Happy Shopper

Dulcita

Dulcita

Paintings, (or whatever this is) come about in all kinds of ways. I brought some baggage with me from my Blackthorn Studio: table scraps; bits and pieces; thoughts; failed paintings, once full of promise; that old clementine box that has been kicking around for I don't know how long. I hadn't exactly considered what I was doing as starting a new work; I was just messing about, settling back into a habit of hanging around in my studio. Dulcita. Sweet clementines. The Sky Dragon, Dulcita.

New paintings

I'm about to start a new group of paintings in my secret lab studio hidden away in the bowels of Anchovy World Headquarters. There have been all kinds of good reasons for me to stall, but I've run out. Time to face the music. Starting new paintings and starting a new studio are both anxious events for me. That's why I like to have a group of paintings going at once, so if I complete one or two, I still have others going while I start new ones. New paintings in a new studio signal time to take stock, think back, look forward, chew on some new ideas, revisit abandoned ideas and so on.

The last time I started a new studio, in the converted shed behind the previous Anchovy World Headquarters, I had the most prolific period of painting ever (some of them were even pretty good paintings...har!). During the period I've been without a studio, while we were selling the old place, moving and setting up here in Longbranch, I've accumulated all kinds of thoughts, images, snipets, titles, approaches, strategies if you will. Somehow or another, those will manifest themselves. The nature of my work has long been improvisational, though, so I also know that whatever thoughts I come in with are just that, opening shots, jabs, and feints.

Messing with Evidence

New Banner

For my new banner, I've dug deep into the past and used a photo of a painting I did in the mid-1980s, called The Architect. This painting hung in an old friend's kitchen for a long time, but finally found it's way home.

The Purge

Many of you know that Tuffy P and I are painters. We've been at it for about 25 years now. You might say it's our vocation, or maybe our folly. The problem is that we have created a lot of painting over the years, way way more than we have found homes for. In fact, painting sales are rare enough I would call one an event. This adds up to a serious storage problem. We've had 250 square feet of storage space in two units, and we both have had about enough of paying for storage space.

Here at Anchovy World Headquarters, we are devoting a bedroom to painting storage plus a portion of Tuffy P's studio. We have to take into account the reality that our folly continues, so we need to save some of that space for new works (which we will might also end up storing for a few years).

We made the decision to kill quite a lot of paintings. Some of these are paintings which, in the fullness of time, we don't think really hold up. Some of these are very good paintings, if I can be immodest enough to say so myself. We spent most of yesterday loading two storage bins of paintings into a cube van (it took two trips), driving them to Anchovy World Headquarters, unloading, and deciding which we were going to keep. It was carnage as painting after painting was carried back to the killing fields in our backyard, where today, I will cut them up with a reciprocating saw, into smaller chunks of dead painting. Still we kept quite a lot of paintings.

It was a sad day in many ways as those paintings represent to us ideas we struggled with, hope that we might find an audience, and as well, they bring to mind the times in which we made them, where we were, what we were going through, exhibitions, friends and so on. I wish I could have found homes for many of these paintings, but I suppose it is my folly to be passionately interested in activities which do not exactly capture the popular imagination.

In fact, I know a number of people, outside of my friends in the art scene, who not only find painting uninteresting, honestly believe us artists are some kind of tricksters, trying to pull the wool over their eyes. Mister Anchovy, why don't you paint a nice pastoral cottage in a mountain landscape. Now that's painting. Get with the program, man. I'll bet if you ask the next 10 or 20 or 100 people you see how many of them aquired a painting by living artist in the last year, very few of them would say, yes of course I did...I'm committed to supporting cultural activities in my community. To put it in perspective, ask the same group if they own a tv set bigger than 40 inches, and compare the response.

