Artist's Statement
In his own words
 
 
Overview
My art tries to convey the beautiful and vivid aspects of nature, emphasizing harmonious colours, patterns and dramatic compositions.

On a day trip on the coast of British Columbia.
I try to catch viewers' attention by recreating in my art the beautiful scenes I sometimes encounter. These are the scenes which non-artists may overlook – or if they notice them – would probably be hard-pressed to represent artistically. I feel that I have chosen the role of conveyor and translator of beauty between the scenery and the viewer.

I attempt to engender in the viewer the awe that I felt when I viewed the scenes.

Many artists focus on ugliness and what is wrong.with things, and that type of art has a useful role as commentary, but I think few people want to put ugly art on their walls. (How many people intentionally choose ugly furniture for their home or office?) I choose to focus instead on what is uplifting and inspiring in the scenes around me; the beauty I sometimes see uplifts me and I hope to share that positive experience with others.

I have experimented with many media and techniques and learned from a variety of sources. Finally, after many years after experimentation, I settled on water-mixable oil as my preferred medium for painting and giclées as my preferred medium for reproduction of my paintings.


My struggle to become a proficient artist has been long and continues to be arduous. It has led inevitably to evolution of techniques and directions. As a result of my long-term artistic endeavors, I'm proud that many of my adherents compliment my art for having what they say is a unique and distinctive style.
Original Prints Versus Giclées

Some elitists have criticized me for publishing my art as giclées instead of as stone lithographs or silkscreen prints (original prints).

The reason is that original prints are not reproduced from paintings, so some art-inclined people value them more than reproductions. Original prints are assembled from sets of stencils drawn silkscreen screens, for example, or monochrome images drawn on limestone stones in the case of lithographs, or images crudely etched into etching plates.

My response to the criticism (that giclees are inferior because they are reproduced from paintings rather than being original art) is that originally printing media such as screenprinting, lithography, etching, mezzotint, aquatint and woodcut can't reproduce my paintings nearly as closely to my intended designs (which I produce on stretched canvasses) as do giclées, and they are so expensive to produce that I would not be able to work as a professional artist if I were restricted to those original print media for my artistic expression.

Original prints are significantly more expensive than giclées (often double, triple or quadruple the price of giclees) and are therefore affordable only by an elite segment of the art-buying public.

Also, I love to paint in full colour; I don't like drawing my scenes with a monochrome grease pencil on a heavy block of limestone (to make lithographs) or drawing solid, black, sharp-edged shapes on a pieces of polyester for each colour (to make serigraphs/silkscreen).

The laborious process of silkscreening, which I did in the 1970s and '80s.

To the elitists, what defines quality art prints is that the artist toiled in back-breaking, manual labor, hunched over a screenprinting frame for hours at a time (while wearing a respirator, safety gloves and apron to protect him from the toxic inks and fumes) using a squeegee to push and pull silkscreen inks over a polyester screen attached to an aluminum or wooden frame with the paper below.

I prefer to sit at my easel with a big canvas in front of me and a large assortment of wonderful, non-toxic oil paints to choose from, which I can mix on my palette in any combinations I choose, and then gradually build my image in full color on the canvas. Then I can have my painting scanned – with every tiny detail reproduced accurately – for the print editions to be printed, on modern, high-tech, digital giclée printers in a non-toxic environment.


In my opinion, giclee printing - a modern technology - is superior both in actualizing my artistic ideas and freeing me from original printing's tedious, manual labor (squeegee pulling, grease pencil drawing and hauling around slabs of limestone that are so heavy you need a forklift to move them) and working with toxic inks, so I can devote more of my time instead to other aspects of being an artist, such as painting.


To me, original printing such as serigraphy and stone lithography are unnatural, unintuive, unpleasant methods of creating art.


The elitists and purists who look down their noses at artists who use giclee printing to reproduce their ideas are akin to the elitists and purists who scorn photographers for using the latest digital cameras and inkjet printers, insisting that the only good photographs are made with the antiquated camera equipment of the twentieth century, and printed laboriously using toxic chemicals by the photographer in an old-fashioned darkroom.

