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2021
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- Joy
- Red Carpet 1.0
- Poppy Garden
- Reflection; refraction; distortion
- to the finish post
- Lady Glaze
- Grimsby haunted
- the autoshow
- In the shade
- Black Skates
- Swimming Lesson
- Thunderstorm over Lake Erie
- The Drive: Return from cottage country
- Summer Concession
- Morning Dew
- The Drought
- The Cricketer
- Beach Stairs
- Blue Western Skies
- Paris Inn
- Still life studies
- Summer sunshine with teal
- Museum musings
- The Goalie
- Roadside Bouquet
- The Hockey Game
- The Bout
- January Lake Surf
- Snooker
- Fragile
- Postcard from the edge
- Winter Surf
- Clothesline
- Window with Wall
- The Walk
- The climb
- Colour Commentary
- Hockey Season
-
2020
>
- Open
- Winter Surf
- Beachfront
- After Sergio
- South Coast Cookhouse
- Side Street
- Lintel with green
- Garage Breaktime
- Autumn Grazing 3.1
- Trick or Treat
- Thanksgiving embers
- Koi dance
- Bird of Paradise
- Agricultural forms
- Visual Interlude
- Back Alley Bins
- Night Heron 1.11
- Grasshopper
- Sunflowers
- SAILING
- Sunflower 8s
- Heron
- Diving
- Graffiti Alley
- Summer Breezin'
- Sunflower 7.4a
- Mabel's Pizza
- Grand Vista 3.0
- Beachcomber 2.5
- Brown Door
- Lock Footbridge
- Night Flower 3.7
- Unfurling in green
- Fungi on wood
- Abandonned Truck Cab : Natures Abstracts
- Social Distancing
- South western patinas
- Covid 19 coffee break
- Murs en blanc
- abandonned tires and passages
- O'Hara Mill Homestead
- Red barn paddock
- Dundas Brewhouse
- Balzac's
- Passageways
- Melodies in blue
- Snowfall 022020
- Mallard 4.9
- Windowdressing
- London market grill
- Winter Landscapes
- Curiosity
- Winter refuge
-
2019
>
- Flutterby
- Sunday morning coffee
- in the doorway
- at the edge
- Chinese Herbs
- Double Entendre
- First snows
- Gage Park Diner
- Remebrance day 2019
- Apple Harvest
- Descente a la plage
- Farmers Market in orange
- The superior aesthetics of loitering
- Salmon run 2019
- Morgan 44 -8.2
- Summers End
- Migration
- ART vs TECH as GAN
- Order on line
- Venetian Meats
- Summer Harvesting
- Honda Indy Toronto 2019
- Morning Irises
- Hillside in sunlight
- Feathers in grey
- SPIRO
- Aviary 346
-
2018
>
- Sand Graffiti
- October Evening Harvest
- Grand River
- The game
- The fortement
- July celebrations
- Buoyancy in blues
- The decision
- Magical Blue Skies in red
- Vatican Fuschia
- RBG : In the river valley
- Bullrushes
- Spur Line
- Abstract 4
- Rural Landscape
- Sunflower #12
- Magical Blues
- Red Balloon
- Lines
- Water: B & W
- Horizon Slip
- Gravity Vortex
- Gears
- Retail narrative forms
- Thompsonian snowbirds
-
2017
>
- Digital Dysfunction
- Autumn Boreal Forest
- Suspended bridge
- Autumn PeeGate
- Food colour systems
- Waupoos harvest, fond fonce
- Waupoos harvest, ground in white
- Stringed instrument origins
- Caterpillar yoga
- South Garden Tinkerbells
- Side yard garden shed
- If light dissipates
- Confessional
- Oasis
- Winter Flight
- Time Drift 17
- Paleo Tattos
- Signal and Noise
- Colour Juxtapositoins
- RBG: Studies of grounds in green and blue.
-
2016
>
- Winter Light
- Silent Vigil
- Memory as Patina
- The Apiarists
- Reading
- Bohemian Waxwing
- Predawn Garden
- the gatherings
- Berger
- Migratory feeding
- Tulip 2016
- Bird furniture
- The bee keepers
- The Beekeepers 168
- Urban Waterfront Series
- Winter Perch
- Marsh Spring
- Found in Translations
- Disentangling the tangled garden
- Education lights a fire
- Jeremiah
- Teal Pond
- Julian Barnes
- Archimedes dreaming
- Bovine
-
2015
>
- Breakaway
- Rabble of ravens 1
- Vortex of difference
- Reading the trail
- The bench #2
- The journey begins
- On frozen pond : (post season)
- Colorflage strategies
- Form by any other color
- Redux A
- Overhead Perch
- Fuschia
- Study in white 2
- Rex head
- Mechanosaurus
- Sideyard skull
- Art begets
- Backyard Daffodil Still Life
- Propensity of meaning
- Pre "I-Drive" Era
- Annie's Sister - redux 1
- Listening to images.
- Figure Skate
-
2014
>
- Pre GoogleDriver -Release History
- IBM portrait studies #5
- this notion
- Emerald Grotto
- Ancient Byways
- Autumn Cabbage
- Off Stockdale Road, ...
- At the field edge
- Under the rose petals
- Composition in Fasteners
- Periods of transition
- Black Sunglasses
- Lake Ontario - March
- Lead positioning
- Hope
- Mobiusesque push
- Immediacy & nostalgia
- Musical interlude
- The lost prologues
- Triple salchow
-
2013
>
- Dreams
- This kiss
- juxtaposition in grey and white
- Feathers and woolen fields
- Red Figure
- Shaman
- Shaman #2
- The pilot school
- Art ,beauty, theory and priorities.
