Neil MacCormick

Two Paintings (or Some Very Hard News)

Last year, two paintings of mine that hadn’t been in my possession for over 30 years came back to my studio. They were in the first ever show of my work, an exhibition at K. Griffin Gallery in the Junction area of Toronto in 1989. They were among the pieces that didn’t sell, but at the end of the show, the paintings, ‘Coin Laundry’ and ‘Summer Town’ were selected by the Art Gallery of Ontario for their art rental and sales gallery. Over the next couple of years they earned me a few hundred dollars in rental income. I always wondered if they ever appeared in a movie or television show as they were occasionally rented out by production houses. In 1992 they were ‘deprocessed’ by the AGO, as I was advised in a brief, blunt letter sent to my residence, and I was told to pick up the work from the gallery.

At that point I was living with my wife, Christina, in Victoria, B.C., having moved there from Toronto at the end of my show in ‘89. I asked Christina’s mother, Mary Jane, if she could kindly pick them up for me.

In her seventies at the time, Mary Jane was an accomplished artist in her own right. In the late nineteen-fifties she put her ambitions as an abstract expressionist in New York on hold to marry a Canadian and raise her family in Toronto. In 1992 she was still the epitome of mid-century modern with her short-cropped, centre parted, pure white hair framing a round face with hooded eyes that, despite her good-humoured nature, always seemed to be in the midst of appraising one’s value while also noting one’s shortcomings. I imagined her short, gently padded form, clad in layers of black, a solid chunk of simple silver jewelry hanging from her neck, driving downtown in her stout, steel grey Volvo station wagon to collect the paintings, someone from the gallery carrying the work to her car.

I figured I’d arrange to get the paintings to British Columbia at some point, perhaps on one of our infrequent visits back home to Toronto, but I don’t remember ever having a plan with which to accomplish this. With my blessing, Mary Jane installed ‘Coin Laundry’ in the back room of the family house in Wychwood Park, an old, well-treed, private neighbourhood in mid-town Toronto, where Christina and her sister, Martha, grew up. Mary Jane, who was never shy about telling you which of your paintings were her least favourite, placed ‘Summer Town’ on the floor, leaning against the wall, its back to the room, behind a small antique couch in a spare room upstairs.

I’d seen the paintings off and on in the ensuing years, until noticing on one trip that ‘Summer Town’ had been removed from its spot in the spare bedroom. It was during my first nervous foray to New York, and I was staying in Toronto with Mary Jane, using the house in Wychwood Park as my home base. I was taking de-framed paintings on paper from Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto, where I was semi-successfully being represented, to O.K. Harris in New York, a gallery that I’d obsessed over for years, which showed the work of many of my favourite artists, and where I hoped to crack the roster.

I was too busy, tired and disinterested in the work to ask Mary Jane about the painting, so I just let it be. On a subsequent trip, I did eventually ask her about ‘Summer Town’ but she couldn’t recall what had happened to it, and I didn’t feel that she actually remembered the painting ever having been there.

I always had ambivalent feelings about ‘Summer Town’. It was ostensibly a painting of Christina and I in front of a permanently closed store with a papered-over window, inspired by a day trip we took to Lake Simcoe, just north of Toronto, to visit the little town where my family rented a small cottage most summers in the sixties. It was an empty, depressing place in the eighties, no longer feeling as far away from the city as it once did. I suppose the painting was somewhat of a success as I think it captured a bland kind of ennui. It was one of a few paintings I dropped off at Roberts Gallery on Yonge Street in Toronto in the late eighties for their consideration. The very nice young man at the gallery thought the paper in the window was a large rock inside the store. I left the gallery feeling like a slowly deflating day-old balloon.

I was annoyed that the painting had somehow disappeared from Mary Jane’s, but I was so unmoved by its existence that I just accepted that it could be gone forever.

I consider ‘Coin Laundry’ to be one of my more successful paintings of the period. It was based on an always empty Laundromat on Yonge Street that Christina and I would often pass on our weekend after-dinner walks when I lived in the basement of my parents’ home in North Toronto in the early eighties. I was the youngest, and last, of the three siblings still at home.

We walked in the dark, peering into the windows of closed stores, planning our lives beyond our current confines. I was moved by the remnant businesses of my childhood that remained scattered throughout the main streets of the neighbourhood on Avenue Road, and Yonge Street, north of Lawrence Avenue. The Vitrolite tiled, stainless steel trimmed storefronts stirred in me a melancholic blend of nostalgia and the anguish of time having passed. In my deluded optimism, I expected to be a successful artist in fairly short order, but the burden of personal history in Toronto felt like a door closing on our dreams. The combined tensions we felt in our families and the unexpectedly volatile housing costs of the time had us pondering drastic change, and in 1989 we left for Victoria.

Christina and I met when she began a part time job in 1982 at a bookstore on the northern edge of downtown in Toronto where I’d worked in the office for several years. I learned from her cousin, who also worked at the store, that Christina was beginning to re-engage with the world after a suicide attempt and was still living in the psychiatric ward of Mt. Sinai hospital. She referred to Christina as someone who ‘made you late for work in the morning’, obliquely, and somewhat cruelly, referring to her unsuccessfully having tried to end her life by jumping in front of a subway train. As Christina was helped, unscathed, from beneath the train at Queen’s Park station, the nearest station to Mt. Sinai, an onlooker chastised her for traumatising the subway operator.

I wasn’t put off by the obvious complications she presented, having grown up around psychologically complicated people, and eventually asked her on a date. On a late spring Friday evening after work, we had dinner at the ‘The Coffee Mill’ in Yorkville and saw ‘Chariots of Fire’ a short walk away at the Towne Cinema. She had a weekend pass from the hospital and planned to stay with her parents where she had been living before her subway incident. She had her clothes for the weekend in a brown paper ‘Sportables’ shopping bag. After our second or third date, I visited her room on the psych ward and met some of her friends there: shy, sweet, young women in their early to mid-twenties, most of whom had made semi-serious suicide attempts and who were also suffering symptoms of anorexia or bulimia.