Even the use of the word artist has changed in my time. Today the word has been successfully co-opted by the entertainment industry. If you don't believe me, turn on the television to one of those entertainment gossip shows, and you will find out that all the popular recording stars are artists, even those who don't write their music, or even choose their music, even those who depend of pitch correction software to stay in tune. When I realized this, I pretty much stopped using the "a" word, and when asked, I say, I'm a painter. "I didn't know you painted houses Mister Anchovy." "Not that kind of painter." "You mean you make paintings?" "fraid so." "I was thinking I'd like a nice beach scene down in the rec room...you know, behind the bar.""Not that kind of painter, either." "I may not know art, but I know what I like".


While yesterday was a sad day, at the same time, I feel freed from the tyranny of my past, freed from carrying the baggage of the past around with me. Curiously, I feel like getting right back to it. These next paintings, they're really going to be great.

Migration

This weekend I'm going to pack up my studio. This is going to be a challenge. When we "decluttered" Anchovy World Headquarters in preparation for selling it, we boxed a lot of stuff and loaded it into my studio. Tomorrow, I'll have to take all those boxes out in order to get at everything inside to pack up. My studio contains all kinds of art-making materials, finished paintings, unfinished paintings, scraps of ideas, junk, a little beer fridge (don't tell David Suzuki), tools, paper, panels, odd and ends, my banjo-dulcimer, books, shelving units, a bicycle, my tai chi swords, and who knows what else.

This all reminds me that if ever there was a time to get a spectacular deal on paintings, old and new, this is the time. If you're interested, let's talk. So you don't forget, order before midnight tomorrow. Operators on duty now. I'd love to find homes for a bunch of paintings!

a new small painting

I'm working on a group of small paintings and one good-sized work. The little paintings are informing the bigger one, and the bunch of them have been simmering away for some time. I've been avoiding them lately, but tonight I went in there, and there they were, with the same problems, as I left them, compelling me find a way through.

I admire painters who can conceive of their image, paint it up and be done with it. I'm not like that at all. My painting has always been a lot more anxious than that. I have to test and try and build up ideas and contradictions. From time to time I will look at some of my older paintings and wonder how it was I got there, settled there, as if they were painted by someone else, or perhaps by me in another time.


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I was thinking about the painter Frances Bacon today. Here are a few things he had to say about painting:
"You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint".
"Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later"
"I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance."
"When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting".
"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."

Blast from the past department

This was part of the first group of paintings in the studio (formerly known as the shed) now known as The Secret Lab. The painting is called St. Phillips and it was done during the 2001/2002 winter. The title refers to a little town in Newfoundland Tuffy P and I visited when were were out there for our honeymoon. There was a trail up along some cliffs, and a beautiful forest. We did some drawings in there. The painting wasn't based on the drawings, but was inspired by the place.

Adventures in the Secret Lab

I'm not finished with any of these yet. I'll beat them into submission yet.

Underground

I avoided the secret lab tonight. I thought, I should be in the studio tonight - then called a friend to try to set up a Go game instead. When that didn't pan out, I settled for an evening watching season one Prison Break episodes. None of this stopped me from thinking about my paintings, of course.

I went back and looked at some pictures of a series I did a few years ago called Underground. I did these on a weird-ass material known as aluminum foam. As it was described to me, the guys who were making it would melt aluminum, pump air through it, and add special sauce. The final product appears very foam-like, although it is clearly aluminum. I was given some samples by a friend of mine. I recall clearly the day I picked it up. It was a hot summer day and I left the stuff in the back of the station wagon I was driving at the time while I was at work. I learned then about a curious property the stuff had - it gathered and stored heat. When I left work, it was so hot, I couldn't lay my hand on it. I made 8 paintings on the samples I had, using oil paint, and all called Underground.

I'm not sure exactly why I went back for a look at these. Maybe they'll help guide me through these new ones. I don't know.

By the way, this oddball aluminum foam material was given to me by my friend Charlie, a fellow I haven't seen in some time. Hey Charlie, if you're out there somewhere, let's get together and catch up.

