The cube paintings started In May of 2024.
The only constraint I set for myself was to work with 6-inch cubes.
Instead of ‘thinking outside the box’, I would think of the box as both a multi-sided blank canvas and a blank void. This added dimension was intended to get me back to the root of creativity where I could revel in the things that drove me to pursue art in the first place. It did!
I feel most content in the process of exploration, experimentation and delighting in engagement with line shape colour form and the illusion of space. With understanding the rules, and then having no ‘hard rules’, the process becomes play. And with the illusion of form and space painted on an actual form in space (cube) there is an added dimension.
Starting with either a few marks, a word, or a concept, the images evolved. I could explore the sides, design forms to enhance depth, manipulate for distortion or have edges disappear. The shapes change and exaggerate as visual elements are placed together. Engaging challenges arise that ask me to resolve them, especially when going around corners, adding surprise and pleasure to the creative process. I hope that you are pleased and surprised as well! 🙂
Les Demoiselles
Lines and curves and blocks of colour – four ladies on a cube, taking the cubist Picasso – on the cube and turning the corner – the eyes do follow, with the female gaze upon the viewer – I am always amazed that with the simplicity of a few lines and a few curves one can insult, offend, titillate or woo. We are all shape shifting from conception to dust.
Tête Carrée- Ceramic
Artists have often tried to imbue their art with a live spirit.
Tête carrée (The French words for square-headed) was what some of us English speaking kids were derogatorily or teasingly called by our Québécois neighbours. Artists have often tried to imbue their art with a live spirit. With eyes that follow and see everything this friendly grotto-esque character would reside in his own boxed in corner of the world. If we stand side by side, it appears that he can look at both of us simultaneously.
Pearl of Wisdom
Curves and straights – Surprise oneself. Exploration. Walk through the unknown to the known. An act of faith. ‘Feel the fear and do it anyways’ and it will lead to the pearls of wisdom.
Field of Excitation
Carrier Box
Apple Box – Hornby Meadow
Block Heads
Cubist Block Party
Flower Box
Niche
Dog Box – Variety Pack
Mixed Flock – Bird Box
There is so much variety in nature…
Steam Box
There is so much variety in nature…
Shape Shifting
Box of Fireworks
Unicorn Box – Cornerstones
One can imagine the pleasure that Stonemasons of the past felt when they designed and carved gargoyles, grotesques and the quirkier characters of historiated capitals and ornamental stone statues. Public engagement and having creative fun, while attempting to ward off evil spirits was a lofty purpose!
I painted directly on a a pumice-textured primed cube. Deeply painted shadows create high relief. When viewed from the right vantage points, the unicorn’s stub of a horn and the shriekingly-excited male character’s glans pop forth while the woman’s ‘botox’ lips, and Pokémon-like bear suggest modern gentility.
Sculpture Garden – Three Graces
Drawing Box
Heavy handed in grade one, I can still see myself tearing the paper as I tried to print “the elephant in the telephant.” The school wanted to hold me back a grade due to poor coordination, but my father, being a Hungarian strongman, insisted his child would not be held back.
Determined to learn eye hand coordination.
I enjoy looking around the room at the other artists when they draw. They don’t usually know they are being looked at.
Drawing someone of something that is in front of us and spending the time really looking. It reveals to us what we would otherwise miss as there is always more to see, be it the rhythms in the hair, or the undulations of form revealed by side lighting. Even in the scurrying of the pencil on the page, there is a calm, almost is stillness in practice of drawing.
Vancouver Box Special
Be it a tree fort, castle, or modern living space, they all start with an architects dream. Human’s love to design and build.
Recollections
Visual perception and sensory experience have intrigued me since childhood and my memories often combined the visual and physical.
I can see myself back in time with legs up the wall, singing while staring at abstract wallpaper. Or sitting in a bath running water while gazing at perceived faces in floor tile, or losing track of time while staring at clouds. I can still taste the salt of the slushys now water that I sucked up a 30-inch-long plastic horn in the parking lot during the local winter carnival. I can’t be the only one who touched two fingertips together while going cross-eyed, thereby seeing a floating kidney bean shape two inches from the tip of one’s nose.
I was a pint-sized Merlin bending rainbows! Little did I know that a few days of dragging my dad’s powerful u-shaped magnets across our cathode ray tube television screen owould destroy the picture of our family television. Oops!
For reason unknown, around the age of ten, I had the compulsion to take fat finger sized charcoal sticks and covered every square inch of every page of a colouring book. When they were totally black and as powdery as can be, I tore out and folded up each page and packed them all into a clear plastic bag to donate to the church bazaar fundraiser. They sold – making my grandmother my first patron. I like to believe she sensed my brilliance, but I laugh now thinking she may have felt sorry for me. 😉
I was captivated by the graphic lines and character of a Paul Klee etching that was on the cover of a drawing book. I now know the image is called ‘Old Man Reckoning’. There was the time of feeling ‘accomplished’, having drawn a snoopy for the classroom door for parents’ night. I think that was for Mrs. Derek’s class in grade 2. I can remember doing batik (using dyes, wax and fabric) with Pascal Belanger after school and going to Walter Lambert’s house to see his new pencil crayons and the incredibly skilled technical drawings of cars that he did. My friend Greg Torchia and I would print off our little comic and joke books using an old hand cranked ditto machine and rubbing alcohol. I loved the feel of the alcohol evaporating off my skin. We dreamed of being Walt Disney and imagined that as adults we would live in a bus and drive around America selling our cartoons. Dreams came first; skill and realistic understanding were to follow.
I recall devouring my dad’s art books and finding images that I fixated on, such as a Mondrian squares and lines, or the rounded face in a Pontormo fresco or the strangely coloured angels and pale exposed flesh of Jean Fouquet’s ‘Madonna and Child’ (c.1450). I have always had an innate appreciation of form, and I am always pulled towards art that made ‘the elements of art’ obvious.
An unexpressed inner drive from my later teens onward was to understand how to create illusion, dimension, depth, form….
The exhibition also includes…
The following images are also on display for the ‘Blockheads and Storied Volumes’ exhibition at Visual Space Gallery May 7 -11 , 2025.
