Grey Halifax (City of Ottawa,) Halifax Peninsula and Railway Lands (Ottawa Art Gallery,) Halifax Elevators and Southend Rail Yards (private collection Halifax) and two stacks of Container Ships at Halifax 2000 (private collection Halifax) installed at the Ottawa Art Gallery, 2004

Container Ships at Halifax 2000 was a body of work I produced from around 2003 to 2006. It’s part of my larger Railway Lands series 1998-present.  The idea was to find images of all the container ships that called at Halifax in 2000 and represent them. I found about 60 images, of which thirty works were produced. The pictures were typically hung in stacks of four and shown in the original Ottawa Art Gallery show and three subsequent Railway Lands exhibitions circulated by the OAG, Fredericton, UNB, Lethbridge, Alberta, SAAG and Charlottetown, Confederation Arts Center. After making nearly half the works I submitted the idea for the new Halifax Library competition, however my late excellent friend Cliff Eyland  got the commission. The works consumed lots of hard to find materials including oxidized steel and vintage rolled floor linoleum. Without support or collectors’ interest I gradually gave up on the project. In the intervening years I demolished twenty Container Ships to reuse the materials in my ongoing Overhead View series. Now there are perhaps three stacks left in existence. 

 

Recently a collector or collectors in Halifax purchased the overhead view, Halifax Elevators and South End Rail Yards, which is a signature piece in the Container Ship series and a stack of Container Ships from my dealer. This is very gratifying to me as my work has not been privately collected in Halifax. Aside for three works in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and a picture in the Dalhousie University Art Gallery collection, my work remains largely unknown in my hometown.

A Biography of the Artist (in progress)

 

Every time a history of Adolph Hitler is given it’s always mentioned that he was a failed artist. As if to be a failed artist was the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person and the justification for any number of pathologies, that being said, I am a failed artist. 

 

The image of artistic success is so solid and pervasive in representation that when judged against the mythic paradigm, all actual artists must fall short. The ideal artist, a 19th century literary construction, is all at once rich, poor, gregarious, misanthropic, short sighted, all seeing, obstinate, compliant to the point of sycophancy, intellectual, anti-intellectual, intuitive, counter intuitive, rugged, effeminate, saintly and perverted among other attributes. Taken as a whole, I suppose over my lifetime as an artist, I have been all the above, except rich, so therefore I fall short.

 

The art world is a very small place populated in each sphere by a handful of professors, curators, artists and collectors. All are totally anonymous except to each other. The most famous artist alive today could walk down Broadway from the Battery to Fort George and go totally unrecognized. In my life as a working artist I’m conscious I’ve been noticed by younger aspiring artists who are impressed that I have a reputation, but also feel a kind of contempt for me as either an old fool or clever fraud.

 

The only thing that matters in the end, really, is artistic authority. I felt the same mixed feelings about the generation of artists that preceded me, but I had the very good fortune in my unconscious youth to meet some very simple and undesigning artists at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design who are recognized now, forty years on, as iconic of late modernist art practice. My artistic authority, such as it is, flows from them because I was willing to submit to their simplicity and embrace it.