double vision
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"Double vision" is a series of small intense paintings done from nature in acrylic with oil paint superimposed later from the imagination. The outdoor acrylic painting respects the complexity and specificity of a place and tries to infuse it with all the physical aspects of the moment - the breeze, the smells, the sounds. The oil component has a more intense chromatic and textural register that overlays an emotional, abstracted response. Each layer has its own speed, its own focus, its own anxiety, and its own happiness. In this way, two ideas of one place are folded together and sustained at the same time. This work began last summer in a residency on Toronto Island. Inspired by the gentleness of the place and season, I decided to return to landscape painting, something I had loved twenty-five years earlier. They gave me a bicycle and I rode around the almost-car-free landscape stopping where I chose and using the basket as my easel. Later I painted at Cherry Beach and the ravines around Glendon.
Painting outdoors creates a relaxed tension in me. All my senses feel alive yet integrated. Unlike the reduced palette of most of my work, I was looking hard and hungrily at colour. At the end of a day of painting, I became "normal" again only when I stopped naming colours - that cupboard is a thalo blue with a bit of mono orange and mars black dragged over an umber sepia.
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