Category: Distracts

Painting to Capture the rapture in the everyday

10/16/2015

Gotta love Salvation Army and the staff's peculiar display choices. Every other store would break up all the retail items so each one looks unique, but at my local Salarmy they sort by colour, making finding your size sort of a crapshoot. But oh, that visual field! Those collections make my eyes feel like they're turning into those cartoon black-and-white hypnotizing wheel things.

Same thing at the MAC counter or the Shoppers Drug Mart cosmetics aisle. I don't have much use for all the lipsticks and nail polishes but I will go out of my way to pass those vibrating, too-exciting colour grids of reds, oranges, pinks, purples, golds. Rosy rows that that set the soul a-glow!

I am inspired. I take photos, I go to the studio. I try to find that colour-field rapture.

Distracts: Big Red, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 72" X 36"

It's all too exciting, too exhilarating and just the thing for stopping my useless 'what if' and 'if only' thinking — or the screen-peering and pecking.

This latest painting might be better titled, Stop Sign, a visually loud/silent call to "Don't just say something, stand there."

But I will stick to Big Red, part of my ongoing Distracts series. Part meditation, part endurance test, part quilting, part painting, as fractured and distracting as our accelerated world.

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Words are not enough to capture the seduction of distraction

6/6/2014

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Distracts #1, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

To me, the easiest part about carving out a place in the visual arts world is writing something about it. Yet most of my artist colleagues don't know how I make myself do it on a weekly basis. Easy. It only took 20 years of deadline writing for newspapers.

'Easiest' isn't quite the right word; it's more like 'reliable.' I can rely on the fact that if I sit down at a blank screen, soon words will link into sentences, inspired and connected by images. It's really just a habit at this point. If I don't get the chance to try to make literal sense of the past week, things start to swirl up into a ball of confusion. But once it's out there, it's done and I can move on.

Distracts #2, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

If only my days at my shared studio were as reliable. I wish I could start the morning with the same confidence as I stare at the freshly gesso'd blank canvas, and have the same conversation I get from writing a column (okay, blog). The two sides of my brain do not dance together at the studio. I do not enjoy the small eureka moments of understanding, or any great leaps forward in concept. And unlike weekly writing, I can't see that I'm creating any history of my process/progress.

Distracts #3, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

Some days I feel like I'm just painting myself into corners, or cycling back to where I started months ago. I often need to call in the reinforcements — artist friends — for a studio visit, when I ask, "Am I flat-lining here?" or "Am I a one-trick pony?"

But words work for me. Letters soon coalesce into strands of ideas and at the moment of this writing I see one taking shape as I type, and drop in these images of my latest paintings.

Distracts #4, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

This much I know is true: This is the most distractive time in human history and I live in a neighbourhood that is arguably the nation's capital of everything yoga. As I ride to the studio, I'm generally pre-occupied with this idea of the swelling dedication to personal, meditative practice juxtaposed with the seduction of our screens and the growing realization that our personal identities can be stolen in a click of a button.

Distracts #5, 2014, acrylic on panel, 14"W x 16"H.

I think about how we crave peace of mind and heart but are captivated by the fantastic and unfathomable, packaged in high-def or in 3-D, with same-day shipping, something to Like, Share, Tweet, and post to Instagram/Tumblr/Pinterest.

Some days at the studio I just need to retreat, retrace past meditative practices, like lace-making. Other days I need to represent the fracturing of that focus.

If painting really is a conversation the painter has with the materials, surface, technique and image, I'm seeing that this is talking about mapping out an understanding of the here and now, where words fail.

Distracts #6, 2014, acrylic on panel, 16"W x 20"H.

It's somewhere in the uneasy spaces between the digital and the handmade, the personal craft expression and the art and decor industry.

Put into words, it's a little terrifying to be in unexplored territory with no obvious path ahead.

I'm just bush-wacking, looking for a clearing.

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inspiration found at accountant's office

4/25/2014

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With the same anticipation as a root canal I plopped down in a chair at the accountant's office. Then gasped and pointed, then tried not to point at the adjacent bookcase stuffed with client files.
The accountant flipped through my own paperwork. I flipped out my phone and hit the camera app while nodding vaguely.

Carlyn Yandle photo

You can have your heli-skiing, your chemically-enhanced club nights, your YouTubed jack-assery; my exhilaration comes from being confronted by these breathtaking visual moments. The effect is enhanced by the purity of the completely uncontrived art object or visual field in its incongruous environment.

