Monday, December 14, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
Shells of Their Former Selves
Newsprint, Acrylic and Oil on Masonite Board
26.5" x 34.5"
Self-destructive mass consumeristic pop culture. I have a sincere admiration for the classical and infinite approach to painting's technique and approach to an endless list of subject matter. I've always gravitated and paid attention to the most passionate and innovative artists. This particular piece was my answer/release to a never ending disappointment with the mass media's, or more importantly, with our hip-hop cultures self-perpetuating, self-destructive, self-concious, predictable personification of who we aspire to be. I have always had a love/hate relationship with the genre, but I truly think we need to start being a little more aware of the popular culture's self-destructive mantra.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Don Reon - Tupac/Biggie
I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with the London (UK) based Don Reon in the designing of their limited edition T-shirt collection. I'm very excited about this one!
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Early in 2009, amidst the social unrest and uncertainty of their own futures, began a secret exchange of ideas and broken dreams, a contract of substance over style, a pact was made between Sarvjit Jassal and Davinder Channa. Two, young intellectual fashion renegades, who vowed to change the face of street wear forever, they made a promise to themselves and the neglected savoir-faire of the urban wear industry that things must change, and thus Don Reon was born. An artistic partnership that has gone from strength to strength, as each new design is released under a cloud of mysterious expectancy, raw talent and shameless egotistic aspirations bucked the trend and defied logic, creating what is maybe one of the most intellectually inspiring collections to have blessed the streets of London.
Inspired by a plethora of influence, deep within political territories, classic style and edgy post-modern whim collide in a spectacle of high-brow t-shirts that punch and kick our complacent 21st century society below the cerebral belt. Delving deeper than the usual gamut of pop reference, into the nether regions of lost kudos, salvaging the best of the worst in life, turning mindset on its head, formulating without a formula a series of head-turning, head-scratching t-shirts designs to shock, question, judge and inspire, all in equal measure.
Having risen from the ashes of a waning industry as the diamond in the rough of street fashion, Don Reon have pushed the boundaries to the brink with a slick, live, fast approach to design and construction, DR have been welcomed by a growing fan base of counter culturists that suck up the breath of fresh air that has come to define their seasonal offerings.
Each T-shirt is made as a limited edition run of 250, screen printed on succulently soft American Apparel tees for a luxurious and stylish cut to suit the most discernible of t-shirt fans, Don Reon has cemented itself into the pavements walked by London's fashionistas.
Available now through established emporiums of fashion hedonism as well as most of the independents at the top of the pile across the UK, DR continues to blaze a trail through the consciousness of those that lead and those that follow. Like the legends that dance and dive and ride and fly through their graphics Don Reon is fast becoming iconic in it’s own right.
The online store is currently under construction, but check back regularly to see the latest... www.donreon.com
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Refus Global Manifesto
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Paul-Emile Borduas - Right To Refuse
By Patricia Bailey, CBC News
Quebec artist Paul-Emile Borduas, author of the 1948 manifesto Refus Global. (Maurice Perron/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
To hell with the holy-water-sprinkler and the toque.
They have extorted from us a thousand times more than they ever gave.
Our duty is simple: To break finally with all the conventional patterns of society.
Quebec artist Paul-Émile Borduas wrote those incendiary words more than half a century ago in Refus Global (Total Refusal), a manifesto railing against the Roman Catholic church and French-Canadian culture of the day that changed irrevocably both the artist’s life and the course of Quebec history.
The cover of Refus Global, published in 1948. (Estate of Jean-Paul Riopelle and Claude Gavreau/SODRAC/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
“They wanted to wake people up,” says art historian Iris Amizlev, the curator of Refus Global: 60 Years Later at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (on until Dec. 7), an exhibit of 58 paintings and drawings by the Refus’s signatories. “At the time, it was scandalous. Everyone talked about it.”
Published in 1948 by 16 artists — many of them Borduas’s students — the bound collection of artwork, photos and plays was the “cri de coeur” of a frustrated generation. These young artists wanted their province to open up to the world. They blasted the clergy and the corrupt government of Maurice Duplessis for keeping Quebecers in the dark. But one of their most daring acts was to portray French Canadians as devout, tuque-wearing habitants held back by their own fear of the outside world. In Refus, Borduas called on Quebecers to create a new culture by living spontaneously: “Make way for magic! Make way for objective mysteries! Make way for Love.”
The Refus Global was one of the first collective expressions of dissent during Quebec’s “grande noirceur” (great darkness). First used by journalist André Laurendeau, the term evoked the European Dark Ages to describe Duplessis’s reign over the province. The notion of free expression was completely foreign and the church, through its control over information, ensured that most people were unaware of the intellectual and artistic movements, such as Cubism and Surrealism, making waves in London, New York and Paris.
The Refus not only paved the way for contemporary art to flourish in the province, it helped trigger the social change that would ultimately lead to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.
“We felt that art and our society were at an impasse. It wasn’t modern or alive,” Refus signatory and abstract painter Fernand Leduc, 92, recalled at the exhibit’s opening on June 19. “We wanted to create art that was authentic, that came from the impulses of life and the unconscious.”
Glorious Cemetery or 14.48, by Paul-Emile Borduas. 1948, oil on canvas, 65 x 80.9 cm. (Estate of Paul Emile Borduas/SODRAC/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
Inspired by French Surrealist poet André Breton’s “écriture automatique” (stream-of-consciousness writing), Borduas developed an approach to painting known as Automatism. At Montreal’s École du meuble, he told his students they could release their creativity by expressing their subconscious desires. As Canada’s first generation of non-figurative painters, the Automatists drew on their instincts and feelings rather than classic rules of style and form.
