Sunday Sept. 6, 2026:
This first week of residency there was a lot of travel, and setting up the studio. I’m residing in a small coastal town in eastern Quebec. The sea at the end of a small street, has a silvery sheen from the sunlight at golden hour. Fall is beginning shortly. The town is beautiful. The slowed bustle of the tourism season leaves the area feeling slightly liminal.
Quaint is the right word.
I sit in the interim studio with my sketchbook to think through my research project for the next few weeks. This residency came at the right time. I’ve been eager to develop this project. I love all of my past pieces. However, artists are forever malcontent.
This residency serves multiple purposes. For me personally, it’s a break from the fast paced downtown environment of the Montreal Studio. It also serves as a way to mark a pause at the end of the show season. It was lovely seeing you all, by the way!
The show season takes a lot out of me. It requires so much logistics, travel, packing & unpacking. It’s physical labour. I carry boxes and suitcases with an entire mini studio set up across the country, each often weighing upwards of 70 lbs. It’s like being a musician on tour, minus the roadies and the team. My backstage pass is also pretty unglamorous. At the end of the season I’m eager for some downtime, a little bit of bed rot, and studio time to focus on creation. I handle an ungodly amount of administration in the weeks following a show. Emails, customer support, discussing possible commissions, custom artworks, collaborations, etc… I say ungodly because I love being dramatic. It brings me a lot of joy to know I’m offering a nice collector experience. You wouldn’t know it from my job title as an Artist, but I’ve been reading so many books on enhancing customer experience. I personally find it so disappointing when I love an artist’s work, but the whole reaching out/acquisition process is painful. I don’t want to be that artist. Therefore, to ensure I don’t become that artist, I’m always updating my website, creating better flow, figuring out photography so you get a good sense of what the art work is like IRL, I figure out how best to communicate when co-creating commissioned artwork with a collector, or business, etc.. In other words, I work a lot on my professionalism. All of this is the behind the scenes work of being an artist. Without the “bringing to market” work, the work never leaves the studio, and no one ever sees it. One day, I promise myself, I’ll have an assistant helping me out, because this is too much work.
*Enter The Artist Residency*
In order to ensure that I have fresh new artwork ideas, that I explore new ways of representing these ideas, and that I have time to pull these ideas out of my mind and put them onto canvas, the residency idea was something I had considered in the past but never committed to. This year, it feels like a necessity. I expanded my show route, and spent more time than ever on the business side of my art. It leaves me feeling deeply the yearning for creation.
I’m committing the entire month of September to creation and research. To make sure I don’t crumble under the pressure of production, and deliverables. I’m focusing this residency on research, rather than creating a body of work.
This is the plan:
Week 01: Assess my current work. What it contains. Why it’s there.
Week 02: What I am choosing to keep, what I am discarding, and why.
Week 03: Exploration. How are the elements going to blend together? Sketching and painting.
Week 04: Pushing further and refining. How far can I take these ideas?
Week 05: Conclusion & Recap & Thoughts.
***
Week 01:
“The creative process”:
I work in a rather cartesian way. I lose myself too easily otherwise. I rely on methodology & protocol to get me through the creative process, as well as most things in life. The creative process can be very obscure, even to most professional artists. Some works will flow, and others will fight you to the bitter end, and generally, win the fight.
To even-out the odds in this struggle, I use my analytical brain as much as I possibly can. Sooner or later, my inspired artist self takes over anyways, and this is how I ensure the best artwork. For this residency I want to approach the creative process with more rigidity than I normally would. The objective of this research project is to identify the throughline in my past bodies of work that represent who I am as an artist, and then use that as my north star going forward.
Therefore my starting point for this project is to assess the contents of my past work. The following images are quick notes I took for myself. Some are assessments of the visual elements that are present in the works, and others are the meanings and intentions, or vibes. The visual elements, and rhetoric elements work together to create the whole of the work. There are a lot of abstract ideas that are the consequence of the tangible design choices I make. I try to be intentional about everything I add to an artwork, because as the saying goes “ A picture is worth a thousand words”, so you need to make sure you know everyone of those thousand words. And to be fully honest, there are more like 10 000 words to an image
The Chiaroscuro collection, like the artworks Rikk'aau and Geddes, rests upon the influence of Caravaggio, the Italian master of lights and darks. He treats somber and religious themes. He is known as the father of the Chiaroscuro technique which is the one I employ throughout this collection. It creates a high drama image, but retains a lot of emotional proximity to the subject.
