Lovelies, as stated above, 2 things—
Thing 1 is that I finished TGOoA: Anger and have begun the next two pieces……nice.
Thing 2 is that I seem to get a lot of comments that could be from real people who have actually looked at the website, or could be from real weirdos who are basically spammers. All of which is just to say that if *you* ever post something and it doesn’t show up in good time, then please excuse me, I was confused.
Liebe Grußies!
mwah mwah x
The next piece ‘The General Order of Anxiety: Anger’ should be done within a week or so…..hopefully up within a month or two. Methinks it’s looking foxy 
It’s up!
Ah, yes! Well just to let you know, the aforementioned painting is done, and the next is well on it’s way, but it probably won’t be posted til late March.
I have been in a press with the drawings, too, so I am going to wait for a few weeks so that I can get a bunch of new drawings up as well at the same time as I post the painting.
Til then, kittens.
I’m nearing the completion of the next piece in the General Order of Anxiety series. The title will be ‘The General Order of Anxiety: Love’ and this one takes from the drawing ‘Animal Study VI’.
It’s the first time one of my drawings has informed a painting….that’s kind of odd isn’t it? I think it’s also pretty informed by inszenierungen; mise-en-scène (clearly this is not the type of thing one speaks english for). There’s a lot of *nature*. Architecture too, but a lot of colourful flora and shrubberies…and of course the fauna! Always my little fauna…I think people might feel differently about this one. I can see that the excess of plantlife might put off some people who are attracted to the architectural element of my work. Sometimes I feel as though I am–on a certain level–trying to bring my work as close as I possibly can to the kind of kitschy, mass-produced, sentimental nature prints that I abhor and still make it good. Clearly the masochist in me. So what I’m saying is: I can imagine that I may with this painting have gone too far that way for some people who’ve stayed with me to this point….
Hopefully it will be done and an image posted in a month or so–just in time for Valentine’s Day…..well at least my animals have a valentine, sheesh…..
Today I finally won the epic dance-off with my latest work.
The third painting in ‘The General Order of Anxiety” series has not yet been subtitled, but it has been finished. Finally. This particular piece has taken the longest, though the struggle this time around was far more a love-in than a stand-off. The relationship between this painting and I would–using the format of a dialogue as a metaphorical vehicle–certainly sound like:
‘You hang up.’
‘No YOU hang up.’
‘Ok…..I’m going to hang up……………….I’m hanging up…..’
‘Are you still there?’
‘YES! I didn’t want to just hang up on you!!’
The preceding exchange took place over the course of months. While it was mostly enjoyable (far more so than the arm-wrestles to which I am accustomed) I did, by the end, want one of us to just ‘hang up.’
Today the lines were cut. Mercifully.
2008 saw the start of a new body of work in my practice as a painter. This ongoing series is called ‘The General Order of Anxiety’.
Prior to this point I had continued working with the ideas I first engaged with my 2005 BFA degree show at NSCAD University, a series of paintings called ‘Landscapes’ (part of the show ‘Sweet Nothing This’). Collaging photos of industrial architecture with unfocused shots of my body, I made paintings from these collages that melded the disparate terrains together. Searching for the moment where skin understood its relationship to cement, and refineries became multi-turreted castles, my work focused on the physical experience of the urban environment.
By the end of 2007 with over 30 works in the series, I felt that I had sufficiently explored the potential of ‘Landscapes.’
Having come to Germany, I began thinking more and more about German painting’s Romantic tradition, where sensitive representations of the natural world spoke for the ineffable reaches of the soul. Relating to this intense feeling for landscape, I still wanted to express this spirituality through an exploration of man-made terrains, though I began to consider more the expressive power of flora and fauna. I began visiting museums of natural history, here in Berlin, and in Oxford UK where my brother lives.
After several months of living in Germany, I began to experiment in Photoshop with introducing animals of the sort I’d been drawing (western European woodland creatures, mostly) with the architecture that still fascinates me. The integration I directed was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The same animals are repeatedly used, and little to no effort is made to naturalize them in their new environments. Lighting sources are not reconciled and proportions are ignored. These animals do not ‘sit’ in space—they hover over it or impose themselves upon it, never fully entering into the landscape.
The title of this series, “The General Order of Anxiety”, refers both to my own experience of Generalized Anxiety Disorder and it is also a reference to the symbolic role the animals play in these paintings. My fears and anxieties—garden-variety and boring as they may be to others—are, like a pet, my own precious responsibility. Just as the same crow appears from painting to painting, warped maybe or flipped, so I see the same worries, insecurities and distortions of reality come into my head, over and over. They hover over my reality, yet exist entirely apart from it.
As a way of expanding my practice, and in response to the great length of time these new paintings have taken, I have begun a series of drawings. The drawings focus exclusively on the animals, and in a sense I suppose, give them a space of their very own to define, rather than imposing them on a pre-existing space, as happens in the paintings.
In April I received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to create 5 new paintings. At the moment I am nearing the completion of the third painting in the series, and as I intend to update this website regularly, it is my hope that it will be on the site by the end of the summer.