In a painting such as Glorious Cemetery or 14.48 (1948) — Borduas used numbers rather than titles to stress the abstract nature of his paintings – he would paint a background, let it dry and then apply colours spontaneously. The result: his luminous squares seem to dance, suspended in the air. Marcel Barbeau‘s Au château d’Argol (1946-1947) is another uniquely Automatist work, incorporating pastels and earth tones as well as the dripping technique popularized by American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock.
“[Barbeau] was likely completely unaware of what Pollock was doing in New York. It’s fascinating that they employed the same technique at the same time,” Amizlev said.
Automatism was a radical concept because Quebecers were living in a censored society. The Catholic church in Quebec banned thousands of films. And in keeping with the Ecclesiastical index of inappropriate reading material drawn up in Rome, the church kept a close watch on what people read. The province’s Catholic bishops also ensured that it was the last jurisdiction in North America to make public education compulsory – it wasn’t until 1943 that Quebec children under 14 were required to attend school. In 1937, 460 of Canada’s 642 public libraries were in Ontario; only 26 were in Quebec.
At the Chateau d'Argol, by Marcel Barbeau. 1947, oil on canvas, 55.3 x 49 cm. (Marcel Barbeau/SODRAC/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
Released at the bookstore Librairie Henri Tranquille in Montreal on Aug. 9, 1948, the Refus Global was immediately and universally criticized by the media and the clergy. Borduas was subsequently fired from his teaching position at École de meuble and forced to leave Quebec for New York. (“He died alone and miserable,” Amizlev says.)
“We wanted to know about what was happening around the world. We wanted to liberate our society,” painter and dancer Françoise Sullivan said at the exhibit’s opening. Sullivan, who was married to celebrated Canadian artist Paterson Ewen (1925-2002), is featured in Danse dans la neige, an exquisite series of photographs taken by Maurice Perron in 1948. By dancing alone in the snow, Sullivan expressed herself unhindered by the confines of studio, stage or formal choreography. “We were young and we were really into excess. We felt we were part of the modern avant-garde,” she said.
Artists such as Sullivan were attracted to Borduas’s ideas about painting and his desire to reform his society. Le Refus was the first in a series of events over the next decade that nudged the province along the path toward modernity and changed Quebecers sense of themselves as a people.
In 1949, 5,000 miners in Quebec’s Eastern Townships started an illegal strike for better wages and working conditions. The infamous Asbestos Strike pitted Duplessis against thousands of ordinary Quebecers and galvanized the labour movement. A year later, intellectuals Pierre Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier launched the anti-clericalist Cité Libre magazine, to “break the silence” they believed was preventing their province from entering the modern world. And in 1953, Quebecers experienced a revelation that not only plugged them into the global village but also affirmed their collective existence as French-speaking North Americans: it was the launch of CBFT Montreal, one of the world’s first French-language television services.
Radiating Expansion, by Paul-Emile Borduas. 1956, oil on canvas, 115.7 x 89 cm. (Estate of Paul-Emile Borduas/SODRAC/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
Sullivan says Les Automatists were experimenting with art but, like much of Quebec’s intelligentsia at the time, they were also exploring what it meant to be French-Canadian. (The term “Quebecois” didn't become common parlance until René Lévesque founded the Parti Quebecois in 1968.)
After losing his job and being forced to move first to New York and then Paris, the author of Rufus Global had an identity crisis, Sullivan says.
“[Borduas] realized he wasn’t French or British or American, but Canadien,” she said, employing the ethnonym used in Quebec since the 17th century to distinguish the inhabitants of French Canada from those of France. “We were trying to figure out who we were, in the sense of the collective nous. At the time, we had an inferiority complex,” Sullivan said. “But we have much more confidence now.”
Refus Global: 60 Years Later is on display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until Dec. 7.
Patricia Bailey is a writer and broadcaster based in Montreal.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
K'naan
How did Mandela get the will to surpass the everyday
when injustice had 'em caged and trapped in everyday,
how did Ghandi ever withstand the hunger strikes and all,
didn't do it to gain power or money if I recall, it's the gift,
I guess I'll pass it on, mother thinks it'll lift the stress of Babylon,
mother knows, my mother she suffered blows,
I don't know how we survived such violent episodes,
I was so worried, it hurt to see you bleed,
But as soon as you came out the hospital you gave me sweets yea,
they tried to take you from me, but you still only gave 'em some prayers and sympathy,
Dear Mama, you helped me write this, by showing me to give is priceless
K'naan - Troubadour
Weezy
Intaglio Print
8" x 10"
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Baby, you understand me now
If sometimes you see that I'm mad
Don't you know no one alive can always be an angel
When everything goes wrong, you see some bad
But I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh lord, please don't let me be misunderstood
Uh, misunderstood ain't gotta be explained
But you don't understand me so let me explain (heh heh)
Stood in the heat, the flames, the snow
Please slow down hurricane
The wind blow, my dreads swing
He had hair like wool, like Wayne (huh)
Dropping ashes in the bible
I shake em out and they fall on the rifle
Scary, hail Mary no tale fairy
All real very, extraordinary
Perry Mason facing, the barrel if he tattle
My god is my judge, no gown no gavel
Uh, I'm a rebel, time to battle
Now or never, I would never, in the ever
Fucking fantastic, fuck if you agree
I'm bright but I don't give a fuck if you see me