On Sunday I went to The Power Plant in Toronto to catch the Ydessa Hendeles show ‘The Milliner’s Daughter’ before it closed a day later. I went because an artist friend of mine, Victoria Cowan, pointed out its connection to what I do. 

There were many rooms of work, each with a different story to tell. What struck me most strongly at first was how extraordinary the objects were, gathered by Hendeles over many years – a lifetime even.

Some items such as the numerous vitrines and two pairs of oversized pince-nez, were exquisitely crafted, as were the focus of my visit: the truly amazing collection of mannequins.

Some were tiny miniatures some life sized or larger; some mechanical toys, but most the kind used by artists to this day.

The combinations, poses, containment or not, scale contrasts whether between figures or between a figure and the furniture it was placed on, they all set up narrative possibilities, which were hard for the brain to resist.

The uncanny feeling of these articulated dolls comes from the conflict between our cognitive understanding that yes, of course these are inanimate, often very stylized mannequins, but on the other hand how life-like their presence was.

It was very interesting to me as someone who teaches figure and portrait to note how little our brains need to register something as a human being, much like the instances of well-known, often religious figures' faces being found on pieces of toast or a stain on a wall.

​As for the connection to my work, some of which is pictured here, I think I’ll let it speak for itself except to say these ‘Boxed In’ figure works formed the basis for a broader range of work and media concerned with barriers, boundaries and constraints, both physical and not.

​That formed the basis for my Chains Unlinked show at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, the mural portion is pictured here. It was also the origin of my 'Containment' installation at In Situ in 2016, particularly the drawers-turned-to-lightboxes, with solitary figures and faces inside, like the one shown here.

What do you think, what connections do you see? Did you see either show? Please let me know in the comments below.

The In Situ arts festival in late October was an extraordinary experience for me as an artist and a fun one in general.

With two large scale pieces in the main space and an entire room installation (allowing plenty of space for dancers to perform in), it was wonderful to stretch out (mentally and physically) into so much space.

The intensity required to conceive and execute so much in so little time is not sustainable for long (by me at least) but has some benefits. As I was just describing to a friend, it kept the threads of my thoughts white-hot, so every hour of work built 100% onto the previous hours, days and weeks of work – since most other distractions had been put aside... even sleep!

As well, working with the festival's fabulous lighting designer Joe Pagnan and working with light in the drawers and other components of my room installation 'Containment', has forever changed my thinking around light.

The incredible support and enthusiasm of Heather Snell, director/artistic director of the festival, and her wonderful husband Ken, was fertile ground in which to grow (thank you both!).

While I had nothing like enough time to get ready (in fact I am still trying to recover from the 24/7 preparations) but the joyful, creative and expansive experience that this was, coupled with the new work I produced for it, means I am glad and grateful for the opportunity.

And I still love that gorgeous, decrepit building!

Thanks to all who visited! For any who could not, I hope these photos will go some way toward compensating.

For the past several weeks I have been working on a new, ambitious installation for In Situ, an event I wrote about in more detail here (click to open).

What I want to focus on in this post is the relationship between artworks and their space, in a deeper sense than "does this painting go with my couch?"

I leapt at the chance to be part of In Situ even though it would cost me money I don't have, even though there was not enough time to prepare, all because of the space!

​Soaring ceilings, tiny welder's booths, classic windows, exposed pipes, industrial fixtures, peeling paint... what's not to love?

The Small Arms Building is a wonderful network of spaces in a gorgeous state of neglect, the perfect location to stage artworks (not just visual but also performance-based) that relate to this remarkable, untamed space.

As an artist working on projects in an imaginative-but-real world, I wear a number of hats. I put a couple on right away when first touring the space: the Practical Hat (the one that wants me to sleep 8 hours every night, not get up to my eyeballs in debt, see my friends and family more often and regularly, eat well and work out, you know the one) – it thinks about what work I already have that could work in this space; the Dreamer Hat looks at the vast potential of all the spaces in the building and imagines a fantastic array of mostly-impossible (for me in these circumstances at least) ways to transform them and create remarkable experiences.

I am grateful to both Hats: one for keeping me alive (more or less, depending!); the other for enticing me to stretch and attempt things that while less-than-sensible have been glorious to thinking about, to see realized, to watch people interact with and to talk with some of them about.

The photo above shows the space that will be all mine (insert evil laugh here). The room is 20ft by 50ft. A dance performance and its audience will need a pathway through it to the next room, but allowing for that I can do what I want!

At right (I hope it's that way for mobile users as well) is a shot showing a fraction of the drawers I have collected or had set aside for me so I can build my main new sculpture. I won't really know until they are in the space how many I will need, which is part of the fun (and also part of what tells me I have fully transitioned to being an artist now, as my designer self would have wanted to control every detail in advance!). 

