishing the last few paintings that will go into the updated exhibition proposals I’m putting together for upcoming exhibition seasons. Details will appear later this year as events unfold. Stay tuned!

As I wrote in last week’s column, I find myself entering 2015 with a revived sense of potential and purpose as a result of the ongoing and emotionally fulfilling catharsis that occurred throughout 2014. A good part of this optimism is grounded in the partial but increased relief from chronic pain I have been experiencing as a result of renewing massage therapy following a required ten year cancer related ban on such pain management treatments. The rest of that optimism is the result of what’s been coming out of the studio since I began painting full-time, and of the increased enjoyment I am having with the work and the medium itself. Time is the luxury that has begun infusing my process and work, and that’s an avenue I want to quietly explore in everything I do this year.

And I want to do a lot. More painting, more loving, more living. Having shed so much of the emotional fallout triggered by last year’s journey down the rabbit hole, I look forward to approaching the studio and life in general with a different, positive, and more focussed outlook and energy. I want to continue working in genres ranging from still life and landscapes to portraits and abstracts, but I also want to work toward a new formal approach that is a synthesis of my work in all of those modes. I also want to play with the medium more to find out what it and I are capable of doing together.

It’s go time.

 

Fifty

 

In The Studio, 1993

I turned fifty last Friday. I was ambushed with a surprise party to celebrate, a risky move in my wife’s part, but grateful for it after getting over the initial wallop when I walked through the door. t was a great party, and a celebration that made up for the dismal way I turned forty. At forty I was in the lowest ebb of a very bad year; I couldn’t walk because of the undiagnosed cancer that surrounded my spinal cord inside of my vertebrae from my L4/5 disc down to the end of my spine, a condition that should have killed me but, thankfully, didn’t.

Yesterday Caroline asked me how fifty feels. I told her it actually feels right and good.

As a teenager, I knew I wouldn’t be fully formed as an artist or as a person until I was the age I have reached, and as it turns out, I was correct. Maybe it’s a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I know the past few years of painting full-time have helped me become a better painter and a happier man. And although I know I’ll be looking over my shoulder to see if cancer is still chasing me, I feel like I’m ok with that fact. I’ve gotten to watch my daughters become beautiful, intelligent young women with their own goals for the lives they want to pursue, and I’m still engaged in the conversation Caroline and I started back in 1994.

 

Crossing the Blue Line 2007

Getting  older is a privilege for anybody, and for me this knowledge is palpable in a way it wouldn’t be if not for the many times I have managed to beat the odds. I’ve overdosed on hard drugs on a few occasions, woken up in alleyways and bus stations without remembering how I got there, beaten cancer twice, and survived two or three heart attacks, not to mention numerous bar fights and other reckless behaviours over the years. Throughout it all, painting has been the one thing I have hung onto.

I dropped in and out of a few art schools along the way, knowing the degree was meaningless for me. I modelled for classes during those attempts at academia, learning more from having done so than I would have from being on the other side of the easel. When I was a student, I also sat in on upper years art history and theory classes to gain an idea for the reading I needed to do in order to give myself a broader intellectual base for my work.

The two most formative influences on my work, however, have been another self-trained artist, Rocky Green, and my wife, Caroline Tees. I shared studio space with Rocky at his studio and gallery back in the 1990s, and we exhibited together for almost fifteen years. Our conversations and critiques of each other’s work had a huge impact on my work, still do. And that ongoing conversation with Caroline that I mentioned continues to inform my practice. These two people help me to keep working when the work seems to be going nowhere, and they are the ones who constantly challenge me to get better. Along the way, I have had the good fortune to have been surrounded by a number of talented artists, writers, musicians, and actors–in fact, the place I live, Peterborough, has a disproportionate number of active artists in all disciplines, and that is why I decided to stay here instead of moving to a larger city as originally planned.

