Acrylic, ink, pastel on canvas (2024)
Size: w 20″ x h 40″ x d 1.5″
After having posted several “in progress”‘ images of this painting, I announced with great fanfare back in May that it was finally finished. It was not.
Fire Escape
Author Archives: npaul
Air Strike
Acrylic, graphite, washi on cradled birch panel (2024)
Size: w 24″ x h 20″ x d 1.5″
This piece is being exhibited this month at the OKWA (Organization of Kingston Women Artists) annual show at the Window Gallery in Kingston, through to the end of November. The theme of the show is Change. My statement is as follows: “Air strikes by drones are a change from past warfare. Otherwise, no change. No peace.”
Ollie in Gaza
Acrylic, ink, re-harvested PETE plastic on linen (2024)
This piece is now finished. It will be exhibited in Kingston for the month of November (Window Gallery) as part of the OKWA (Organization of Kingston Women Artists) annual show. Here is the statement I wrote in response to the show’s theme, Change:
“Ollie the orangutan was photographed in 1988 for a book about endangered species. In my painting he is bewildered, palms up in despair, bearing witness to the death and destruction in Gaza over the past year. This artwork itself has seen much change, originally a dense network of red dots but layer by layer overlaid with paint and buried in plastic rubble, symbolizing the tens of thousands of individual lives lost. If he is still alive, Ollie is 42 years old. I show him fading from our view just as these magnificent creatures are vanishing from the world, approaching extinction.”
Ollie in Gaza (Work in Progress)
Acrylic and ink on canvas (2024)
Size: w 16 ” x h 20″ x d 1″
Ollie the orangutan was photographed by James Balog at Marine World Africa in California in 1988. In captivity, an orangutan can sometimes live into their late 50s. If he is still alive, Ollie is 42 years old.
Heart and Science
Acrylic on paper (2004)
Size: w 12″ x h 19″
“Between 2700 and 2400 B.C., roughly contemporaneously with Old Kingdom Egypt, craftsmen in the Cycladic Islands of Greece sculpted female nudes in marble whose elegance and simplicity was not to be seen again in art until the work of Brancusi and Modigliani.” (From The Cycladic Spirit, Masterpieces from the Nicholas P. Goulandris Collection, by Colin Renfrew with Introduction by Christos Doumas, 1991). Hard to argue with that statement. The folded-arm figures in this magnificent book were photographed by John Bigelow Taylor. For this painting I chose to work from one of Taylor’s photographs of the Chalandriani variety, a figure with squared off shoulders and a long cylindrical neck. The black box inserted into the figure’s chest is my addition of course, a CT scan image of the heart.
Holding My Broken Heart Aloft
Water soluble crayon/pencil and graphite on paper (1990)
Size: w 13″ x h 25″
This is what I wrote in 1990 about this piece:
Like the photographer James Balog who photographed the 15-month-old Atlantic green turtle on its back, I too am “continually mesmerized by this image of delicate sensibility.” Balog tells us in his new book, Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife, that the species is on the verge of extinction following systematic exploitation for meat, eggs, and oil. This picture is about vulnerability, and also about the awareness of incalculable suffering which surrounds and drowns each of us like a heavy sea. The turtle yearns to extend herself, to reach beyond her own separateness. The Scythian mirror, a relic from the sixth century BC, is symbolic of her vain, broken effort.
Dragon in the House
Acrylic and graphite on paper, mounted on canvas (est late 1990s)
Size: w 16″ x h 10″ x d 1.75″
Many years ago, years before she died in 2007, my mother asked me to illustrate her poem for children about a dragon coming to visit (actually to stay indefinitely) uninvited. The dragon represented to her the crippling, painful illness which had changed her life dramatically; she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 59.
My mother herself created lively pen and ink drawings for the poem and in the end my detailed, somewhat fastidious, paintings were not what she had envisioned. The project eventually stuttered but in the meantime I put together a sequence of images to go with the several verses. I have decided now to “publish” them on this blog (a new page yet to be set up) alongside the text of my mother’s poem.
The painting featured here is the first in the sequence. The first verse of “A Dragon Has Come To My House” by Pauline Johnson goes as follows:
A dragon has come to our house
He’s come to stay
He’s found that creepy corner,
In the basement, eh!
The corner where the sump pump
Sits in a pail of goo
And he says he isn’t leaving
Whatever shall I do?
Passing: Fire Escape
Acrylic, ink, pastel on canvas (2024)
Size: w 20″ x h 40″ x d 1.5″
Now finished — Ta-da!
Three of my paintings (Nereids in the Garden of Hippocampus, Leaving Eden, and Dragonfly Dance) are on exhibit at the Etobicoke Civic Centre this month through to June 6 as part of The Art of Regret, a group show of work by the Organization of Kingston Women Artists. Here is the link to the Civic Centre (scroll to click on Gallery Exhibitions and the image shown is of my piece, Leaving Eden).
Passing: Fire Escape (Detail of Work in Progress)
Yet another detail (see last two posts), showing a bit more this time. Not finished yet.
This painting began with the idea of red flames, figures descending stairwells and climbing escape ladders while the earth’s treasure, all we cherish in this world, is vanishing, gone forever out the window. It is not so red anymore, but the fire and fear of red reach back to a painting I originally posted in February last year, Nereids Enter the Burning Forest.
Here is the statement I wrote recently for that painting:
This painting is about bravery in the face of insurmountable odds. The two figures run into a burning forest carrying balls of water, balloons. They do this rather than step back, look away, leave the job to others. With their action they counter the hopelessness we on the sidelines feel in these times of crisis. As I write this, the world mourns in anger the seemingly targeted deaths of seven humanitarian aid workers in Gaza.
RED
Red for me means love and joy
But that is not the subject here.
Fire and Fear
This red is a line and a light:
Don’t cross, it taunts;
Don’t move, it mocks.
This red threatens and cons.
Courage, it cries!
Promising passion,
It pleads sacrifice.
This red is infernal
Gathering heat as it roils and rolls,
It bleeds its case.
It wants your life.
Fire Escape (Detail of Work in Progress)
Acrylic, ink, pastel on canvas (2024)
Size: w 20″ x h 40″ x d 1.5″
Almost there.
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