- Blue collar
- The shaman's light
- SIlent mooring
- Catnap
- Purple Jacket
- Golden ground
- County cornfield in spring
- Horizon-scapes
- Painting only begins with vision
- The advent of jewelry
- The raku apprentice
- Shadow cinema
- Spring Horizons
- Patina & Portaiture
- Winters last waltz?
- Return Migration
- Christmas Snowfall
- Release
- Pursuit and reading meaning.
-
2012
>
- Considerations on augmented paintings
- West of Amherst Island
- December Cadmium Orange
- Young turkey
- Parks Studio Road Crossing
- Beside the orchard
- Heirlooms and contemporary
- Art shrink wrapped
- Poppy 11.11
- The nephews funeral 3
- Attending to what is
- Upon a bed of gravel
- Among the hydro lines
- Interest in the interested
- Homo Collectus
- Brightons Mute Swans
- Triangulation & pointing
- Commonalities & distinctions
- The paintings never finished
- Derivatives and reflections
- The stone Herald
- Faces
- Eyeshadow in gold
- The boat (Belize)
- Saint Patricks
- Side studio door
- 2011 >
- 2010 >
- 2009
- Audio >
- Notes
- Interview
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Attending to what is why art should seem useless
Another Sunday drive through The county. Sunshine adrift upon the breeze, the rolling lines of green of the vineyards sliding past. Nearer the lake, the contrasts of blues makes me wonder. Here in these rural rhythms it's not uncommon to see 150 people gathered on a morning like this, to attend an auction at a local farm. To see what might arrive. So seeing tractors of all sizes and mechanism are the norm roundabouts here. But this morn, on the western approach to Wellington, I had to stop in wonder. A collector of sculptures has started to install their major works outside on the shores of the Great lake. The White lion, the Sienna Bull between the conifers, and this morn, the vintage tractors ! Which just shook my expectations. There upon their private lane, raised on metal poles riven into the ground, were impaled these tractors of all vintage. Simply amazing. Obviously they were originally designed and engineered so those aesthetics had to have always been there. But this morn, suspended in balance upon these minuscule pedestals, metal and rubber tires both adrift upon the air, those tractors had become - useless, Inutile. Utterly and unquestionably Beautiful. And that's just it. This appearance of inutility seems to be a necessity for art. (Consider antiques or Duchamps ready mades) I doubt this is simply a question of context, these floating tractors were outside on a private lawn - they were inherently in their environment for the most part. I still hold to the view that art has an extreme contribution to make to social evolution. For me art isn't useless, but crucial for civilization to stay on track. Yet, Arts appearance of inutility is necessary for it to become useful. That reason I think is pointed to in Iain McGilChrist's book The Master and his Emissary. Among the thesis put forward there (and elucidated much clearer there than here) is that there is an essential reason why we have two hemispheres for a brain. That being in part to be able to hold two differing ways of knowing the world always at our beck and call. The right hemisphere being attuned to that which approaches us, discerning the other as other and seeking the possible relationships we may have with this variable environment and our place in it. It is attentive and responsive to what is, seeking an integrated understanding of the world which includes oneself. The left hemisphere is geared to applying an existing rational self view of consequences, structured to do things within its understood and pre-existing worldview, it is manipulative in all senses of the word. It attempts to bring the world to fit its view point, it achieves things. Put vulgarly, two world views, one for the prey and the predator. But significantly, it is the attentive to the other, the realm of the moral and morales, that permits us to become one with an other, that allows us to see the greater significance of things, of metaphor and meaning and graces us with love. Art, by appearing to be inutile, has no apparent function for the left hemisphere to apply its reasoning to. So the right hemisphere is allowed to attend to what is there. To discover the depth and significance of this other than what is known by the left hemisphere. So like a friend that has utterly no utility for us, but is cherished for their complexity and depth, in fact can hence be loved for themselves, so art too is given the space and time to reveal itself. It isn't something to be used, but something that might be understood and related to for itself. There is seemingly nothing to accomplish with it, nothing for the left hemisphere to make work, so instead we seek with the right hemisphere the arts relations to itself and the world, we attend to it, awaiting discernment of whatever it may reveal itself to be. All because, art appears useless !. When we put something upon a pedestal, like those tractors impaled upon those black metal posts, there isn't much it can do. When we hang pictures on a wall, there isn't much they can do, when we capture a memory within a moment, frozen or repeating within a loop, it itself can't accomplish much, the sculpture upon the pedestal, remains there. But since we can do little with them, the left hemisphere doesn't intrude on the right hemisphere, and we are then allowed to discover of them. Like a friend that is always so much more then we have ever known, and we allow to reveal to ourselves, to change , be in flux and not reside in our expectations, so our understanding of a piece of art is grounded in our accepting it as always having something more to say. That it isn't simply something we need or can manipulate to our advantage, as our left hemisphere is apt to achieve. That it is allowed to be whatever it reveals itself to be. Art first needs to be seen as useless, otherwise we can see only its utility, and then nothing of its being and significance. Art is understood in our relationship with it, within the right hemispheres attending to the world, and far from the left hemispheres analytical preconceived view of the world. So yes, art first appears useless, hence we may discern its significance and value. |
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