She was eventually discharged from the hospital, moved home again and began working full time at the bookstore in the accounts department. Every week she saw a psychologist, who was once her nurse at Mt. Sinai, whom I thought was unqualified or simply incompetent, and took anti-anxiety medication that dried out her mouth and made her muscles buzz.

A year later, we both left the bookstore, I to paint full time to see if I could make being an artist work, and she for a job in the acquisitions department of the North York Public Library. We both lived at home, and most nights after dinner I drove my car to her parents’ house in Wychwood Park. We’d go for a long walk and talk about the world. I think she enjoyed my straightforward, unindoctrinated views on things. She was a beautiful, creative, highly intelligent, sensitive person. Over a period of time, with my encouragement, she was able to wean herself off her medication and eventually left her psychologist.

Not long after the opening of my first show in 1989, we got married in a small ceremony at North York City Hall and afterwards had a small, mostly-family reception at her parents’ home. The next day we loaded up a rental truck and began our journey to Victoria, B.C.

Victoria was a running away of sorts. Running from the stifling roles we played in our families, running from the relentless changes of a big city. In comparison, Victoria was a back-water that reminded me of the uncomplicated Toronto of the sixties that I grew up in, and was unconsciously desperate to return to. In the late eighties, Victoria was still full of mom and pop restaurants, stores with signs unchanged for decades, and a peaceful, unhurried feel. As for so many others before us, Victoria represented a chance to breathe deeply and calm down. There was a palpable sense of this in the eyes of new residents. Everyone wanted a fresh start, but for some, Victoria, almost as far west as one could go in Canada, also represented the last chance to get it right.

Ironically, and unexpectedly, six months after our great escape, my parents sold their house in Toronto and followed us out to the west coast. We ended up pooling our resources and buying a large, early nineteen-hundreds shingle house that had been duplexed in the nineteen-forties. Christina and I lived in the upstairs unit, my parents, downstairs.

We had what appeared to be a more or less normal life there for fourteen years. I painted and began to find my way in the art world, showing in Victoria, Vancouver and Toronto, and transformed the enormous, empty side-lot on our property into a sprawling garden. Christina worked at the Greater Victoria Public Library, read voraciously, wrote journals and poetry, and collected antique dolls and tin-type photographs. We haunted the downtown thrift stores on weekends for vintage clothes and housewares.

The passing years were unremarkable, both of us sliding quietly into middle age. There were occasional tensions around work and money, and in retrospect the tensions increased in a way that I didn’t really notice. Weren’t there always tensions between two sensitive people living together?

Our years as a couple ended with more than a little drama when Christina ‘came out’. Was this the source of the tension? She had hoped I’d say that I was also gay and we could both move on to our exciting, fulfilling new lives. She’d read that this was sometimes the case when a gay woman married a sensitive man, but to me it felt like the sudden end of everything rather than the beginning of anything.

Together we struggled through the confusing transition of her moving out and finding her way in her new life. My life was now a yawning chasm that she once occupied. I felt manipulated and betrayed, how long had she been plotting the end of our relationship? At the same time I understood that she had to do something, and that we were both victims of a circumstance over which neither of us had any power.

I tried to be as supportive as I could, from surreptitiously moving her into her new apartment downtown (we weren’t ready to share the upheaval with my parents) to attending gatherings with her, almost as a chaperone, before she really knew anyone in the local gay community. We’d occasionally meet downtown for a beer, or a walk through a bookstore, and talk about books and art. It was a way of trying to normalise the new situation for both of us. At the same time, when I was home alone I questioned every decision I’d ever made in my life and wondered what I’d done to deserve living in such a hell.

In the past, Christina had been uncannily accurate in her assessment of people and had always been hypersensitive about the vibes they gave off, but she seemed to be having trouble reading people’s intentions and interpreting social cues. Now on her own, she began to develop a paranoia about her security. I convinced her not to install a second deadbolt in her apartment after she expressed what I thought were unfounded suspicions about the superintendent of her building. She said she had sensed him lurking outside her door at night. I expressed my skepticism, despite agreeing that he did seem a little ‘off’.

After a couple of months, we ended up moving her into a suite in a large old mansion, a twenty minute walk towards town from our old house. She felt a little more settled there. She made friends with several others in the house, but the relationships always stalled. She seemed to project her feelings of attraction onto women, assigning sexual fluidity to people who had none.

To maintain my sanity, I began to leave my house as I hadn’t for most of my years in Victoria, and forced myself to socialise by going alone to a local pub. It became a focus for my nights later in the week, and I found myself with an eclectic group of acquaintances aged from their early twenties to their late seventies. I was pleased to see how easily I made friends, and before long I was accompanying the servers to catch last call downtown after closing the pub, being let out through the kitchen exit as they set the alarm, piling into a taxi or someone’s car for a short, boisterous trip to town. Many nights I made my way home unsteadily from downtown, happily mulling over the evening, walking along damp, deserted streets at three or four in the morning. I’d walk my dog when I got home and slowly slip into the wretched darkness I’d left earlier in the evening.

A year later, Christina decided to move back to Toronto. Her intense first relationships in her new community in Victoria hadn’t worked out and she felt the need for a restart back home. I helped her sort out her belongings, including her extensive antique doll collection, and packed and shipped them to her mother’s house. The dolls had each been named by Christina and she often spoke to me through them, bringing alive their unique voices and personalities. I felt like I was silencing them as I wrapped and boxed their fragile bodies. I drove her to the airport and said goodbye.

I was mostly relieved to have her gone by then. She had become critical of how I was going about sorting out a new life, and neither of us really enjoyed hearing about the other’s private life. The stress of starting new lives after almost twenty years together was making it difficult to maintain a supportive relationship. We wanted to be happy for each other, but it wasn’t always possible.

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Within a year of her return to Toronto, a voice had told her to cut herself as she passed a piece of glass on the path of a park she was walking through at twilight. Not long after, while Christina was staying alone in her mother’s house, she attempted an overdose of pills and was saved by an unexpected evening phone call from her mother’s cleaning lady. Christina managed to answer the phone and desperately asked for her help. Her sister, Martha phoned me in Victoria to let me know Christina was in the hospital and that she had survived with no apparent physical impairment. I hadn’t been surprised by the news, but neither was I expecting it.

