Tunnel Vision

I've been working on a diptych (i before y I have to remind myself) but had decided before I started to get one close to completion before beginning number 2. This may have been a mistake.

The photo source shows one Afghan soldier, clean cut and with a small smile, while the second soldier has a beard and a sheepish expression. I knew that the clean cut guy was going to be less interesting, but that was fine because the project is partially about boredom. The trick is to make an image whose subject is boring but whose painted content has some sort of passive dynamic.

Close to completion, I moved onto number 2, but a funny thing happened. After 2 sessions and still far from completion, I realized it was almost done. There's nothing really earth-shattering there as paintings reveal themselves as much as they are constructed. Having tunnel vision for some dangerous belief in how you're gonna conclude a painting is always a bad strategy.

There's a part of me that just wants to toss out the almost finished but boring painting and keep only the unexpected and arresting image. If I was just painting for painting's sake: Doing portraits and figures within the broad scope of depicting the human form or even the narrower scope of depicting The Canadian Contribution to the ISAF mission, that'd be fine. However, I have a structured project that requires me to work with "Twins" and so I need both guys, side by side.

No decision has been made yet, but the thing I really wanted to say is it's great to have these unexpected moments that require me to make decisions, play with the tension between the project and the painting and think about how much I'm willing to let the paintings reveal themselves versus how much I want to dictate to them.

In a couple of sentences I'll insert the images but feel compelled to clarify that I'm somewhat embarrassed by the journeyman quality of the "finished" piece. That's balanced out by the awesomeness of the unexpected "Portrait of Satan"*. Maybe I'll start over... maybe in the end I'll have to, but maybe I can come to a place where I balance the currently unresolved tension between these twins. Maybe they both need to be weird in their own ways and when in doubt I'll usually go weird. What the ways will be is the sort of mystery that keeps me slogging away as a painter.

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*That title is purely off-hand and is no way meant to imply anything about Afghans or Afghan soldiers.

Letting you in, but not really

Yesterday, painter Keita Morimoto tweeted the following,

""You need to embrace the artifice. Construct everything exactly the way you want it to appear and then hide your tricks."

To which I replied,

"Showing some of your tricks to the viewer lets them feel like they're part of the game, even though they're not."

Keita (besides being one of my favourite local figurative painters) is right, it is all about illusion, but I'm a fan of letting it slip, of that moment when we see behind the curtain – of The Great and Powerful Oz as a charmingly avuncular, but relatively powerless guy. 

As Dave Hickey wrote, (and here I paraphrase) we all know that a painting is an illusion but want to believe in it, we want to believe in illusion because it allows us to believe that the world is not what it actually is.

But as I was educated in the world of Western academically oriented art, the honesty of the process was successfully infused/brainwashed into my psyche. Lord knows I won't be shifting to abstraction any time soon, but (for good or bad) I feel drawn to the importance of "truth in advertising ", of showing the limits of my ability, because if truth be told and humility be tucked away for a moment, my ability is pretty high.

With all of the above in mind, and with thanks to Keita for getting me thinking, here's the preliminary gridding step for my small portrait of CSM Rich Davey – one of my favourite soldiers.

The Bulgarians

The first of the major paintings: Complete.
With the large paintings, the driving visual cues will start from repetition. As I look at this painting online, for the first time I realize that all these stripes make it look a bit like a golf shirt. Or, let's say Rugby shirt... that's easier to live with.

Next up: Afghans in matching tracks tops.

Also, last week (during one of our few wintery days) I gave a talk at The Toronto to School of Art.Thanks to Peter Kingstone for inviting me to talk to his class.

It was my first chance to talk about the project to an audience so while it was fun to discuss my earlier work and how it segues into this project, it was more personally relevant as the act of talking helped me clarify some things.

Specifically, (and though this should be totally obvious to me) only during the talk did I realize that while my earliest military/fraternity paintings were about the contemplative possibilities of violence, this project engages the contemplative possibilities of the boredom that stems from the-lack-of-violence. Well, I knew that, but like so much of my practice, themes and thoughts are often latent and only announce themselves after some gestation time.

Yep, it's all about contemplation. Probably, I think too much but have a crappy short-term memory.

Back to it

Here's a short post with a few quick shots of some of the post-Kabul painting.

I'm pretty stoked to return to figuration and while I should probably wait until the project is further along, here is a little peek.

The top image, The Bulgarians, is still a way off completion (and this is a cropped version) but not as far from completion as one might  surmise.

The 2 portraits are complete. They are the first of a dozen small portraits.

 The Bulgarians

 Capt. Foley

Capt. Peabody

The Yonge/University line vs. Jalalabad Rd.

Thankfully I seldom take the TTC, but on the day I got back I had to hump my 3 backpacks (well, 1 rucksack and 2 backpacks) up to York U to teach a class. Not really enough time to go home, so after having a great breakfast at Aunties and Uncles I took the Streetcar, then the subway, then the bus to York.

Of my time in Kabul, the most potentially exciting events were the roadmoves. Small packets of armoured SUVs darting their way from one camp to another. Each roadmove began with a FragO (fragmentary Order) which would include threat assessments and actions to be taken if we came under fire. The most important thing to do was keep your eyes open. "look out, not in". This is an obvious way to help keep each other alive – by being aware of what is going on around you.

As we drove along, scanning the outside world for one Toyota Corolla that might be acting differently than all the other Corollas we'd also engage in small talk (or sometimes sit in silence), but it always felt like a collective endeavour.

On the TTC however, people look in while concurrently looking nowhere. During rush hour, it's headphones, daily newspapers, blank stares and napping. Essentially, riding Toronto Transit was the direct opposite of navigating Kabul. On a subway car full of people you might as well be alone. In an armoured SUV driving through downtown Afghanistan, the three people around you become, temporarily, your world and your lifeline.

* * *

I've noticed that when people ask me how the trip was, I am reluctant to talk about it. Maybe I'm just being greedy, wanting the experience for myself, at least until I get to produce a body of artwork from it. This reluctance is something that puzzles me and I'm trying to figure out.

Home (or what passes for it)

Outbound legs on the C17: 

7+5+4=16hrs flying time

Inbound legs on the C17: 4+5+3+2+8=22hrs flying time

38hrs flying time total!

It was a haul to get home, that's for sure, but it was a pretty excellent trip back none the less. Highlights include a day in the southwestern Germany town of Trier. Trier with its Roman ruins, bible writing robot, German beer and Struedel; The Kuwaiti desert was sand-blown and overcast but I always enjoy a good, bleak vista; The aircrew were really great as well, letting me sit in the cockpit for one of the legs and chatting about one of mine and the captain's favourite books, "Wind, Sand and Stars."

More importantly though, they took me in a big way, offering me their company for dinner and drink in Germany as well as generally looking out for my welfare when I was just sort of dumped on them without (once again) the proper procedure or documentation.

So a big thanks to CanForce 4082 for getting me home and making the cavernous cargo hold (of which I was the only passenger) feel like a home of sorts.

A small and heartfelt thanks to the service member working the AMU check-in desk at Trenton for offering me a cot to sleep on. Otherwise it would have been an 80$ room for 4 hours of sleep, or the lesser option of crashing outside the Via booth in Trenton Crossing.

Thanks once more to everyone along the way: Canadian, Afghan, Coalition and otherwise who put me up, put up with me and gave me some pretty open access in theatre. The (hopefully) strong project to come from this should make tangible and entry point for those who raise a furrowed brow of mystery at the notion of soldiering.

Production starts...

next week

Bye Bye Karzai

I 
am 
done.