The Chiaroscuro artwork that has most influenced me in my career, though, was not by Caravaggio. It is an artwork by Artemisia Gentileschi, an Italian Baroque Painter. She was a prodigy by age 15, and had a long career as a professional painter. Her artworks are evocative of passions and thoughts that to this day, tend to be censored. I saw the artwork Judith and Holofernes for the first time when I was a teenager, and this work has forever been engraved on my mind. It has inspired a great many of my works, including my painting Shattered.
My own work, inspired by these Italian artists, attempts as best as I can to embrace the whole of my own human experience. I choose for my work to evoke simultaneously positive, and troublesome feelings. Rarely do we ever feel clear emotions. I think this ambiguity conveys an interesting complexity in my work.
The Dark Fantasy collection stems from Chiaroscuro, but integrates pop culture elements. The themes of supernatural, high fantasy, and science-fiction remove our real-world constraints and allow us to envision different rules overseeing the lands. I love these themes because they offer the opportunities to conceive utopias, and dystopias. I find they offer us a way to dream up different kinds of lives, and travel through the painted scenes. I don’t see it so much as escapism, but more as an entry point to soul-searching.
The Jungle monster collection is my most complex work insofar. The aesthetics rely on natural motifs, creatures, and Orientalism. The overall color schemes are conceived to feel lush. As mentioned above, there is a lot of theoretical substance to this body of work. A great deal of research, and hope in mankind went into its creation. It carries a lot of the heavy detail of Baroque but was principally a study in Orientalist art, and sociology. Much of the artworks that I drew upon for reference were of Jean-Leon Jerome. He was a brilliant academic painter, and could render materials, skin tones, and light like no other. He made Europe dream of The Orient and participated in creating the mystical, mythical vision we carry when we think of Scheherazade.
I’ve made it abundantly clear that this iconography, as beautiful as it is, has had negative consequences on our contemporary world, and how this collection aims to remix the symbolism in the works in a way that carries the mystic mythological essence, but gives back humanity to the sitters.
And finally, the Garamon collection.
The Garamon collection is kind of an outlier. It’s the collection I reserve for my personal exploration. It’s not very much shared on my socials, because of its boldness. It's on a very different visual path than most of my work, however it’s close to my heart. What’s more is that, in a million subtle ways, it ties in neatly to the other collections but the same ideas are expressed in dramatically different ways. For instance, it’s rooted in sociology. In college I studied cinema history, and a theme that stuck with me was how sci-fi films had risen swiftly in the wake of the Second World War, the Vietnam war, and the Cold War. The reason for this is that these wars had severe threats of biological, and chemical warfare. People were terrified, and many places in Asia have suffered from those developments. Godzilla was born from that fear, and represents the atom bomb and its destruction. From this vantage point, you can see how it relates to the Jungle Monster and Dark Fantasy collections. This collection also leans into sociology, history, and ethics.
Conclusion
Here is the starting point of the work.
Assessing my current work.
What it contains.
Why it’s there.
How it’s presented.
I’ve identified a strong Baroque influence, Orientalism, Pre-Raphaelite, mysticism, mythology, ethics, the 1001 nights, Godzilla and Kaiju, mid-century graphic design, and quite a few other recurring topics. This is step one in this research project’s methodology. These topics are the throughline of my past works. They keep coming back whether it’s a conscious or unconscious decision. These are the themes my work revolves around.
Next Sunday, for step two of my methodology, I’ll be exploring which of these elements I wish to hold onto in future works, which ones I will leave behind. I’ll also explain the reasons behind those decisions.
***
Nota Bene:
Funny enough, I have been writing the essence of this blog post & research as I go. It was ready for publication on the day of writing! On the night before the scheduled posting of the first blog ( the first Sunday morning of September), I stayed up all night worrying about how it would be received. Total insomnia. 20 minutes before the post was scheduled to be live, I pulled it from the internet.
The post-as-you-go method was stripping all of the space I had created with the residency, and it felt again like I was under the public eye. Postponing the publication f this blog has given me the creative space I needed to get the work done. So, sorry for the delay, and here it is! If anything the posts are virtually unchanged, save a few spelling mistakes I caught on later reads.
Come back next Sunday for part two!