In the ensuing months, Christina was diagnosed variously with dissociative identity disorder (what was once called multiple personality disorder), borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia. Her psychiatric medications stabilised her and she saw a well qualified psychiatrist twice a week.

My own life in Victoria began to settle while she was in Toronto. I met my partner, Hayley in the building I’d moved into after selling the big house we’d all shared in Victoria, my father having passed away from cancer, my mother, then in her mid-eighties, having also returned to Toronto to live down the hall from my sister in her mid-town apartment building. After only a few months together, my dog and I moved into Hayley’s tiny condo from our even tinier condo a floor below. Two years later, we moved to Montreal to help with the production of Hayley’s burgeoning clothing line. I wasn’t yet ready for any kind of return to Toronto.

During the seven years we lived in Montreal, I stayed in touch with Christina mostly through phone calls until her number went out of service, and emails once I’d obtained her email address from the only person in Victoria with whom she was still in contact. At one point I even acted as a kind of liaison for Martha and Mary Jane, both of whom Christina had stopped talking to, as she periodically did. Her new email prefix was ‘exitfromwychwood’. The prefix, making reference to the family home, struck me as odd but I never asked her about it.

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After Hayley and I moved back to Toronto in 2015, Christina and I had sporadic meet-ups for coffee. I was always nervous about our meetings and tried to stay positive and interested in her life while limiting my involvement to encouraging her creative life and supporting her feelings about her family and psychiatrist. She told me that she’d come to realise she had different versions of herself for different situations and people, and that I experienced a unique version of her honed of our twenty years together.

She was doing well enough, enjoying writing, painting and drawing. She was accomplished at all three and one late winter afternoon, after coffee, we went back to her basement apartment to look at her art. Like an underground artist’s studio, it was mostly a place to paint, write, read and sleep.

She had several different styles that represented the different voices that occupied her brain. Some paintings were expressive androgynous portraits on found pieces of wood such as cupboard doors with hinges still attached. Others were profiles on paper of humanoid faces, the flesh painted in raw looking reds. Some drawings were childlike doodles. Propped against the walls she had bits of painted old wood from renovation projects, found curbside, and squashed metal parts from the winter-damaged undersides of cars that she’d carted home for assemblages.

She spoke of two men in her life, both poets. They exchanged writing, lent each other a critical eye, and went to literary events around the city. She was an intelligent, intense, charming, sometimes prickly woman, and I gather there were times when she would cut them off for a time because of some perceived slight. Both men were taken with her unique writing voice, a kind of deconstructed, untethered-feeling, free form poetry that reflected her fractured mind. She had several chapbooks published by a local champion of unpublished writers. I was unclear if there were any romantic connections with the men and didn’t ask her to clarify. After all this time, some stubborn, wounded part of me still couldn’t see her as being gay.

Christina’s isolation increased by virtue of a water damaged cell phone she wouldn’t fix or replace, and we communicated only through the email she accessed on the public computer terminals at the reference library downtown. We still managed to meet for coffee by pre-arranging a date and time and meeting at the same busy coffee shop at a scruffy downtown intersection.

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Mary Jane passed away three weeks shy of her hundredth birthday in June, 2018. I gave a fleeting thought to my paintings which I hadn’t seen in over a decade, but I assumed if anything changed at the house, I’d get a head’s up from Christina or her sister, Martha. At this point, Christina was living alone in the house in Wychwood Park, having had a failed attempt at home ownership herself. Her house, turning out to be in need of serious rehabilitation, prompted a move back to the unoccupied family home more or less permanently.

I knew from previous chats with Christina that she had some trepidation about what would happen to the estate after her mother died. She felt that her sister wanted her out of the house in order to sell it for the finances they’d need to keep paying the taxes on their two country properties to which Martha was heavily, emotionally attached. And, besides, Christina would need some sort of income, and the upkeep on the old house would surely drain whatever money was left in the estate. Knowing how important the stability of the house was to Christina, I felt there was likely enough in the estate holdings to reach a compromise. I was tempted to help with more than words of support but the thought of being any further involved made my stomach sink.

An excerpt from an email from Christina, dated October 29, 2018:

“I just learned the other day that I'm not going to be able to keep the WP house. Yikes. Still, I have some time to try and figure the future out. Really at the moment just can't stand thinking about it. I think Martha's agreed that I can stay for a year and my shrink's lobbying (perhaps unrealistically) for 5 years because then, at 65, I can apply for assisted living. Ho-hum.

“Martha and I have written a book, Sister Language, that will probably (fingers crossed) eventually be published, probably by Pedlar Press, although Coach House will also have an option to publish.”

An excerpt from my reply on the same day:

“I don't envy your having to deal with Martha about all the estate, property stuff. Looks like she wants you out of WP! I'm sure you'll sort something out, I'm glad your doctor is in your corner.

”Congrats on the book! How amazing! I can't believe you managed a collaboration with your sister! Can't wait to read all about it.”

I was astonished that Martha and Christina had managed to collaborate on a book despite the turmoil of their mother’s decline and eventual death, and Christina’s unpredictable ability to cope with her family. ‘Sister Language’ was a kind of ‘call and response’ between the two sisters, Christina’s writing on the left page, Martha’s response on the right. She’d described it a year earlier in an email, responding to news of my first solo show with Frank Bernarducci in New York City, to whom I’d first shown work in 2001:

“Martha and I are collaborating on an essay about my writing, my ‘formal thought disorder’ and ‘cognitive disorganization’ -- it's going really well... this is something I've been needing for about 15 years now, so, for me too: a long time coming but here at last.”

We met for coffee at her usual spot on the second last day of 2018, a cold, dry, road-salt-haze Toronto winter day. I brought her a copy of American Art Collector in which was an article about my early 2018 show at Bernarducci Gallery, the first magazine piece I’d ever had written about my art. She was at a table with a book and a cup of tea, dressed in loose layers of grey and brown.

