HOW WE ROLL
disasters, heat scores, husbands, polaroids, quick saves
I am in our new basement, trying to organize the mountains of things that have just moved over from our old house. There are endless rubbermaid tubs of papers set out in front of me with papers and photographs from my life and from my husband Andrew’s as well. I am in an Andrew bin, which comprises of masters of recordings from his bands The Doomsday Dogs and Faded Films, old photocopied posters, sailing rope, burgees, cassette tapes, vinyl pressings and welding manuals, all tossed in a scramble of life-lived into a bin.
Settled in our current home in an old printing shop building, I thought it might be nice to dedicate a bin towards his musical archives and one towards his sailing trophies and memorabilia, going for the nesting impulse to deeply organize objects. I was in the midst of doing so, when these two mysterious polaroids fell out of the sheaf of things in my hands, straight onto my lap. One was of his old Dodge van, and the other was a photo of him from back in the 90’s, with a tabby cat slung over his shoulder.
Polaroids.
They were so luminescent and mysterious sitting there on my lap. They were so Andrew. They exuded him—a younger him, that I did not know, but am immersed in loving alongside of the man he is now. A heat score van, metallic and insistent in the suburban street. A dark, shadowy night portrait of him, goth, intense. They flew up at me so powerful, that I just knew I had to paint them.
At the time, I was on a very intense schedule, painting through a year with a large solo exhibition at Gallery Youn in Montreal, as well as appearances at four art fairs almost concurrently. I was a couple months away from needing work at Foire Papier in Montreal, and saw the two images on my lap in my basement, immediately as larger paintings shown as a dyptich. A portrait of a time. My husband’s old polaroids felt like a portrait of him, yes, but also of music/culture at a specific juncture. What band in the 80’s didn’t have a heat score van that they drove around the country in, playing at small, sweaty bars? Who didn’t party with a guy like Andrew in the 90’s in small raucous house parties, long into the night? We all know the warm glow of late nights around a kitchen, bare bulbs dissipating into shadowy corners. Deep in conversation. Intimate in-gatherings in old wartime houses with warm wooden trim, rich with alcohol and loud playlists. Explosions of drunken laughter. Late night intimacies in darkened living rooms and bedrooms.
I saw them together. A tiny study in a semiotic. I was attracted to a palette that was a slight shift away from the work I had already completed that year. Less about colour and more about composition. I ordered my panels and once they arrived, I got started on the paintings. The portrait of Andrew was first, and it went exceedingly well. It came fast and balanced, which is a rare experience, in my world, with a painting. I almost felt like I was working in a dreamscape. I remember making a large exhale when I painted the ghostly light in the ceiling—I wasn’t even aware that I was holding my breath—as the intimacy of making that little gesture of a light was so completely satisfying. I knew it was right. It was the perfect shadowy inference of an extinguished light in a shadowy room. It hung there like a truth. Exhale. The silence in my studio was deafening while I mixed icy greys and balances of black. I found in this work, a rare equilibrium between creating a comprehensiveness of composition, alongside of a looseness of line that I have grown to like, less fussy about being straight. The depth of experience as an artist was plentiful with this work. I can say this is a work of my own that I truly love, of someone that I truly love, in a time that I truly loved.
Then there was the fucking van.
I got very, very hung up here, and was coming off of the high of finishing the previous painting so seamlessly. I knew that wanted to paint the van in a very specific way. The way that it was being painted in actuality quickly became a very far away version of the one I had in my mind. This dissonance between visualizing a painting and actually making the painting is, to me, something natural about the painting process. I believe that as an artist, part of the gig is to understand this dissonance and to carefully circumnavigate the potential disaster that can lay ahead in the work on the ground. There are, though, a few instances when my brain gets stubborn about the actual painting looking like a reflection of the imagined painting, and there is little to stop me from getting too fixated on this dissonance, and careening forward into the realm of overpainting.
Naturally, overpainting is going to be a thing that every painter has to come up against, and normally, I am game to destroy a few paintings in order to understand how to create a healthy aperture for things. However, my gallerist had chosen the WIP van for Foire Papier, and the shippers were five days out to come and fetch the work and bring it up to Montreal. I had on my hands a totally destroyed work. I was already disappointed that the portrait of Andrew would not be shown alongside of the van, and on top of it all, I had now ruined the work that was expected to arrive in a matter of days. What a total disaster.
I was scheduled to be involved in the MOCAD Monster Drawing Rally that evening, and somehow had to assemble myself into a person that had not been sobbing on the floor of my studio for an hour straight, and into the kind of human that gave no cares about drawing live in front of large crowds, I had to get it together and get myself to Detroit.
It is difficult to tear oneself away from an artwork in the studio that one has accidentally destroyed. The brain is still on overdrive trying to figure out a way to rescue the work, solve the problem that has developed in the trajectory of painting. It felt almost like a violence to leave the studio. Somehow I managed. I cried all the way up Woodward, and honestly have very little memory of that night at the museum. If I was nervous when I got the invite to LIVE DRAW in front of people, I am not sure what to call the way I was during this event. A white hot terror comes to mind. I am sure I looked normal. Well, I am not totally sure, but it was as if I was in a black out, and therefore so long as nobody present that night bursts my bubble (please don’t), I will assume it was spectacular.
I came home late that night to a canvas that Andrew had rushed out and found for me, that was in close proximity to the size of the ruined van sitting in my studio. He looked me square in the eyes.
“You can do it.”
God bless that man. He is just too great. He believed in my ability to paint more than I did at the time, and thanks to him, with a four day window, I reenacted the van almost straight from memory. It was a very, very strange four days spent in the studio, with little sleep and lots of caffeine, but I can honestly say that DODGE turned out better than I could have hoped for, within the stringent parameters. It made it up to Foire, and was later shown in an exhibition at the University of Windsor, and was recently purchased right out of my studio by a couple who are quickly becoming friends as well as collectors. I DID get to hang FADED (the portrait of Andrew) with DODGE in the show CHANNEL SURFING at the university. That was very nice to see them, finally (and maybe for the last time) hung together, as imagined.
The days of high stakes painting have lessened, and I am back to a studio trajectory that has a lot more sanity. I am thankful for that, but also will go all in again if I have to and face up to steep deadlines and high stakes. I love all of the ways that the studio can widen me as both a person and as an artist.