There are many photographers and artists who embrace the old technologies and many galleries exhibiting their work, and that's fine. But the artists' or photographers' chosen tools should not be an issue in valuation of art. And in my opinion, whether the art is reproduced from a painting that can be bought and sold, or reproduced from a set of images drawn on a polyester screen (silkscreening/serigraphy) should also be irrelevant to the valuation of art.


The purists claim that original prints are superior to giclees because they're not copied from a painting or drawing that can be bought or sold. They are, however, still copies – copies of grease pencil drawings on limestone, or copies of stencils drawn on polyester screens, or copies of drawings on etching plates.


But to me , it's the creativity that counts, and whether or not the art succeeds in touching the emotions of the viewer, as the artists intended.
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Less Detail in Art Doesn't Necessarily Mean Less Effort Went Into Making the Art

A lot of people have the misconception that art that has lots of detail has required more time and effort by the artist to create than art that looks simple.

Yes, detail requires work, and the more detail there is, the more time is required to add the detail. But whetheer a picture appears simple or complex, viewers have no idea how many times the artist may have painted over sections of the image – or the entire image – in his struggle to make the piece work.

I have repainted some sections of canvasses – and repainted entire canvasses – dozens of times, in my struggles to achieve the effects, the mood, the lighting, the harmony, the flow of lines, the balance, the brightness and the energy, that I have in my 'mind's eye', but none of the reworking is visible in the final art.

So the amount of detail in the final piece bears little relation to the amount of time I spent on the painting.
 
 

Boulder Beach

An example is my "Boulder Beach", pictured above.

A galleriest recently exclaimed how much work it must have been to paint all those boulders in the Boulder Beach painting. It was a lot of work, but my initial attempts to paint the rocks worked basically as I had planned, so I didn't have to rework the rocks much – unlike some of my simpler designs.

So the amount of detail in my art (and others' art) can be deceptive. A simple picture is of no less value than a complicated one, because there may be more to a picture than meets the eye.

Also, simplifying art to me is often what makes it outstanding. (It's called impressionism – an art form I greatly admire.) And simplifying an image – while making it beautiful and harmonious – can actaully be more work than reproducing every detail of the real scene that one is portraying, because it requires imagination to distill the image.

"How difficult it is to be simple."
––Vincent Van Gogh

"Victoria Harbour". From afar, the image looks photographic.
 
A detail from "Victoria Harbour". The close-up view appears impressionistic. Brush strokes become more apparent as looks closely.

Champion skaters, dancers and singers are so skilled that they make their performances look effortless. But if a self-aware neophyte tries skating, dancing or singing he quickly realizes that it's not as simple as it looks.

And even if a painting required little time to create, why should that lessen the value of the parinting? Musicians such as The Beatles wrote some of their greatest hits in 20 minutes for each song. Does that mean that they should be paid less for those quickly composed songs than the songs that were lengthy struggles to compose?

When people choose songs to listen to and add to their music collections, I don't know of any of them who value quickly composed songs less than arduously composed songs. The music lovers don't discrimate against songs that are simple instead of complex, because it's the realization of the musicians' creativity that they appreciate.

So I don't understand why some people measure art by the amount of time it appears to have taken – a different yardstick than they use to measure music, dance, skating, film, books, and any other creative medium I can think of.

I'm reminded of a funny ancedote of when I was a graphic deisnger. My design partner and I had struggled to design a company logo. I pointed out to the client that we had designed 28 versions of the logo to come up with a version that we and the client were happy with. The client exclaimed, "But we didn't hire you to design 28 logos! We hired you to design only one logo!"

What didn't occur to the customer was that we had to struggle to make 27 prototypes go get to the final twenty-eighth version that I, my design partner and the customer were satisfied with. And this didn't even occur to him even though he had been involved in the design process with us and had seen most of the prototypes!

The conclusion is that, unless people watch every step of the art-making process, they have no idea of how much time and effort is required even if the art looks simple – and even then they can't accurately measure all of the work put into the project, because they don't know how much time the artist spent ruminating about the design problems while away from the easel!
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Color
I love color.


I love color for all it's glory and lusciousness – its vividness, saturation, subtlety, contrasts, and interrelationships.