I also worked for close to fifteen years at a great pub/cafe in town, The Only Cafe, which has been a meeting place for people from all walks of life since it opened in 1990, the year I arrived in Peterborough. It’s where I met many of the aforementioned artists, and its owners are themselves actors. It, and they, provided me with a venue for making those connections while earning a good living, and it’s where I met Tim Etherington, a writer and friend who sometimes seems like my doppelganger in writer form. We worked together at the Only for around five years off and on, and were teammates for over twenty years on a hockey team that evolved from a canal based shinny team to a couple of good league teams, all while embracing an arts based focus and approach. Yes, to hockey.  As with Rocky and Caroline, Tim has made me aim higher in all aspects of life, and like them, he has been a shaping influence in matters of art. He also gave me the gift of his insights into ethics and philosophy, and he held onto my chalks when I wanted to throw them away because I was frustrated by my lack of productivity when I was a new father. He kindly gave them back eight months later.

So when Caroline asked me how fifty feels, I consider the paths I have wandered down, and the people who have wandered with me along the way, I know in my bones that I have become the person and the man I hoped to become back when I was a teenager. And it feels very good, indeed.

Self-Portriat 2013
Chalk on cotton rag paper
110.6 x 82.2 cm

 

About

In The Studio 1993

I’ve lived and painted in Peterborough, Ont., a small city 1 1/2 hours northeast of Toronto, since late 1989. I arrived here after attending and dropping out of some of Canada’s better art schools, including Mt. Allison University in Sackville, N.B. and Concordia University in Montreal, P.Q.  I came for Christmas and wound up staying here, because much to my surprise, there was a talented and creative community of artists, musicians and actors working in the remains of the city’s downtown.

At that time, Peterborough was, like many small towns, mired in the aftermath of the recession of the late 1980’s. Unlike most places, however, there was a palpable dynamic to what was going on downtown. There was an excellent artist run gallery and performance space (ArtSpace, still going in a new home), an experimental theatre collective with links to the local university, as well as a thriving music scene involving both local and touring bands. In addition, there were a few business people who also recognised this undercurrent, opening cafes, bars, shops and boutiques at just the right time to add fuel to the fire. So I stayed, found myself a job and a studio, and began my career as a painter.

Since that time, I’ve spent the better part of 22 years living the life of a painter while working as a bartender and raising two daughters with Caroline, my wife of close to 18 years. I finally gave up the bartending gig in 2011 to concentraate on painting full-time. In between, there have been some detours, including rehab and a couple of trips through the cancer ward.

I make what Marcel Duchamps derisively called “retinal art”. That is, I make art that is designed to stimulate the visual sense and sensibilities. I utilize art theory and history in creating my work, but at the end of the day my work is concerned with colour and the handling of pigment. Stylistically, I cover a range of approaches that includes everything from colour field abstraction to pop art to “traditional” representation. In doing so, I am exploring how each method or approach attempts to make sense of the visual world in which we operate, and how the theoretical constructs and media chosen or employed affect the way in which one apprehends, processes and expresses one’s visual experience(s) through the act of painting.  

I work in the medium of soft pastel, otherwise known as chalk. I came to chalks gradually after studying painting and printmaking during my forays through art schools. It was during my time at Concordia that I realised I had developed a tactile aversion to the sensation of a loaded paintbrush coming into contact with canvas–something that can get in the way of becoming a painter!! My training with lithography paid off when I finally found the right combination of chalks and paper (100% cotton rag) that I still employ in my work, as it made me aware of the importance of planning three steps ahead while still leaving room for changes and responses to what was already happening with the painting. With chalk, I also found a medium that satisfies my need for colour. 

When I was a teenager, I told myself I wouldn’t hit my full stride as an artist until I was fifty. I turned forty-eight earlier this year, and I’ve started this site because I think I’ve hit my stride a couple of years earlier than my prediction. And though I’ve been fortunate enough to exhibit and sell my work regularly on a local basis during the intervening years, it’s time to take my show on the road.     

As the site develops, I’ll post articles on studio life, as well as articles about the art and artists who have helped shape my career. There will also be some stories about everything that has led to this moment and period in my life and practice. After all, who doesn’t like a good story?