An Artist Muses

The famous but oft-misquoted line from Casablanca, "Play it again, Sam", in fact goes like this: "You played it for her, you can play it for me.  Play it."  I bring this up simply because if you substitute "paint it" for "play it", you arrive at a scenario I've found myself in a couple of times. Twice now I've had instances where somebody has seen a previous sold painting of mine and asked me if I'd consider painting it again.  In both cases my reaction has been "Sure, why not?" (not to be crass, but financial incentives routinely trump artistic interests).  Besides, it seems like a straightforward enough task...I mean, I've already been through the exercise once.  No fuss or thought required to walk that blazed path again, right? Except it's not that easy, funnily enough. In the case of the first piece, it was recreating a work that was fairly old and from a more experimental phase of my career.  Here's th

  A lot of my work over the years has involved painting scenes based on archival pictures.  As I comb through archives, I have a tendency to land on pictures that involve a person or persons going about their daily business.  I find photos like this fascinating. They give me a glimpse of a moment that I can only speculate on, in a life I know nothing about nor ever will. But in the case of this piece "Neville Park Loop" I know not only the story behind it, but also the two young girls pictured.  That's because it was commissioned by my sister-in-law (Kelly) for her mom (Suzanne) on the event of her 75th birthday.  The painting would include Suzanne, her sister Joanne, and their parents, Ann and Charles (Charlie) Matthews...taking part in a daily ritual that was an important part of Suzanne's childhood. In the late 1940's, the Matthews family lived on Neville Park Boulevard in the east end of Toronto.  Neville park is well known for a couple of reasons.  It

Decisions, decisions.  There are a myriad of them when creating a painting, usually of the relatively inconsequential variety.  "What size brush should I use now?"  "Should I tone down that red?" These decisions each on their own are but one piece of the puzzle.  Rarely are they a stark either/or.  But in the case of this piece, "Love on the Gapstow" I faced just such a decision in the initial planning stages. All along I had intended to paint a scene of the iconic Gapstow Bridge in New York's Central Park.  That there would be humans in the piece was a given (story is always foremost in my mind), and so the couple on the bridge was an obvious early element. But then I decided the picture needed more.  It seemed just a bit too trite to only have a couple on the bridge.  And thus I entered into a conundrum of my own making.   I often include a person in the foreground of my pictures.  To me it helps lead the viewer in and adds a