It was 2012. I had just completed my MFA at the University of Ottawa where my alter ego Stan Dickie was born. Stan was, of course, an iteration of Stupidism an art movement of one that aimed to satirize the stupid things that we flawed humans tend think or do. The truth is, when I was doing my MFA I always felt like I was a cartoonist, or at least that I had the sensibilities of one, so in some ways when my professors at the U of O would tell me that my work was more like comedy than art, I had trouble defending it. I definitely didn’t feel like I belonged in that world, and I often joke that I think they graduated me just to get rid of me.
After graduating, and not being sure what I was going to do with Stan, a friend of mine who is one hell of a painter suggested, based on my watercolour skills that I take up oil painting. I’ve said before in this blog, that I feel like I knew all along that I would end up painting, but I got sidetracked by other things that I’m also interested in. And I seem to be pretty good at a whole bunch of things, which is a bit of curse, since it can lead to these kinds of distractions on the way to getting to the thing you feel you were meant to do. And that thing for me, is painting.
The question when you start is always something to the effect of: ‘what should I do?’ or in this case paint? I really didn’t know what to paint, so that friend gave me the best advice ever. Just pick a subject and start. It didn’t really matter what. It could be to just paint your wife or the house across the street. Or maybe weird things happening on the moon, which is what I did. I also painted weird things happening on other planets. Then I did a series of human/animal hybrids or chimeras. All of these were pretty well received by friends and family and when I showed them publicly.
A Few of my older paintings. One day I’ll add them to the site.
But one day I was thinking about one of my favourite art exhibitions that I ever attended and that was the George Condo retrospective Mental States at the New Museum in New York back in 2011. I wasn’t painting at that time, so I’m not sure it influenced the work I was doing. But back in 2018 I started to think about what I could do with a Condo inspired (but not copied) aesthetic. At that time I was moving in a kind of Neo-Pop Art direction using pop culture imagery as a starting point. I wasn’t particularly happy with everything I was doing at the time, so I thought: “what would happen if I painted characters from pop-culture in a Condo/Picasso (Condo is heavily influenced by Picasso) influenced style? And, as I’ve probably said many times in this blog I did one. And then I did another and I haven’t been able to stop. In fact here’s a new one. Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation.
Leslie Knope, 11″ x 14″, oil on canvas, 2021.
I have also branched out into painting animals as well as imagined human characters in this style. The big difference for me is that in this work I am not satirizing anything and because of that, it made me feel like an artist, rather than a cartoonist for the first time in my career. Having said that, the more I think about it, this feels like where I was meant to be. Even when I dabbled in cartooning, the only thing I was actually good at was drawing faces. So it may be that I just paint faces for the rest of my life. But who knows? Feel free to follow me here on my website and on social media to find out!
Originally published on June 1, 2021.