She seemed fine, her usual slightly jittery self. I remember she was excited about my article and thrilled with ‘Sister Language’ and the prospect of her own published work, the first ‘real’ book in a lifetime of writing. The specifics of our conversation are lost to me, but I’m sure I told her about my show and my time in New York. She undoubtedly told me about an artist she’d discovered through a book in the library, as she often did. There was nothing unusual in our time together. Because I knew her and her family in ways most people couldn’t, I was a sympathetic witness to whatever was troubling her. We hugged on the street afterwards and mumbled about seeing each other again.

As I turned the corner to walk home, I exhaled the tension of social engagement and felt thankful that the visit had gone well. I texted Hayley that I was on my way home.

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I emailed Christina on her birthday, on April 29th, 2019 to wish her well and catch her up on what little news I had.

The next day, Christina replied:

“I'm fine. I'm actually taking a shrink-condoned meds holiday -- first time off meds in ten years; and I've been heavily medicated... I feel alive again -- kind of "myself" again; the meds I was on are very deadening. I'm having fun with my writing and staying calm so far and taking it one day at a time (I'm determined to make this work if I can).”

She wished me a happy spring.

From me, on the same day:

“Wow, that's amazing about the medication holiday! I didn't know that sort of thing was even possible! Really incredible, it will be great to feel 'yourself' again.”

Spring came and went. I asked for my paintings back from the gallery in New York, fearing that it would close without warning. I’d heard rumour of its impending demise. I had some issues with my arrhythmic heart that occupied my thoughts in early summer. I wore a heart monitor for two weeks, painstakingly filling out a chart of my unremarkable activities as related to my heart rate, and after several specialist visits, was relieved to find there weren’t any new problems.

When my birthday on August 11th passed, I noted that Christina hadn’t emailed as she usually did. I hated getting birthday wishes, but not getting them always activated a small, worried voice in the primitive part of my brain. Did I do something? Is something wrong?

Less than two weeks later, August 22nd, 2019, a Thursday morning at the studio Hayley and I shared, I opened an email from Christina’s sister, Martha and immediately knew what was coming.

Subject: Some very hard news

Dear Neil,

When you have a moment, please give me a call. My landline: 416-XXX-XX21

Cell: 416-XXX-XX88.

Love,
Martha

I called Martha from the mezzanine in the studio, gaining some privacy from our two employees amongst the racks of dresses which absorbed the words from my conversation. Martha, in tears, told me that Christina had passed—had been found in the house in Wychwood Park. I could feel all of the old, hidden animosities I’d had for her family, that I’d collected from my years of being Christina’s only support in her life long battle for self realisation, fall away. I felt an immediate, overwhelming empathy for Martha and the years of turmoil she’d endured as the sibling of someone so ill.

I read recently in an article by the New Yorker writer, Donald Antrim, who had survived a suicide attempt: “I believe that suicide is a natural history, a disease process, not an act or a choice, a decision or a wish.” Christina once said, while I was trying to make sense of the news of the suicide of Kurt Cobain in 1994, that people who committed suicide were reacting to an unbearable pain they felt could only be relieved through death, and despite my own depression and thoughts of suicide in the past, I knew I had never reached a level of anguish that would have lead me to that end.

After the phone call, I came back downstairs and told Hayley what had happened. I left the studio and took the streetcar to Martha’s house. I learned that Christina had managed to asphyxiate herself. I didn’t ask for details. Such was Christina’s isolation that she wasn’t found for almost two weeks. Martha had been communicating with her through notes left in Christina’s mailbox and had been alerted by an unopened note. The book launch for ‘Sister Language’ was four weeks away.

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In the months that followed, I kept in touch with Martha, answering what questions I could about Christina’s possessions for the insurance company, and lending an ear for the difficult thoughts Martha was processing. The book launch became a memorial for Christina. I decided not to attend.

Because of the nature of Christina’s ‘unattended death’—the lengthy delay between her death and the discovery of her body—the house required a professional bioremediation. Furniture, books and other objects in the house were processed with a perfumed anti-bacterial spray. Countless items were discarded in the brutal cleanup, but Martha directed the company responsible to salvage what they could of Christina’s writing and art, Mary Jane’s decades long collection of paintings and, I hoped, ‘Coin Laundry’ and ‘Summer Town’.

I didn’t want to burden Martha with unnecessary stress about the paintings. I was prepared for them to be lost, as I had always feared for ‘Summer Town’ anyway. In October, Martha emailed to say the paintings had been successfully recovered. In a few days, after dinner at Martha’s, Hayley and I brought them to our studio.

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The coroner was unable to officially confirm Christina’s identity through DNA, as sibling DNA test results are often quite different from one another. I was asked if I could remember any significant marks or identifiers for her. I could only remember that she’d had a mole removed from the centre of her back when we lived in Victoria.

I was reluctant to send my mind back to a life that had ended so abruptly, to open a door to the intimacy of corporal memory. I didn’t want to remember. One afternoon while in the trance-fog of painting at my desk I thought of the well hidden repair to her two broken front teeth from childhood that formed a small arc between the two, and the finger-sized lateral scars on her thighs from the cutting she did in her teens in order to make manifest the pain in her mind. There seemed an imponderable inadequacy to identifying someone through the traumas their body endured.

In December, after the coroner’s office had finally released her body, Martha invited me to Christina’s cremation. I thought about it for a day and decided to join Martha and her husband, Jonno, to witness the cremation.

It was a bitterly cold, crunchy-snow morning as I took transit to the cemetery. I waited in the office for Martha and Jonno. When they arrived, we made our way to the ovens not far from the office. I self-consciously took a few cell phone photos: a silver, heat-proof coat hanging on a hook; the large, scorched looking ovens; a heavy, black, adjustable stretcher to carry the casket to the oven; the simple wooden casket with an identification sheet taped to the cardboard top. I was surprised to see my family name still being used as Christina’s surname. We’d been separated for sixteen years, ten of those divorced.

