Today I am writing about a little more than a artwork. My painting entitled "Night & Day" was created in 2022 and became one of my favourite creations. It's about transformation, and I have been in a profoundly transformative state for the past five years or so. I have been leaving old things behind me, like bad habits, bad behaviors, and silly, foolish things that did me no good. I am embarking on a spiritual cleansing, seeking my maker, seeking some kind of purity. I have been getting rid of all my baggage and looking forward with a lighter heart. I have been rekindling with my faith, which was always important to me but was seriously neglected. This is a journey that started slowly but surely after I met my wife Kristal in 2017, and even more after we had our first child Emmanuelle. A man has no choice but to fall into a transformative state when he becomes a husband and a father. You cease to be the center of your world.
This painting represents this journey, a journey that is not only a spiritual and psychological one, but it also applies to my artistic approach.
Acrylic (and Frame) on Wood Panel
16" x 20"
2022
I had been living in Montreal for nearly 10 years when I met my wife. One year later she was giving birth to our daughter and nine months after that we were moving to New-Brunswick and getting married. I am originally from here so I was more or less coming back home. In the midst of this storm, as I was fighting off addictions, I was changing my way of thinking, and I was seeking self-awareness. I was also changing my way of eating, seeking to transform my mind, body and soul,I was reading profusely while becoming a dad. Facing my demon of panic disorder and trying to make a living on top of all that was not easy. I was also in a wrestling match with my artwork and my art career. I didn't really know what to paint anymore. I knew I needed to grow and be a better man, husband and dad, but I also needed to keep finding my voice as an artist. When we moved to New-Brunswick, we moved into a very small village where work was hard to find and making a living as an artist was barely plausible. I ended up giving up painting for about a year as I focused on family and working whatever odd jobs I could find while dealing with all sorts of phychological and spiritual matters.
It was soon after the birth of our son, Ezekiel, that I started painting again. I got a couple of small commissions, and slowly but surely, I was painting again, but I was still unsure what I wanted to paint. I knew that I needed to do something new and break away from what I had been doing before, which didn't really work. I wasn't happy with my work. Painting made me happy, and the joy of finishing a painting was still there, but it didn't last. My artwork felt like an egg that would not hatch. I knew there was something alive in that egg but it would not come out. Suffice to say that I struggled to find my true voice. Little did I know that it had been there, in front of me for decades.
As a teenager I started drawing framed drawings within my drawings. I enjoyed it but it never really went anywhere...
Creepy, I know. I was a very troubled teenager. I was about 18 years old when I drew that. When I look at some of those drawings now I can't be left a little baffled and fascinated. What was going through my mind? The idea stayed somewhere in me, and it even tried to peek its head out occasionally. I was drawing colour pencils on paper for most of my youth until I moved from the small town where I grew up to Moncton, where I had access to an art supply store. That is when I started painting on canvas. Around 2008 was my first attempt at some kind of semblance of "artwork within artwork" where I glued canvas panels onto a stretched canvas:
Again, I enjoyed the idea but nothing came of it. I was in a new city, I was learning a new medium, I was meeting artists and art teachers, and I was learning about all kinds of new techniques. While I learned a lot, it only made me more confused about finding my artistic voice. I was faced with the "problem" of having a lot of ideas and a lot of things to say but struggling to find a consistent way of ex[ressing those things artistically. On one hand I liked creating pretty, decorative work and on the other hand I liked creating very strong statements with characters that made you feel uneasy. Could there be a middle ground somewhere? Many artists struggle with having ideas, but no one talks about the struggle of having too many ideas. This may sound pretentious, but I don't see it that way at all. We see this problem in every area of life, and you know it when you see it. Have you ever been to a restaurant where the menu is too big and the plates are confusing because too much is going on? There is a reason why restaurants with a small menu and simple dishes tend to be more successful than the latter. It takes a lot of discipline and decisiveness. One thing that I always wanted to avoid as an artist was to be boxed into having to paint the same thing all the time. Some people thrive in that and are happy, but if you have a lot to say. I know people who are very successful artists but they have been stuck having to paint the same thing over and over for years to please galleries and collectors.
