I was born in the Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, my grandfather was a homesteader near Blue Rock. The Bow Valley has been my life.
After working as the Art Director at Chinook Plastics, where I supervised and produced the architectural signage for large projects such as the Cave and Basin in Banff and the University of Calgary I moved on to a career at Art School (Alberta University of the Arts) where after 6 years of study I taught painting and drawing. (c.v.)
By editing to create fleeting moments of exaggerated light, colour and pattern, my contemporary approach to digital painting has created a body of work that is brimming with nostalgia for my first homes, the street, and the mountains.
The works are similar in spirit to Nouvelle Vague:
“From this passion for cinema they developed a belief in the theory of the auteur: that is, a conviction that the best films are the product of a personal artistic expression and should bear the stamp of personal authorship, much as great works of literature bear the stamp of the writer.” © 2008 Simon Hitchman
“(An artist) makes liberal use of artistic license to significantly embellish or change the circumstances of real-life incidents by any means possible” – Rosalind E. Krauss.
With my emphasis on feeling, I’m a personal history expressionist. I relate to Alice Neel, who as “A successor to the expressionism of Chaim Soutine, Edward Munch, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Neel used distorted drawing and invented color to reveal the character beneath each sitter’s physical
appearance. (© Artsy)”
I use the camera, editing software, a formal education in painting aesthetics and a lifetime of fine art practice to reveal what lies beneath; the poetry of existence.
Blackstock 2019