September 6 – 30, 2012
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 6, 6 – 8 p.m.
FRAN HILL GALLERY
285 Rushton Road
Toronto, ON, M6C 2X5
Tel: 416.363.1333
E: franhillgallery@bellnet.ca
Hours: Fri–Sun 11–6 p.m. or by appointment
“My principal concern as an artist is in painting, which I continue to find a fertile and exciting form of expression. I am concerned specifically with its intrinsic and essential formal qualities and with the interior emotional logic of paint — the interaction and integration of surface, plane, line, edge, shape and colour. I am also concerned with weight and resonance, and the dialogue between object and image.
Painting is pure visual communication detached from the verbal and narrative aspect of language into pure experience relating to life in its operation, not in its superficial appearances and resemblances.
I am interested in the confrontation between a ‘resistant’ explicit surface and spatial activity and how to maintain a structural equilibrium between them. In other words; how surface is modified, enhanced and possibly subverted by the relationship of line, edge, shape, colour and physical/material characteristics. Colour is largely chosen by function, ambience, resonance and oscillation (slow/fast), weight, and in relation to scale and surface activities.
My current series of work is the On Some Faraway Beach Paintings. The titles do not refer to nor describe real ‘places’. Conceptually On Some Faraway Beach alludes to the edges/boundaries between the known and unknown, the near and the far, the real and the imagined. It is a ‘place’ of questing and reflection, the inside and the outside. In all formal respects the paintings are rigorously abstract.” Blair Sharpe, August 2012