Martha asked if I’d like to press the button to start the furnace as she had done for her mother’s cremation. After hesitating, I said ‘yes’. The casket was manoeuvred to the oven and I was led behind a heavy black curtain to a dark, sooty passage between the two furnaces. I was told by the cemetery worker to flip a switch then press a large button on a junction box hanging from an electrical wire. I heard the furnace start.

We left the furnace building and briefly walked through the cemetery on a thin layer of icy snow, doing a small circuit that brought us back to the furnaces. None of us was dressed for the piercing wind and we left in Martha and Jonno’s car before the smoke rose from the chimney.

They drove me back to their house for a brief lunch, and together we continued to puzzle out our thoughts concerning the last several months. Afterwards, I walked up their street to the streetcar and returned to work.

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I’ve had the paintings in our studio for two years, on the floor, facing a wall beside my desk. Their backs still wear faded stickers from the AGO art rental gallery from 1992 and the frames, which I made myself from substandard materials in 1989, could do with being replaced. After Christina left our home in Victoria almost twenty years ago, I decided that possessions were a burden best discarded. I destroyed, gave away or sold decades worth of collections and personal artifacts but I’ve never been able to discard any of my art. The psychic weight of these two paintings is a challenge to be sorted through. I’m still undecided about what to do with them next.

February 8th, 2022

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 A Largely Insignificant Day

I completed my project ‘One Day at Rest’ on December 31st, 2015. It began on July 2nd, 2011 when four GoPro cameras recorded more than 7200 digital image files of a day in the life of my partner, Hayley Gibson and me. Twenty of those files were used to compose ten paintings and ten drawings, illustrating the events of that day.

I spent four and a half years immersed in the minutiae of a single, largely insignificant day while the tumult of the present pressed on. I wanted to confront and contain the impermanence of an average day of an average weekend at a particularly unremarkable time in our lives, to arrest the relentless trudging towards the unknowable future.

While I painted and drew, the planet we inhabit completed more than four revolutions of our sun. It rotated on its axis 1643 times. I broke my arm, I lost a tooth. My mother died, my dog died. I lost a gallery in New York and gained two in Canada. I participated in six group shows and had one solo show. I sold one painting. We moved 550 kilometres down the road from Montreal to Toronto, my sixth move in nine years. I began to make peace with the ghosts of my hometown after twenty six years away.

With the project completed, I emerge from a kind of mental exile, reengaging with my art world brain, with what happens after the work is done. What to do with this body of work? Do I want to sell it off piecemeal? Do I want to sell it at all? Would anyone buy it? Do I even want to share it with anyone?

I’m conflicted about what I want from my life as an artist. More so after thirty years than at any time before. Perhaps it’s just the confident ignorance of youth petering away, diluted by the disillusioning realities of the art world or my own warring desires of notoriety and obscurity.

Working for so long in isolation, I alter between states of grandiosity: ‘This is the best work I’ve ever done, no one is doing work like this!’ and hopelessness: ‘I’ve wasted my life, no one will care about any of this, I don’t even care about it!’. In the end comes ambivalence: neither, nor. Any remnant desire I might have had for some unspecific personal transformation slowly evaporates with the completion of the project.

In times of stress, an image often floats into my mind of myself as a child. It feels like loss. I’m in the basement of our house in Toronto. It’s summer, and in the cool relief of that crudely appointed space I quietly assemble a model car. It’s an image from the seemingly endless solitude of an afternoon in July or August. I imagine that I’m aware neither of the past, nor of the future. I’m content to hide from the sun, from my peers, from the neighbours. I will always be in this moment and I will live forever.

I’ve spent much of my life trying not to participate. Trying not to be noticed, hoping to be left alone. So much of my childhood was spent trying to cope with the insidious, if intermittent turmoil of the family around me. I coped by retreating in to myself, by assembling models, by drawing, by watching television, by removing myself as much as possible from the physical world outside our doors.

I never wanted to leave the house. I created an unchanging landscape of days that made solid a ground that always seemed to be in threat of shifting, of altering for the worse in some irreparable way.

I’ve lived most of my life not far from this self-protective shell. I seek comfort in routine and greet change with reluctance and suspicion. Despite knowing that the only constant in life is the endless, shifting cycle of decay and renewal, and despite having the dark knowledge of my own inevitable demise, I subconsciously believe that my routines will make me immortal: If you can make one day much like the next, then surely this chain of days can push endlessly ahead, slowing time to a crawl.

In my late fifties, I’m more aware than ever of the ticking of the clock, of the pages flying from the calendar as in an old movie. I continue to impose routines on my life, sometimes to the detriment of my relationships and never to any great effect.

For the last four and a half years, the child in the basement stopped time. He made a day in 2011 last until the final hours of 2015. Whatever the outcome of my reengagement with the present, I can say at least in that regard, that the project was a success.

March 11, 2016

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The Big Picture

Waiting eight hours in a packed emergency room with one’s swollen arm in a sling makes one reassess how life was before one’s elbow slammed into a sidewalk. I write this as I recuperate from surgery for a broken ulna which has left my arm looking and feeling like it was beaten with a mallet until the person beating it became bored with the project.

In my seven years here, I’ve found Montreal’s winters to be a difficult, endless misery and this year’s version has been particularly challenging. As we prepare for a spring move to the slightly less ice-gripped and snow addled city of Toronto, this parting gift from Montreal’s icy sidewalks has given me pause to think over the dispiriting events of the last year and allowed me to place them into a larger life context.

Whenever I’m on the highway, and it cuts through a section of sedimentary rock, I wonder if anyone else imagines how our own bodies will one day be part of that same geological process. We seem to believe that all of the earths ancient systems, like the depositing of mineral or biological matter that comprise these sediments, have somehow paused for our benefit.

I’ve read that if the age of the planet we inhabit was expressed as a twenty four hour clock, human beings come into existence just over one minute to midnight. I remind myself of this every time I’m unnecessarily obsessing over some minute aspect or other of my life. Specifically, the kind of thoughts one has about legacy.

As a kind of balm, I used to think to myself that if no one cared about what I was making as an artist while I was alive, that perhaps when I was dead it would all make sense to someone and my work would achieve some measure of notoriety or at least become a footnote in the discussion of the art of my time.

