Books

Contraries : An Artist’s Life

For many years I have sought to combine my paintings, drawings, and small pen and pencil sketches, with essays dating back to the early seventies, but still relevant, in my view, to life to-day.

My original compilation typed on an ancient Underwood, and paired with artwork via the first copy machine, a Xerox, seemed complete in a rough sort of way.

Copy machines improved rapidly, to enable almost perfect replicas of images – photographic, painted or drawn – which could also be reversed and re-sized. An exciting tool!

Eventually I mastered a computer well enough to type the essays in a more professional manner.

My vocation was painting, but you cannot paint all the time. As you age, if you are healthy, you have more than enough time to spare, so writing helped me fill the extra hours.

Life Sketches

Life-drawing and painting were once considered essential to a basic art school education. In the latter part of the twentieth century, and so far in the twenty-first, the emphasis seems to be on abstraction, conceptual art and computer graphics.

Life-drawing and painting were my preferred subjects at the Ontario College of Art many decades ago, and still are, but to survive as an artist, you have to sell, and there is only a minute market for the nude.

My finished life paintings are like my children – they must be launched somehow, for better or worse, and many nudes from my output illustrate this small book.