The Rural Disasters began after a chance encounter with an online photograph of a car accident. Finding it overwhelmingly beautiful, I fell into an artistic practice in which the starting point and justification for my work is not ideas, but visual exhilaration (n. a feeling of happiness and excitement combined with a heightened sense of being alive.)
An indispensable component of my method, and indeed the genesis of the entire undertaking, is surprise, randomness and accident. For the first time in history, due to the combination of digital photography and the Internet, there is access to millions of unpublished, unedited, high-resolution photographs, allowing me to hunt images like a sculptor scavenging found objects. I search the archives of emergency response websites, and choose images based on a gut feeling, combined with what I call their ”paint-ability” or their potential to be translated into paint. In transforming the found images, I hope to preserve some of the vivid real-ness that photography provides while simultaneously reincarnating them as paintings. Thus certain areas of the paintings meticulously and faithfully respond to the original, complete with signs of how the intrusion of a camera distorts, visually enhances, and becomes part of the incident depicted, while other areas emphasize the visceral materiality of paint itself and bear witness to a freer, accident-prone, painterly approach.
My fascination with rural nighttime structure fires and car accidents undoubtedly derives in part from my experiences of childhood stargazing, small-town adolescent nightlife, and personal tragedy growing up in rural Vancouver Island. Yet my immediate attraction to an image is a wholeheartedly aesthetic one; I’m drawn to the glow of flames on pickup trucks, the organic muteness of nocturnal evergreens, and the glare of the camera’s flash on wet grass, crumpled metal, and disturbed gravel. I tend to experience the photographs first as beautiful landscapes, then look for that which I love to paint—the dark, the shiny, the luscious, the dazzling.
It is only after a friend’s probing questions did impressions of my rural childhood and memories of tragedies witnessed and experienced rise to the surface, instigating a self-examination that continues with every new found image. Why do I find this one so beautiful, and not those ones? What do we mean when we say something is beautiful? Who am I? My place for exploring these questions is the painted surface itself and the tactile joy of applying paint: fleshy swirls of impasto, scumbles of dry brush and drippy transparent layers of oil, all undeniably influenced by formative years spent navigating mossy forests, shallow creeks, muddy paths, and the wet, shiny Old Island Highway.
The paintings have elicited many interpretations: contemporary memento mori, allegories of the artistic process itself (a series of accidents leading to beauty), apocalyptic vision, self-portraiture, a new Regionalism, and even as moments of ecstatic awareness. Some find ironic humour, others dismay. New interpretations lead to new approaches on my part, which in turn reveal yet more possible readings. It is my goal to continue seeking the intuitive, mysterious starting point to each painting, allowing the work to evolve over time as I do, and to keep exploring my chosen medium. My hope is that this will continue to lead to viewer fascination, endless interpretive angles, a deeper self-knowledge and an increasingly universal overall statement.