In 2018 I was invited to create a work of art on a skateboard for a group exhibition in Montreal. The idea of framed artwork within artwork came back to me and I decided to try it literally. This time I would actually have a real framed work of art on my skateboard.
I loved how it turned out but again, nothing really came of this idea after that. The frame I used was made of metal and putting the whole thing together was a headache, not to mention that I did not have a whole lot of time to figure it out. I ended up hanging it on a nail in the board as a separate piece. In retrospect I had no idea how important this piece would later become. I still love it very much and I was very happy with how it looked, but I wasn't too sure where to go with the concept. Mind you that I was working on other things at the time. I had a few commissions going, plus a big painting for Montreal XL as well as preparing a big series for an exhibition at Foufounes electric with my wife for the next year which were all in a very different styles. So my focus went back to that and the frame within a frame idea went back to sleep. Thinking back, if I had not been working on anything else, perhaps I would have taken the time to really explore this idea of "artwork within artwork", but it was not the time. In those days I had been exploring doing portraits of children inside children drawings. It was very promising at first but then new ideas came and I tried to fit them together without any real success.
Then came the child, the move, the marriage, life in a small village, quitting painting, the birth of a second child and starting to paint again. It was then around 2020. I had been painting children on and off for a number of years and I started painting that again, but I wasn't happy with it. In fact, we were having a lot of problems in our family and I wasn't happy with much of anything. Depression was trying to take over while I was trying to grow as a person. I was fighting what seemed to be a war at the time. Moving out of that small village into a small city helped fix a lot of what we were dealing with. Moving from Montreal to a small, secluded village was too drastic a change for us. It was after moving again that I got a commission from someone who wanted me to paint whatever idea I had in mind. The person who commissioned a painting was from the same village I grew up in so I decided to start with landscape of a river from where I grew upthat area. That is when the idea of adding a framed work of art within a work of art came to me again and this time, it really stuck with me. I created this piece entitled "I Know What You Look Like in the Dark":
I painted the landscape on stretched canvas, then I painted the night time piece on a canvas panel. I framed the panel and then glued it onto my stretched canvas with staples in the back to make sure it would never fall off. At that moment I knew that I had found my voice and it had been there all along. However, these pieces proved to be the hardest artistic challenge I had ever faced! Mounting the framed artwork onto a canvas is nerve-racking enough as it is, but now I have to make another framed work of art fit with my colors and my composition. It is often a real headache, but I embrace the challenge. After creating this piece, I knew I wanted to make more but I kept making other, easier, small paintings on the side as new ideas came and went. I still struggled to make this my imediate go-to because they take so much time to make and I tend to be impatient. For the first time in a long time I was really struggling with what to paint. The ideas in my head needed to be reformed to this new approach. That has been an artistic problem my whole life; wanting to put an idea on paper as fast as possible when I should have been spending more time practicing and learning. But's it's all a part of the process of growing I suppose. Since I don't like sitting around thinking about how to do something all day and would rather be painting, it still took me a while to start painting strictly "art within art". With these works of art I need to be saying something and the pieces need to work. After creating a few small pieces with "art within art" (I'm not really sure how to call it!), I finally created Night & Day in 2022 for a series of paintings I did for Café C'est La Vie in Moncton. This was my first exhibition in New-Brunswick since moving back here and every painting in that show had this "art within art" approach.
The term "Night & Day" is often used to describe something or someone that has changed drastically. The painting represents me in my transformative state of growing as a man and also it represents the growth and change of my artwork. It is a new birth. From night to day while looking towards the light for a new tomorrow.
Beyond this transformation, the artwork within artwork pieces represent the idea that everywhere you look, there is so much more than meets the eye. Wherever you look, something is looking back at you. Everything you hear or think about, there is another perspective somewhere that should be heard and considered. For every opinion, there is an opposite opinion somewhere. Everyone's understanding is based upon their life experience and their knowledge. While we may all be looking at the same things, we all process them a little differently. One landscape is continuously changing with weather and seasons and so are our perspective of life and the world as we grow. These works of art mean all of that and a little more. I hope that some of them will speak to you and that you may have a therapeutic moment, one way or another, as you experience them.
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