Never mind this delicious chrome-y palette that is simply a coded filing system; the whole filing...uh, object radiates with the yearly summations of individuals' spending and earnings, losses and gains that mean everything and nothing. Each colour-bound bundle evokes the stress of tax filing, of legitimizing one's existence, of facing up to the obligation of submitting and committing and remitting, of coming clean or engaging in some white-collar-cheating — or of the quiet shame in not managing to do this whole filing thing on one's own. (That can't just be me.)

All that emotional intensity bundled and stacked and gridded is powerful stuff, but it also feels old timey, almost nostalgic now that we are squinting at the brightly-coded visual depictions in the dawn of big data. The non-object colour fields of information are persuasive and invasive, even in my own studio work. (Below: two paintings in the developing Fabrications series of acrylic on canvas.)

Digital imagery may boast sophisticated information (and limitless space) but the overstuffed file-pile at the accountant's resonates with heft, weight and compression. It's also heavy with 'the hand': the human activity of handling files, cases, persons.

Everything is awesome, as the kids insist on singing post-Lego Movie. But the relentless data-scene enhances other accidental art objects that are in opposition to lurid digital fields. I get the same visual slam when I see it in the concrete cracks between the glass condo towers, or, below, somehow blooming where they are not planted under an off-ramp and against a sub-station wall.

Carlyn Yandle photo

These filigree moments of respite also manage to infuse their way into my own work, quite unconsciously. It is only in hindsight that I see the impact of these accidental artworks. (See Grey Lace, below and a video documenting the making of this painting.)

Another lesson in the notion that art makes the artist.

Grey Lace, 2014, Carlyn Yandle, acrylic on canvas, 50" x 40"

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Innovation can be a risky business

1/16/2014

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Coming up with new ideas is not without its hazards. The world-renowned Noma restaurant is a case in point. Chef-patron Rene Redzepi uses what grows in the area, innovating astounding food creations famously foraged from the local land and sea. Sometimes the magic works; sometimes it doesn't. He's even admitted to his own spontaneous bowel reactions to his experiments.

Mountains of Christmas lights headed for the grinder in Shijiao, China (Atlantic Magazine)

One outfit in the southern Chinese town of Shijiao has innovated a low-tech method for squeezing a livelihood out of the great bulk of broken Christmas lights. Making use of the empty shipping containers returning to the global export hub and North Americans' addiction to buying cheap throwaways, the strings are thrown into a grinder, then shovelled into a water bath that separates the heavier metal wire fragments from the plastic insulator bits. The metals are eventually separated into reusable copper and other metals, and the plastic is used in slipper soles. (Check out the fascinating video.)

Granted, there are problems, like the possibility of lead in the plastic that ends up cozying up to the soles of feet and the spewing pollution from copper processing.

That necessity to make a living is one mother of invention, a prime example of the hard birth of a global leader in innovation.

Baled copper. Carlyn Yandle photo

Considering the glut of stuff and our continued rampant consumerism, it's becoming unconscionable to me to use materials that are not either post-market or readily re-usable. That's easy to face down in the making of sculptural objects. I find inspiration through foraging in my own environment, where culturally-weighty artifacts from spider-webby doilies to crushed copper play with concept.

But I'm stymied when it comes to painting. I love the exploration but can't stand the materials. I rely on petroleum-based paints and resins, first-use softwood stretchers, brushes and canvasses. Acrylic paints allow me to do the layering I can't achieve in oils, creating that fine line between the handmade and digital.

Untitled, 2013, Distract series, acrylic on canvas, 24" x 30" on panel.

I feel it all coming to a head: Am I willing to lay down the paintbrush to reduce my own carbon footprint? Not quite.

But I am taking a few baby steps. I've been experimenting with composing larger paintings out of my painting studies, to incorporate the patterns of both the painted surface and the piecing, not unlike a quilt made up of well-chosen materials that have outlived their original purpose.

It may just be that necessity to reduce my consumption that pushes me into innovating in painting. Like other innovations, there will be failures and disasters. Somewhere in there is a new way to approach painting.

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Painting to Capture the rapture in the everyday

Words are not enough to capture the seduction of distraction

inspiration found at accountant's office

Innovation can be a risky business

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