It’s a pretty harmless way to maintain some momentum. It’s hard to convince yourself to produce work when you feel no one will ever care. Life is about fooling ourselves into believing something matters aside from our inevitable, out of control run down a hill that ends in the ultimate face-plant. Hence our devotion to religion, children, the perfect lawn, a new car, achieving representation at a blue chip gallery or having a painting find its way into a museum collection.

Which is not to say that I find no meaning in life. Through my paintings, I find it in the expression of the feelings and thoughts that are the accumulation of my life. I find it in my involvement with my partner Hayley and her own creative work in her company, Birds of North America. I find it in the daily struggle to maintain some personal dignity in the face of the void.

The exhibition of my ‘One Day at Rest’ series has been derailed by the combined ambivalence of gallery and artist, and the final two pieces that need to be completed suddenly feel like an exercise in futility. Yet another period of reassessment begins.

Perhaps reassessment is a constant state that comes in and out of my conscious brain because I know that life is fluid and ever changing, but I also know that I sometimes beat this thought down in order to maintain some illusion of order amidst the chaos of the universe.

It’s hard to maintain the screw-you-I’ll-do-what-I-want attitude when you also have to deal with the realities and appetites of commercial gallery spaces, but I feel more strongly than ever that I need to be the one in charge. I don’t want to ‘paint to a deadline’ or waste my time on a commission in order to please someone else’s ego.

The whole point of withstanding the mental anguish of a life in the arts is to have some measure of control over one’s life and art. I refuse to relinquish that control to anyone. If this means that all of my life’s efforts in art amount only to a fraction of a layer of sediment on a planet orbiting a dying star, that’s okay. That’s all it will ever amount to anyway. In the big picture, that much is clear.

January 28th, 2015

Unemployable

A friend in Montreal, Dahn D’Lion, produces a line of printed t-shirts as part of his inclusive initiative 'We Live Here Too', a kind of ‘best friends’ club for the disenfranchised of the world. In his own words: ‘Youth, Queers, Vegans, Punks, Artists, DJs, Ballerinas, folks with disabilities, folks with hyper-abilities, and any combination thereof’. I don’t buy many printed t-shirts but this spring, after seeing his inspiring and intelligent video about the meaning behind his shirt ‘Unemployable’, I was moved to make a purchase.

I saw images of the shirt some time before I saw the video and I had developed my own take on the ‘Unemployable’ reference. It seemed to mesh around thoughts I’d been having about the idea of ‘letting go’. Letting go of the stricture of expectations. Letting go of distant, hazy goals, of defining myself today by aiming my efforts at some imaginary, wonderful art-world future. Letting go of even wanting to understand the fickle art market, the often incomprehensible success of other contemporary artists.

It’s difficult not to be lulled into the warm bath of a ‘thing’ that works. In my case, it was centred-subject portrait paintings of forlorn, forgotten industrial buildings and storefronts. I knew that I had to create a cohesive, identifiable body of work to get where I wanted to go (a particular gallery, O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York) and my enthusiasm for that pursuit sustained me for years. I even achieved my goal.

Success is a drug. It feels good. People buying your paintings feels good. The money feels good. The prestige of being represented in New York feels good. This is the warm bath: make a painting, send a jpeg, sell a painting, ship a painting, receive a cheque. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Pretend that you fit in. Stop thinking about why you paint. Stop wondering if what you paint is saying what you want it to say. Ignore that most people don’t seem to get what you’re trying to do. Ignore the pit of your stomach feeling that these building portraits no longer mean anything to you and that finding subjects for these paintings is becoming a pain in the ass. Forget that you used to tell yourself that being an artist wasn’t about making money.

Art world goals tend to involve someone or something outside of the artist. The goal tends to be some form of acceptance by peers or collectors or galleries or media or academia or granting organisations. I’ve decided, though not for the first time, that if I have a goal, it’s to produce work that I feel needs to be done, regardless of what anyone else thinks.

To me, art is a middle finger aimed at convention, not a cry for acceptance. Too often, the most financially successful artists play the old role of the ‘licensed fool’ in a Renaissance court, having been given bemused permission to behave badly by the reigning art world royalty of blue chip galleries and big city critics.

My ‘unemployable’ is a statement. You will NOT employ me to further your needs as a curator, gallery owner or director, collector or arts organisation. You CANNOT employ me. I am unemployable.

June 17th, 2013

Fetishising the Negative

Montreal has finally slipped the shackles of winter. Only the scars on boulevard trees and the bent iron railings of gates too near the sidewalk to avoid the reckless destruction of countless, clattering mini plows remind us of what has passed.

Winter lingers in my mind until the long days of daylight savings time drive out the darkness. I very easily slide into a dark place in those winter months. The space I reserve in my mind for negative thoughts becomes so easily accessed.

We often carry the effects of negative comments and actions that have been directed at us through our lives. Like a favoured collection I revisit them, as though opening a jewel case, sorting through the scars, running a finger along the edges of damaged tissue.

Of all the myriad unpleasant experiences I could mull over, one seemingly insignificant episode inexplicably rises to my consciousness with some frequency: the nine year old me, making my way home from school, uses a penetrating, newly learned whistle to call to friends a block ahead of me. A class mate, a girl whom I don’t know well, scolds me from across the street: ‘You think you’re so cool!’

The sense of deflation I felt from this remark was probably more extreme than warranted but it must have pierced a particularly sensitive part of my psyche. Was it wrong to stand out? Will people hate me if I do?

I was a precocious, confident child. In the sixties, precocious, confident children were placed in accelerated programs and completed three years of schooling in two years. I was one of six kids in my grade two class who were placed in this program.

By grade five, at age nine, I was already struggling to cope with the social displacement that comes from being younger than one’s group of peers. A late summer birthday meant that some of my classmates, with later birthdays, were almost two years older.

It didn’t take long to fall out of touch with my former classmates in the lower grade. A year with the older students in grade five made them seem impossibly young.

