Lou's Café, August, .06


I'm sitting down to breakfast, at 53rd and Sixth Avenue. I'm thinking about '26' and wondering how it will hold up as a document of the last several years. It should work out. I've left it in the hands of people I trust.

As far as definition of process, where I have been with the paintings, and the nature of the '26' location in Toronto, homebase, my residence and studio, I think it's all there, maybe in between the lines.

Before I cross the road and go in to take a close look at de Kooning's 1950-52 'Woman I', one of the most laboured paintings I know of, I'm also wondering what my next paintings will look like. There is of course, no way to tell. And that's alright. I've never wanted to know anything beforehand....

I've always thought of myself as an expeditionary painter in that sense. Each time I start a painting, I am truly at a beginning, empty at the start of the work (and empty upon its completion). What happpens in the middle is a journey of intensity; the reason for this, painters understand.

And so I will look hard at 'Woman I' and get pulled to one side for a while. This was de Kooning's valiant revolution. His struggle with this painting is as clear as its consequent breakthrough. The meaning is partly in the scraping. There must have been countless moments over months where he scraped away whole sections of his picture, parts of life, said good-bye to what was there.

That's the way it gets done, driven, inspired...

MD NYC

Eric Davis
Where must art first touch an individual - the intellect or the soul?

Sean Scully
For me it is very easy to say the soul. It is the attachment to the soul that we deeply need. It is what moves us. It is not simply a question of what makes sense; it is deeper than that. When that inner part of ourselves is engaged, we are truly alive.

"And so the real work begins"
Nicole Collins.

download 26 in *.pdf format click here.

Trinity Bellwoods Park, April, .06


After some twenty years of working, and thinking about it for closer to thirty five, I have come to understand something about the nature of painting. While my debt to history reaches back a considerable distance, the period which I value the most, is of course my own. But the future is insistent upon the past.

In particular particular, I strongly believe that the work of the 1940’s and 1950’s, most evident in the so-called ‘New York School’ (and again somewhat later in Canada ) left a legacy in visual language, as fresh and demanding as anything before it. And yet it is unresolved.

The act of painting today deserves the utmost attention in that it speaks of something much greater than its own time or place. The influence is immeasurable. When for example, Al Held said that "de Kooning provided a language you could write your own sentences with", for me this is a moment of revelation, in that abstraction is not only in the iconic signature work of such painters as Still or Kline. Rather it is also a ‘language form’, as was understood by de Kooning, carried forward, in order to express the universal.

Can we reach a place of understanding which is beyond what we know? Yes. Painting continues to be an act of faith. Abstraction has been the vehicle of choice for some painters in that it was born historically from the ‘existential’, out of notions of the ‘automatiste’ and the ‘surreal’, and so in separating itself from the strict representation of the visible, became the factual language of the invisible.

MD Toronto