An Artist Muses

Let it never be said that I was much of a car guy.  I'm not that dude that would spend his weekends lying in the driveway working on my car's undercarriage or lovingly buffing Turtle Wax into the hood.  I know how to check the oil, replace wiper blades, and change a tire.  That is the pathetic extent of my knowledge of the functional parts of an automobile.  Cars simply haven't caught my attention beyond their basic ability to provide transport from A to B. And yet...the more I paint them...the more and more I'm struck by their ample aesthetic appeal. If you are a lover of history, and want to paint historical paintings, you end up depicting things that you would never bother painting in a million years on their own.  Telegraph wires.  Ads on buildings.  Streetcar lines.  Spokes on wheels.  Horses.  And of course, cars. Far from being a burdensome task, rendering cars has become one of my more pleasurable ones.  I love the s...

I remember well my last day as a competitive football player.  I was trying out as an offensive lineman at the Ottawa Sooners rookie camp, and even though I had passed the first round of cuts, I had decided the time had come to hang up the gear. Being honest with myself, I had no future in the sport.  And I now no longer found joy (if ever I did at all) in battling 260 lb. men over a scrap of muddy ground...especially since I had other, less hazardous interests like the arts to pursue.  And yet, 31 years later, those two disparate activities would reunite in a most pleasant and rewarding way. It was at the 2013 Ottawa Art Expo, when I was visited at my booth by Paul and Darlene Stewart.  Paul and I had been teammates in high school on the SRB Bengals, a team that in our junior year won the city championship.  We hadn't seen a lot of each other in the intervening years, but it immediately was like old times.  Best of all was Darlene's 50th birthday prese...

It was exactly 100 years ago today that the guns fell silent (for a time) in Europe, ending what had been to that point the bloodiest conflict in the history of humanity.  The death toll from the 'War to End All Wars" would shortly be topped by the next more massive and widespread conflagration.  But World War One still stands alone in testament to the futility and horror of a world devolved by modern conflict. Which brings us to the subject of this painting, Hell's Quagmire, which I painted for the 1917 - Canada Comes of Age exhibition. The most astonishing thing about this painting is that it is based on an actual photograph.  I'll never forget the first time I laid eyes on it.  It showed a solitary soldier slogging through an endless moonscape of shell holes and mud.  The ground had arrived at this point because ceaseless shelling had destroyed the ravines and gulleys and other features of the natural landscape that normally channel rain water away....

In June of 2018 I got to Ireland for the first time in my life.  I was travelling with my wife Siobhan and her aunt and uncle, Breda and Colin.  We stayed three nights in Dublin and then headed west to Galway for another three nights.  From there, we struck out on day trips to explore west Ireland.  And on one misty, drizzly day we drove a circuit through Connemara National Park.  I had been to the Lake District in England previously, and also to Scotland all the way up to Inverness...but none of that prepared me for the haunting beauty that was Connemara.  It seemed each bend in the road revealed fresh wonders: white-washed cottages, centuries-old churches and graveyards, countless inlets and bays, and all of it presided over by those rugged green hills whose tops at times disappeared into the fog.  I opined to Siobhan that I thought it was a 'terrible beauty', because for all the green and the sparkling waters it was a very remote and lonely p...

There isn't a more appropriate day than this one, November 1st, to write this blog post...for it was exactly five years ago on this day that my dad died. It simply wouldn't be possible in the span of a few paragraphs to do justice to the character that my father was.  Member of parliament, native rights advocate, Ontario human rights commissioner.  On a first name basis with all of the political powers of the day: Trudeau, Stanfield, Chretien, Turner, Clark.  Dad was an intellectual, rascal, drinker, dreamer, womanizer.  Reckless, irresponsible and funny. Never dull.  He died on All Saint's Day, and the irony of THAT would not have been lost on him.  My Facebook post on that day featured the one and only painting I had ever done of him, and perhaps for that reason it's become the defining image for me of his passing.   The painting was commissioned by my brother Gene in the spring of 2013 while our dad was still alive.  It's based on a ...