Dark and stormy night...in the secret lab

It's kind of misty and damp and cool and foggy out right now. I've been plugging away at the paintings in the secret lab. Like the weather, they are damp and misty and foggy. The colours are earthy, swampy colours and the forms are becoming decidedly awkward and mucked up. Not pretty, no, no, no. The big one is getting close, but there is a big problem in the bottom left. I messed with it some, but more drastic action is called for. Next time, I'll paint out the bottom left, rid myself of yesterday's bad idea, and start to build it up again.

One of the reasons they feel misty is that I've been using the spray bottle as a painting tool...brushing on paint, and spraying parts of it off, letting the forms drip over one another. One of the curious results of this strategy is surfaces that are matte - the water sucks the lustre right out of the paint. It gives the paintings a starkness, a nakedness that is a little surprising.

Getting down to business

Behind closed doors in the secret lab. What's that fishboy up to?

In the studio

I spent a few hours today working on a group of paintings out back in the shed/studio. I did a small group of small paintings in the spring, but through much of the summer and fall, I did my best to avoid my paintings. Now I've decided to try to complete a new set of works before we have to pack up the house for the crazy spring renovation we're planning.

After over 20 years of painting seriously, creating a painting remains a mysterious and somewhat anxious process for me. I look at my work and think, how the hell did I make these things? Outside of a small circle of friends, I don't even have a lot to say about them. Funny, huh?

The last time I showed was in Halifax at NSCAD, and I haven't even thought about exhibiting in Toronto again. Yet, I'm beginning to visualize a modest solo exhibition, but where, I don't know. First, let's get on with these paintings.

gesso disaster

These days I paint in a very small studio. Actually, it is a converted 12X12' shed. I've insulated it and put in a window and ran power out to it for an electric heater for winter, and lights and whatever tools I might want to use. Once I put a work table and some shelves and a bunch of paintings and assorted other stuff (like my bicycle) in there, it became a fairly tight but workable space to work in. I recently finished a diptych I painted for a friend of mine, and this afternoon, I planned to prep for a new group of small paintings. A while back I bought a gallon tub of acrylic gesso. This is basically acrylic polymer emulsion, a little white pigment, and some kind of chalky filler stuff they use to give it the right kind of body. I use this to prep surfaces for painting. This particular gesso came in a tub with a lid that required me to snap off a chunk of plastic to open it up. I did this and started to pull the lid open. As I did this, the lid suddenly pulled off faster than it should and I lost my grip on the jug, knocking it to the floor of the studio. Now depending on the maker and I think the age of the gesso, it can have a variety of textures. I've had some that was very thick, and some that was sort of jelly-like - gesso that you could turn upside down, take your time about picking up, and still not have a mess. This gesso was different. It was more liquid than usual, smooth and flowing. About 3/4 of a gallon of the stuff was on the floor of the studio before I could right the tub, spreading across my work area. I scrambled to move away stuff that would be wrecked by the gesso, then grabbed some new canvases and started to prep them from the pool on the floor. I primed every new canvas I had ready to go, and still had a big pool of gesso on the floor. The good news is that the floor is just rough spruce plywood and I don't care about the paint on the floor. I figured the best way to clean up the mess was to spread it on as much floor as I could and let it dry. It's drying now.

I won't go in there for a few days.

Postcard, Forest of No Return

Here's a different sort of postcard. This is a new painting called Postcard, Forest of No Return that I made for my friend C. To give you an idea of scale, the whole painting is around 30 inches wide. It is made up of two panels that hang butted together. This painting is oil and alkyd enamel on canvas.

I've made several other paintings in the past year or so also bearing the title Forest of No Return. Those paintings are all the same size and all quite small. The title was borrowed from the title of a song. I first heard the song on a CD called Second Star to the Right by Sun Ra and his Arkestra - a CD that is a tribute to Walt Disney. I understand that the song comes from the 1961 Disney flick, Babes in Toyland. There is also a 1934 Laurel and Hardy Babes in Toyland, but I don't know if Forest of no Return is on that film or not. Maybe the movie freaks in the crowd can help me out on this.

