“Like most artists, I have been influenced by a broad spectrum of art. The intense human narratives of Rembrandt and Velazquez, Ingres’ sublime depiction of idealized femininity, and the ugly/beautiful distortions of Egon Schiele have captured my imagination and influenced my work as a figurative painter. The expressive power of pure abstraction has also affected me, particularly the emotional intensity of Rothko’s floating squares of dark despair and Barnett Newmann’s serene colour balances.

 In this exhibition I have assembled a range of work that begins with classically influenced narrative paintings, and then gradually progresses through a series of figure and ground explorations. My work has always circled around three elements: the human figure, the narrative, and the study of formal elements, the painter’s building blocks of colour, shape and composition. Three interrelated bodies of work bring these three obsessions into focus.”  – Taken from the statement of the artist.

Rogue:

 *jocular.    a mischievous person, especially a child.

 *a stray, irresponsible or undisciplined person or thing.

This exhibition of painting and drawing takes as its subject royal personages, (as seen through European oil painting), gone rogue, or as we might say here, off-the-grid. The works are derived from an ongoing investigation of the Spanish Baroque artist, Diego Velazquez, as read into the Canadian historical circumstance. Canada, in all of its crude beauty and conflicted past, becomes the new ground to these royal figures.

In the Estevan installation the focus is on the daughter of the King Phillip IV of Spain, (reign 1621 – 1665), the Infanta Margaret Theresa. She is the central figure in the composition of the painting Las Meninas. As she is key to the representation of the Spanish court in Velazquez’s work, the Infanta becomes the pivot point for varied expressions and interpretations here. From youth, new possibilities.