Some people have suggested that I paint in black-and-white. But for me, colour has much more impact, and is much more pleasing and full of life.

At the easel

Black-and-white pictures remind me of when I was blind; seeing scenes in black-and-white and seeing blind have in common the fact that the viewer is deprived of a full, rich sensory experience. When one is partially blind, all colours are always dim and muted – never vibrant and bright. To me, black-and-white pictures are incomplete experiences that are far removed from reality. To me, seeing black-and-white is like eating food without taste, while seeing colour is like eating a sumptuous meal.


When I was young I experimented with black-and-white photography and black-and-white drawing, but over time I gravitated toward colour.
Beauty versus Modernism
I studied fine art for one year at Fanshawe College in my home city of London, Ontario, before dropping out to study journalism, as I wanted education that could lead to a career.


My fine art instructors disapproved of my art because they thought it was too conventional.


People of course have wildly different opinions of what good art is, and that debate will never end. My instructors were of the camp that believed that the main criteria for quality in art was for it to be unconventional and weird.


They wanted us to paint paintings that had some sort bizarre aspects and do make 'installation pieces' such as building a sandbox, filling it with dirt and sprinkling it with shards of glass, paint, confetti and scraps of window screens and burlap.


The depiction and expression of beauty – and the aesthetic pleasure that can be enjoyed by such beauty – was scorned by the instructors for being trite and passé.


To me, merely being zany is not good enough; that standard is too low, and heaping disparate objects to compile an 'installation piece' – or randomly spattering diverse colours and materials onto a canvas – doesn't require talent and discipline.


If beauty and the pleasure that can be derived from it are disreputable, then one must also reject artistic genres such as beautiful music, whose sole or primary raison d'etre is to appeal to the deep human appreciation for beauty and the emotions evoked by the music.


A bunch of disparate music notes and instrument sounds assembled because of their disparity doesn't make a great song, unless the notes and instrument sounds are crafted into a harmonious arrangement, and to me, the same thing applies to fine art (and all forms of the arts).


I disliked experimenting in art by making ugly constructions for the sake of trying to be unconventional and modern.


I try to make my paintings unconventional in their own way because my paintings are fresh images that never been seen before in art, and at the same time I try to make exquisite images that emphasize the most attractive elements of what I see in my outdoor environment.


"It's easy to make ugly art. But to make beautiful art – so beautiful that people buy it with their hard-earned money, exhibit it proudly and cherish it – now that is a challenge."
––Tony Max

Subject Matter
I like to paint the beautiful scenes I see around me.


Southwestern British Columbia is considered to be one of the most beautiful places on our planet. It's replete with interesting subject t matter.

On a hike at Lynn Creek, North Vancouver

In fact, I'm working on a painting of a view of the Lions Peaks that I can see from living room window, so I don't even always need to go outdoors to find lovely subject matter to paint!


I was was drawn to nature already as a child. My parents owned an old farmhouse and a small plot of land near the hamlets of Amberley, Ontario. The surroundings were farmland and woods, and Lake Huron was within walking distance. In the 1960s, the region had plenty of woods and wildlife. The wildlife even included deer, porcupines, wolves and bobcats and was sparsely populated by humans. I spent every summer there until I was 16.


The region was not far from the wilderness of Ontario that inspired Canada's Group of Seven to create their bold, colorful, raw landscapes that defined a new style of Canadian art early in the twentieth century.


Unfortunately, with relentless human population growth, the wilderness and rural experience where my family's acreage is, was spoiled. The village of Clark Point sprang up nearby – a bedroom community for the workers of the Bruce atomic power station that was built at nearby Kincardine. Most of the wildlife disappeared.

The old farmhouse in rural Ontario.

The sounds of whipporwills was replaced by the sounds of lawn mowers, cars, barking dogs, chainsaws and the hammering of nails as more and more buildings were carved out of the woods. The wondrous kaleidoscope of the Northern Lights that was sometimes visible at night was drowned out by the increasing intensity of lights from the growing town of Kindcardine where the atomic energy plant is situated.


But the early experiences with nature in rural Ontario gave me a lifelong appreciation for the more pleasant aspects of nature and I think that was one of the motivators for me to become an artist.

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Introduction