In the late 1980s I made a number of drawings of drapery studies based on details from within Renaissance and Baroque paintings. I abstracted and scaled some of them up as paintings. I exhibited them at the Vancouver Art Gallery in the autumn of 1990. Then I took a break while I thought about what to do next.
In 1994, I became curious to see what would happen if I abandoned the modernist idea of “signature style” and started making a number of new paintings with no stylistic focus. It was liberating. There were no rules other than to make whatever I felt like making. I started to consider what was the least I could do to make a painting (a kind of painting degree zero). I wanted to work on a small, domestic, or private scale, and I felt I had to make a mark, use colour and cover an area. I decided the paintings needed to be small enough that I could keep the whole acrylic surface wet while I was painting it. That allowed the paint to pool and dry in a variety of ways. I realized that what they looked like beyond that didn’t really matter, and because I see painting as inherently abstract, these are abstract paintings. Over the next two years I made about fifty paintings that I exhibited in the summer of 1995 at Stride Gallery in Calgary in an exhibition entitled “The Rest of Our Lives.”