Anxieties always find a way out. The subconscious, internal battles we wage often manifest in debilitating thoughts or actions. The feeling of displacement I had at school, combined with the stress of familial complications made manifest in me mild versions of agoraphobia and body dysmorphia.

The agoraphobia, from which I occasionally still suffer, is classic ‘fear of the marketplace’, a kind of discomfort or even panic when faced with the chaotic crowds one finds at malls or markets or simply the chaos of the urban environment. Body dysmorphia, simply put, is a condition wherein a person has a preoccupation with perceived shortcomings in their physical being. It’s one in an arsenal of psychological maladies brought about, in part, by depression, anxiety and social withdrawal.

The anxiety of these things can be so strong that I have sometimes developed a limp while walking alone in public. In my mind there are vestigial, critical voices commenting on how I stand, how I walk. My debilitating, self critical analysis interfering with the simplest mechanical systems of my body.

As an offshoot of this, I now have what I jokingly refer to as body-of-work dysmorphia. This is an inability to see one’s work objectively. I constantly struggle to understand where I fit in the art world, to see my work as having value. A finished painting is a new opportunity to question one’s career decisions, one’s worth to society. A chance to revisit the old wounds of rejection.

Society reveres iconoclasts, putting their faces on T-shirts and mugs, quoting them endlessly in print or on the web while simultaneously deriding unusual behaviour in individuals, discouraging any deviation from the norm with the kind of Victorian moralising that ensures we all just become cogs in society’s machine.

I’ve always had a conflicting desire to stand out from the crowd while being wholly fearful of drawing attention to myself. The precocious, confident child still exists in my psyche in remnant form. I’m trying to let it out a little more often now while knowing that anything I do that is unusual or challenging is an invitation to the world to pick it apart.

In that place which is more than just ‘the blues’ but also just shy of despair, I compulsively turn over the accumulation of rejection in my mind. In a strange way, the delicate box that contains my collection of negative thoughts acts as a way of grounding me. Prodding the source of pain is a way of remembering who I am.

June 11th, 2012

Solitude

I spent the last month weaning myself off facebook. I went to my home page, checked for messages or notifications, looked at the first couple of posts and left. Do I really need to see what other artists are doing? Is it helpful?

Most of my art life has involved selective ignorance. Long before home computers, in the hazy days of my youth, finding out about anything was a chore that involved leaving the house and I rarely left the house for anything but school or street hockey. The few art books that made their way to my consciousness came from my sister who worked at a bookstore. I had undeveloped interests and it pleased her to feed them: Diners, by John Baeder; New Techniques in Egg Tempera, by Robert Vickrey; Ken Danby, by Paul Duval; High Realism in Canada, also by Paul Duval. I didn’t buy or look at art magazines, didn’t know any artists and got most of my visual education through popular sources like newspapers, television and high-end greeting cards.

I’ve always drawn or painted: at the kitchen table with the radio blaring while my mother cooked or baked; at the dining room table with my sister, copying the pictures she made for her homework assignments; at the coffee table in the living room with the television blaring. I drew what was at hand: a cigarette lighter; a newspaper masthead; the radio. I incessantly drew hot-rods and other vehicles. We were a car free family in North America and cars were an exotic ‘other’ for me.

I also spent a lot of time looking out the window, watching planes on their descent to Toronto’s Malton airport or people and traffic going by on our quiet street. The world has always seemed to be something apart from me and I’ve always taken measures, mostly unconscious ones, to protect my mental and physical space in it.

Partly in an effort to develop and protect my own system of thinking, I’ve never read artist’s biographies. In my early twenties I bought and began to read a book on Edward Hopper but I didn’t get far. Many of the things he was saying were already in my head and I didn’t want to associate those thoughts and ideas with Hopper, I wanted them to be my own.

Although my life as an adult is a little more open to the world, my exposure to art continues to be guarded. What began as a way of protecting my embryonic thoughts from a barrage of challenges has become a kind of identity. In all my trips to New York City, I’ve never been to the Metropolitan, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney or the Frick. I’m still not exactly sure what or where the Frick is and I have no real desire to know. There have been no art school ‘crits’ and until facebook, no obsessing over other people’s work.

The internet should be a boon to someone who doesn’t like to leave the house but I find it a mixed blessing. The internet’s unlimited access to thousands of other peoples’ career decisions can be confusing.

Facebook is my new ‘peering from the window’. Only now, instead of a quiet suburban street, it’s the busiest possible downtown intersection. Logging out of facebook is the equivalent of closing the blinds, leaving me to the comfort of my own thoughts. Even if those same thoughts are in the minds of my peers and have been in the minds of generations of artists before me.

February 11th, 2012

One Day at Rest, Painting 1

Now that the first painting for ‘One Day at Rest’ is finished, I’m pondering which images from that day will become drawings or etchings, figuring out a handmade book that I might make. I suddenly feel like an artist again instead of a machine for producing photorealist paintings.

I used all manner of materials when I was younger, the different media transforming the ideas I brought to them. What happened? Perhaps I was too eager to define myself. I’ve been so intently focused on producing a cohesive body of work in the last couple of decades, refining the definition of what I do, that I forgot to take time to experiment. The commercial gallery world, where I felt inclined to belong, likes to define things, needs to define things. The simpler the definition, the easier the sale.

Painting is exhausting. It consumes every ounce of concentration I can generate. For me, the end of the day means the end of thinking about art. I need to get away from my desk, blank out, go for a walk, watch television. Late in the evening I’ll think about the day of work I have ahead. In my mind, I go over the areas I’ll be tackling in the morning like a marathon runner crossing the country. Tomorrow, I’ll try to get to Calgary.

I’m excited enough about my new project that it’s dislodged decades of walls I’ve built around what it means for me to be an artist. During the several months that I work on a painting, I’m not sure I can do other things like drawings or prints, but the time between paintings, when I’m usually feeling unsettled, distracted, or guilty about not painting, suddenly seems like the perfect opportunity to experiment.