A sneak peak into the secret lab

Here are a couple small pictures made with acrylic paint and cardboard boxes.

Some people have all the luck

$66M worth of Picasso's stolen.

Some madcap or group of madcaps have gone and stolen a couple Picassos. How silly is that? It's not like you can go unload them with the local fence or anything. I mean, that old fart Pic only made the most recognizable work you can imagine. Who is going to buy these paintings? The entire known universe knows they are stolen.

On the other hand, I'd like to suggest that my own paintings are available to steal. Please bring a 5 ton truck, I have plenty of works. If they were all stolen, I could stop paying for storage, and could spend that savings on a new button accordion or perhaps a new handmade split bamboo fly rod...or maybe even pay off the car. I understand if you don't want to steal them all. Bring a friend, and divide them up. And, as a bonus, if you steal them all, and find you can't unload them - no problem - for a modest fee of only a few thousand canadianos, I'll let you return them - no questions asked.

Forget Picasso. Steal my art. You can see a selection on the sidebar.

A few years ago, Tuffy P's storage unit was broken into - twice! Each time, nothing was stolen. What is this, is everyone a critic? The lady from the storage company, upon hearing that nothing was stolen, offered her condolances. "I'm so sorry", she said.

...so, what do you write about?

Today I asked S if he read blogs, and then spilled the beans and mentioned this place. I don't usually talk about mister anchovy much. I like the fact that my readership, such as it is, has developed more or less organically. A bunch of people know that mister anchovy perhaps isn't my given name (har, they think they know the real me), and I do nothing to prevent people from figuring that business out if they think that is a good use of their time.

S asked a couple perfectly reasonable questions. The first was, what do you write about? Good question. I mumbled something about accordions and painting, while thinking, my god, I don't have a business plan. There are no rules. I can post anything I want. What good is a blog like that? You know, model-train-heads can go to model train blogs and knit-heads can go to knitting blogs, and foodies can go to food blogs... I never fill out the section on my template where you are supposed to describe your blog, because, well, I'm simply not sure just what the thing is all about. Now, if you asked about my other blog, The Southern Ontario Fly Fisher, the answer is easy...it's about fly fishing, silly.

About mister anchovy, maybe I should just say, it's about anchovies, silly?

The second question S asked me was if I had ads, yet. Well, as you all know, I don't have ads, and let me say now that as soon as I get the idea in my brain that this is a money-making venture, please feel free to whack me upside the head and say, it's all over now, baby-blue...shut her down. Not that I have anything against ads on blogs or bloggers who choose to have ads on blogs. Not at all. (I don't read the ads...quick poll...have any of you actually clicked on an ad on a blog on purpose, even once?). I simply like the fact that mister anchovy is pure, well pure something-or-other-whatever-this-is. Pure folly.

I often think of painting as my folly. I make paintings in spite of the fact that few people want to look at them, and fewer people still want to buy them. Occasionally, somebody will ask me if a show I exhibited in was successful, and I never know what to say. I want to say, oh yeah, some peculiar fellow wandered in a week or so ago and really dug the paintings.... but I know the answer is supposed to be in financial terms, like, oh yes the collectors were lined up, and as usual, all the paintings sold before the opening. I remember a show I had at Loop Gallery a few years ago (it may have been the show with Scott Childs called Two Miserable Bastards). A guy came in and went into the back gallery where I had a bunch of small paintings. He was in there for the longest time. On his way out, he went over to the comment book and wrote about one of the paintings, called Superior: this is one of the best paintings I've seen in years. Too bad I don't have the money to buy it. I wish he had said something...the painting would likely be on semi-permanent-hardly retrievable loan right now (if you're out there and you remember the painting, contact me).