In addition to drawers and boxes, I will be working with a lot of photo-digital image transfers, plexiglass and light. This work's roots are my 'Boxed In' figure drawings from 2010 and it will connect up to all of the 'Subject to Limitation' thematic work since.

I will be showing a few existing pieces, one reconfigured specifically for the space it will be in (not pictured here). One of the others has only been shown in BC back in 2012: "Turbulence" a 21ft long photo-digital mixed media piece comprised of six angled panels that will be hung high and look down on the people below. It should suit the main space very well!

So in answer to the question posed in the title of this post: both. I've had the idea for the drawers portion of the main sculpture piece for a few years now but other aspects of the installation that it will be part of were inspired by the context. Also the actual configuration and some of the details of the sculpture are responses to the space and particularities of the event.

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It was a busy and fun weekend in Port Credit (Mississauga) on June 18 and 19 at Art-Spread where I was one of over a dozen artists/artisans showing and demonstrating what I do. 

Lots of people I know came to visit (only one had ever seen the scrolls live before), and if you were one of them, thank you.

Above is a wonderful TED Talk on the power and importance of disruption in creative work, with some amazing and famous examples (i.e. the resulting work is famous, the fact that disruption made them possible isn't). This is in fact the source for my title “Play the Unplayable Piano”.

Watching the video will be 15 well-spent minutes of your life – how much of our life on the internet can we say that about? 

​It makes me wonder if I should show it at the beginning of all of my courses – might be a good way to warm up creative thinking and help prevent the instinctive resistance that can arise when I introduce something new. 

Disruptors are an important factor in how I work as an artist as well as how I teach although I've usually referred to the “randomizer” in my brain. A better name for it is “disruptor” since that expresses its effect as well as its role.

​How has it shown up in my studio? How do I even choose instances?

​There was the time I decided to take on my least-liked colour, so I kept working with pink until I stopped disliking it. Pink functioned as a disrupter in every painting I put it in, until it became just another colour in my palette.
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Or the time I decided to work with a brush that had hardened, caked-on paint, instead of throwing it out, then made the best paintings of my life to that point.

To be more creative, introduce something that disrupts your familiar.



​Disruption is uncomfortable,   even excruciating, at first, because the things that make us           comfortable are familiar.

Top: video of Tim Harford's TED Talk on How Frustration Can Make Us More Creative. Above left and right: Over and Over and Chair with Swatch #1; both examples of work that included disruption as part of their process.

Every residency or workshop I have taken has disrupted my normal practice, sometimes enormously, especially when being far from home was combined with a really powerful mentoring situation.

More often I am inclined to take on things I don't know how to do as aspects of a project where I do know how to do other parts. Like last summer's charcoal figure drawing mural at the Art Gallery of Mississauga; or the chairs I am working on now.

My first efforts to use fluorescent colour was a powerful disrupter, both challenging and fun. When I introduced it in a class I was teaching, I got the full range of responses: from those who giggled with amazement at being completely out of their comfort zones and delighted disbelief at what they were producing, to one who refused to try even a drop, and of course everyone in between.

​There are a couple of things about disrupters that we need to remember, whether they are an old friend or a scary stranger: they make us far more creative as we struggle to adapt to them, discover new things because of them, and they are uncomfortable! They may even feel excruciating at first, but that's natural, because the things that make us comfortable are familiar.

Recently, when my friend artist Patricia Singer generously suggested I teach a workshop at her studio, I didn't have to think about it for long. Looking at these photos I think you'll understand why I and this small group have been having a wonderful time working in her space and our great luck that the days – and our view of them – have been glorious!

We've been exploring contemporary mixed media, working with photos and other digitized imagery in a variety of ways and combined with all kinds of traditional media.

Collage, working into prints (by drawing, painting, cutting, sanding, peeling, piercing and even embroidering) and trying out numerous image transfer techniques has kept everyone very busy and the days seem to fly by! At the end of each day we take a look at what some other artists have been doing along the same lines to see what's possible and get fresh ideas.

Not everyone has a studio large enough for a group to work in, but if you do, it can be fun and convenient (you don't have to schlep all of your materials somewhere else!). Please get in touch if you'd like to discuss the possibility. Depending on the time of year, my availability can be quite limited.

Philip Guston was a Montréal-born painter (1913) who became a major artist in the US.

I admire him for his honesty, making radical changes to his work over the years, going from skillfully figurative to purely non-objective (i.e. abstract) and then back to figuration; changes that had to be made in order to be true to the changes in himself as an artist.

The apparently crude approach he finally adopted (he said he wanted to paint like someone who could not paint) centred on a very personal vocabulary of recurring imagery and symbols.

​This quote from Guston shows his intimacy with and insight into the painting process.