Maggee Irene Day
Emily Carr University of Art + Design, MFA
Through my experimental process, I am exploring the various ways I can see the space in front of my apartment building, and therefore— the various ways this space can be represented through paint. The doorstep is the location where my exploration starts; it is a catalyst to my more central subject which is the space of perception. This location allows me to see the familiar as strange, while reevaluating how I construct a representational painting.
A rule I created in my process is that every painting must change its order of procedures and materials. I want to highlight all the different choices that a painter can make when they approach a subject, and furthermore find connections and divisions between processes in art history and contemporary painting. When I approach my subject I have a choice to capture the visual information in a photograph, or through plein air painting/sketching— afterwards I have a plethora of different possibilities. I am interested in disrupting the illusion of painting by throwing wrenches into my process. These wrenches include translating information from one medium to another, layering images wet on wet, rotating the canvas, and spilling paint.
This process of decisions and accidents open up a slippage between what we do and what we think— paint follows the artist's body and emotions, but the artist also follows the paint. The doorstep gets pulled apart into abstract colours and shapes that hold information and suggest a logic to three dimensional space and objects within it. Although many of the initial elements are there, they are now open to be rethought and renegotiated because they have not been resolved as what we traditionally look for as being landscape. These incongruities allow me to retrospectively learn more about the relationships between seeing and abstraction, representation and perception— as well as, the material potential of paint.
Doorstep View 3, 2019, Oil on Canvas, 60"x 72"
Doorstep View 4, 2019, Oil on Canvas, 60"x 72"
Doorstep View 5, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 72"x 96"
Doorstep View 7, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 60"x 72"
Doorstep View 8, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 48"x 60"
