In the autumn of 1976, I was living in Halifax at 1534 Bishop Street on the second floor of a cold water flat in an old row house that I was sharing with three other friends who were also NSCAD students. I moved in there that August, after I got back from six weeks of traveling in England, Ireland and Europe. I set up a small drawing table in my front bedroom and began to make ink drawings on small sheets of white paper with a sharp-nibbed stick pen that I dipped into a bottle of black India ink. I liked the slightly awkward, unforgiving line that the pen made.

I remembered the crude perspective and flat rendering of Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua that I had seen on my way to Venice and I hoped that I could make drawings and paintings that were as straightforward and fresh. While travelling, I had made some small, postcard size ink drawings of three dimensional forms in perspective – vessels, viaducts and bridges, that I used as a starting point. I continued drawing these architectural forms based on the two-point perspective that I had learned in my high-school drafting class, as a way to generate more ideas for paintings.

I didn’t really start with a plan, I just sat at my desk and drew for a few hours each day. Over the course of the next few weeks I had made a number of drawings that I was excited about and thought had potential as paintings. I felt it was important to be faithful to these original ink drawings. They felt genuine. Painted on abstract coloured grounds the scale of the forms were quite ambiguous. These crude line drawings and the ones that followed over the next few months and years served as the source imagery that I used for many of my paintings over the next eight years.

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