Saint Lambert Leymoine and Southwark, and The Cut and the Arm on display at Gallery Sivarulrasa, Almonte, Ontario 2021

 

Promotion Engine Wow, 2004, 75 x 135 cms, private collection Ottawa

The Cut and the Arm, 1978 (2019) 83 x 122 cms mixed media construction on plywood

The Cut and the Arm, 1978 is based of an aerial view from the City of Halifax Archives and shows west end Halifax from the Armdale railway cut and the Northwest Arm to the roundhouse in Rockingham, circa 1978. Because of family breakdown I spent the first year of my life living next to the ocean in my Sang Mêlés Acadien homeland, Tus'ket Wedge in Yarmouth Co., Nova Scotia. Returning to Halifax the family lived in a dilapidated Victorian, cold-water flat off Windsor Street. In 1966 we moved to the west end into a new world of new things - streets, houses, schools, parks, shopping malls, all new and clean with smooth unbroken pavement for as far as the eye could see. Nothing can touch the perfection of this place on a quiet Sunday in high summer when all was so still the chirping of grasshoppers drifted over the hot paved parking lots and I was drawn to the historic train line behind Simpson-Sears to wait for trains. In contrast to everything around me the rail line was old, covered in oil and the margins overgrown with grass. The engineers knew this was a playground for children like me, particularly Chebucto Road Bridge so they sounded their horns from a great distance in the railway cut to warn us. Hearing the high pitched glassy sounding chime tooting and bending in the fluctuating winds we stepped away from the tracks and waited in the long grass for the train to pass, usually a modest double hitch Dayliner on the way to Yarmouth, or a long passenger train bound for Montréal. Before I could understand what sacred meant I knew this place was somehow sacred and eternal and that I was just a passing shadow over the pristine grey pavement on a quiet summer day.

The Ice and Snow in Nova Scotia, February 2015 (2015) 60 x 80 cms, collection, the City of Ottawa

The work is based on a satellite image of the Maritimes showing unprecedented ice and snow. The work is a kind of memento mori for my brother Gerard, who died in Truro in February 2015.

On Trains and Going

 

On Trains and Going was the name of my first Railway Lands show in 1999 at the Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick. Though the title at first suggests the state of being on board a train and traveling, I meant the phrase metaphorically to suggest how the train as a temporal marker, embodies the action of going. As a boy of eleven or twelve in West End Halifax I would often pass hot afternoons and the long evenings of summer under the Mumford Road railway bridge smoking cigarettes scrounged from the Eaton’s parking lot waiting in the cool oil soaked shade for trains to go by. I use to wonder where the people in the sleek black and grey coaches were going. I tried to look in the windows for faces, but never saw any, just polished glass reflecting back the scrubby pine horizon and sky. The train was a profoundly mysterious object. All I knew about it was its destination, Montreal. That train is going to Montreal, I though to myself. I could see the zebra striped locomotives in my mind charging ahead as they cleared Bayers Road Bridge in the hazy distance and turned out of sight at Rockingham on their way around Bedford Basin. What lay beyond the Basin, I had no idea and my imagination failed me, just endless, epic miles to Montreal. Some day I knew that I would take that train and all would become clear, but I knew instinctively once I went and was going, that I would be an adult and could never go under Mumford Road Bridge again to wait for trains.

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.