October 28th, 2011

A Way Forward

On July second, 2011, I took more than 7,200 photos of a typical summer Saturday in our condo studio in Montreal. Four cameras, covering virtually every square inch of living space, recorded our existence from our waking at 7 am to lights out at 10:30 pm. The digital cameras were mounted surveillance style from the ceiling and at an interval of seven or eight seconds, one of the four cameras would silently record an image. I also carried a voice activated digital sound recorder throughout the day and recorded over eight hours of audio.

‘One Day at Rest’ is an attempt to further explore my perception of honesty, its nature and role in my work, and a more direct attempt at portraying my physical and psychological existence without the distorting filter that results from turning the camera outwards.

I’ve spent decades sporadically roaming the streets with my camera, subconsciously searching for subjects that reflected my mental state, my unease with the world. Every subject I painted spoke to me in this way, whether trailers, neon signs or derelict commercial buildings.

It took several years to consciously understand that I was searching for a way to reflect my damaged self, except I’d found a way to expose myself to the world without truly giving anything away. I hadn’t intended to perform this psychological dance of the seven veils, I thought at the time I was being pretty direct. I certainly felt the anxiety of the exposed, but a growing awareness of how people perceived my paintings made me realise I was on the wrong track.

In a gallery setting, my paintings look vaguely like photographs. Admittedly, like ink-jet photographs printed on cheap paper in fast draft mode. I’ve often explained to someone hustling past the images at an opening ‘By the way, these are paintings, not photographs!’ People would often do a double take and look a little closer but I began to feel that most were saying to themselves, ‘That could be a photo or it could possibly be a painting but I’m not interested enough to care.’ The current dogma of contemporary art appreciation doesn’t seem to allow for a small photo based painting. Ironic, given the preponderance and apparent popularity of rather dull photographs of abstract collages, photographs of paintings and photographs of photographs. I’m puzzled that people don’t seem to ‘get’ the work but I think they’ve been taught that there’s nothing to get.

When what I do no longer works for me, it’s time for a change. Art is communication and I feel that my message could do with a little reworking. It’s just an old building, how can I expect anyone to get that it represents my tortured soul, that it speaks of impermanence, mortality, alienation, the nature of and value we place on the production of culture? I’ve been hiding behind a facade, sometimes a literal facade, strangely, and it’s time to change how I show myself to the world.

Seventy two hundred photographs of me doing very personal things somehow didn’t make me feel any more exposed than my paintings of buildings or signs. For me, they are the same thing. I hope for the viewer they are something quite different.

October 16th, 2011

Sea Change

ABC United Trading Corp. will likely be my last storefront for awhile. The changes I’ve made to get my paintings into a different realm in New York have had unexpected consequences. This ongoing process of recontextualisation has led me to a surprising revelation: It appears I’ve driven a car into the desert and run out of gas.

I’m not sure when, exactly, I ran out of gas. It may well have been long before I made it to New York for my first show at O.K.Harris in 2004. The twenty year drive to show my work at a good gallery in New York City somehow kept me from knowing that I was no longer inspired by what I painted.

The little ringing voices of truth that I imagine occupy a space just above and behind my head are most easily ignored when life is complicated. The more entanglements my life or career has, the more I ignore them. The blessed silence afforded by the odd confluence of a dying American economy, the strange weightlessness of an unsure venture with a new gallery, and my aching disinterest in my own work has finally allowed the voices to be heard above the din of self delusion.

Art is self exploration. This fact doesn’t always mesh well with a world that prefers to see culture entwined with commerce. The artist’s understandable preoccupation with the financial insanity of this kind of pursuit and the accompanying deviation from the purity of one’s truth is no longer an option for me.

The pressure we place on ourselves, or allow others to place on us, to proceed along a predetermined path to ‘success’ has the effect of eliminating from our lives the insignificant seeming non sequitur, the chance encounter which changes one’s entire direction.

I know now that there isn’t a goal. Only a direction to take and reevaluate when necessary. This is a journey whose length is indeterminate and unknowable and ends only when we ourselves end.

I can choose to find some gas and continue on or I can leave the car in the desert and find another road out. The immense relief I feel as I walk away in another direction is the answer to the question ‘Have I done the right thing?’

July 28th, 2011

Living in Exile

I’ve made two significant geographical moves in my life. The first, in 1989, from Toronto, Ontario to Victoria, B.C. (3397 kilometres). The second, in 2008, from Victoria back east to Montreal, Quebec (3733 km). Both moves gave me a sense of living in exile in one way or another. Both were largely financially driven but each also had an element of escape. The first, escape from the fold of family, old patterns of expectation, the ‘didn’t I know you in high school?’ encounter. The second, a licking of mid-life wounds, an almost random stab at the map for a new place to start again.

Perhaps the urge to move on is an inherited trait. My parents became postwar, economic exiles of Scotland when they made the difficult decision to move to Canada in 1950. Canada was a place of employment opportunities and where one could buy a dozen eggs if one wanted. The latter was no small consideration for a young family living in postwar food-rationed Glasgow.

My father never fully committed his heart to Canada despite spending a large majority of his life here. ‘Home’ for him was more than 5,000 kilometres from the house he shared with us. In a way, he never fully committed to the idea of a home with a wife and three children either. He once remarked to me as we stood looking at the backyard of the house I grew up in, ‘This would be good place to raise a family.’ I thought, ‘Actually, it was. Where the hell were you?’

Sometimes the moving on comes before one is actually ready to leave. Over the last year or two I’ve struggled to understand my place in the art world and tried to sort out why I don’t feel particularly comfortable with the ‘photorealist’ label, despite the obvious connection my work has to the genre. I know that I’ve moved on but I’ve had trouble falling into step with my new surroundings.

Exile is the removal of oneself from the realm of interest that so possesses the person in exile. The removal, which can heighten one’s desire to engage the mind with what was left behind can also, over time, allow for a dampening of the passions. So it is with my dying interest in photorealism.

Montreal isn’t home yet but it probably will be before long. ‘Moving on’ is more of a psychological transformation than a change in one’s address. It’s easy to pack a truck and move oneself physically but the ties one has to a place aren’t so easy to shake from the mind.

April 4th, 2011