This Little Light of Mine: the astonishing art of Canada’s Pat Moffatt

There are a few tricks to getting the kind of colour and light that seems almost supernatural in Pat Moffatt’s paintings, the kind of colours that bounce around the room against the sun’s changing shadows, reverberating with glowing energy. One is gratitude, an inner illumination that comes from letting go, forgiving, moving on.

The other is more technical. Just don’t use brown. Ever. “Brown is a zero,” Pat says. “In my mind, brown is one big orgy of colour, that the brilliance of the truth of colour has been lost. There is no opposite of brown, it sits alone.”

This act of symbolic omission creates stunning works that vibrate with a luminous beauty I’ve never seen before. There’s a certain purity, and maybe that’s exactly what the artist is longing for. The colours shine like stained glass, like a lighthouse clear and bright over shadowy pines and a dark bay.

I happen to like brown very much- it is the colour of bark, sand, the earth, chocolate, giraffes…but I admit I’ve never seen a vivid brilliance like what shines in Pat’s work. Besides, everything Pat does has an important symbolism. The number of flowers in a vase, the colours used, a doorway, what the sky holds- all of these hold a story, a particular piece of Pat’s heart and soul. And the things that are not there- brown- also have meaning. “Brown symbolizes a wealth of bad things,” he says. And Pat prefers to leave the bad things out.

His symbols are not consciously planned out in advance. “I see it after they are done, not before or during,” the artist tells me. Consider the painting Forty. “I started painting January of 2003, I was forty. I had my first one man show at The Gallery Wall on Bloor Street in February 2005. There were forty paintings in that show. The show was called Forty. I knew it had to have a theme. A consistency. So I started working on a ‘theme’ piece. In it you see a wheat field with nine modern

Forty

bails of wheat. Two of them are in the foreground, representing my two marriages. The sky, a very dark blue, almost like there is a planet very close to earth, and out of there is a bolt of lightning hitting a pine tree. Illuminating it from within. The tree being hit with energy represents me being given the force to paint, to create… to connect with God? There is an abstracted version of a small chapel on the left representing my belief that there is something much greater than ourselves and because it’s abstracted it may mean that ‘religion’ has corrupted the ideal of spiritualism. The painting is actually a sign of gratitude for the ability to paint. To express.”

The ideas come in a flash, on a subconscious level. “I have this urgency to act on it…and when the creative process is over, I always see profound things in the work that pertains to my life. This in turn helps me deal with those things. Come to think of it…. during the whole process, I’m not a part of any of it.”

Teachers told Pat early on that he was an artist, but he did not begin painting until he was forty. It began rather suddenly, and has been wildfire ever since. Each and every work is created, “rapid fire, no thought, like an oracle.”

There was a “set of rules, in place, in my mind, from day one,” Pat says. “These were there before I even touched the brush to canvas for the very first time. I never break them, and starting and finishing a painting in one sitting- three to four hours, on average- is one of them…It’s all about letting go for me, and in that, comes beauty.”

Pat lavishes the canvas with abundant helpings of paint, another symbolic gesture of the generosity and giving of humans, and his gratitude. This effect, combined with the furious brushstrokes, the colour vibrancy, and the speed of the composition, gives a cosmic energy to each work. He churns out about two paintings a week, but feels he should be making several a day.

Indeed, the muse has come amazingly often since Pat began painting only six years ago. He has since created hundreds of gorgeous oil and acrylic paintings, and none show any sign of a fumbling evolution, a movement toward maturity, of the search for one’s own artistic identity, signature style- the “voice.” Rather, they are all, from the beginning, instantaneous masterpieces. The “brownless palette” creates an immediate and vivid cohesion. The fast fury of brushstrokes contributes to their vitality. The underlying use of symbolism means that a still life is not quite as still as it appears. And the distinctive use of perspective and choices of subject matter have yielded, in the artist’s earliest stages, the works that an artist might finally come to after decades of study, experiment, exploration, trial and error. Could it be that this humble man from Thunder Bay, Canada, is a master in our midst?   For even the creative geniuses had a gestation period, Renoir, Picasso, Van Gogh…

Van Gogh. It’s what the viewer thinks about from the first moment.  When I experienced Pat’s work  at a Touched By Fire art exhibition, it was exciting to see someone continue on in the master teacher’s style, even, dare I say, improving on it? I assumed the stylistic focus was intentional, and I admired the artist for such singular dedication to learning from the best.

I was surprised to learn that the connection was spontaneous, and there from the very beginning. “I somehow do paint like him. A blessing or a curse…not sure?” Pat says. “This comes naturally and logically to me. My natural brush strokes look almost identical to his for some reason. My best friend for 32 years has an oil painting I did when I was thirteen. I had no idea he’d kept it all these years. Recently, he brought it out and showed it to me- I almost fell out of my chair. My brush strokes are the same as they are now! But at the time it was painted, I hadn’t even been introduced to Vincent Van Gogh.”

Van Gogh did use browns, but the kind of quick, short brush strokes that energize everything Pat paints indeed evoke the master and no other. The type of perspective used, the sorts of colour choices, the framing and splicing of the composition, and the subject matters- laneways, churches, flowers, faces, skies, landscapes, fields- all of these things have the feeling of deep homage to Vincent. I can’t help but wonder at the connections, the statements Pat has made about not really being there during the process, not premeditating the work, acting as an oracle.

“When I paint, it’s almost like I’m in some sort of state,” Pat tells me.  “Like runner’s high. Most runners will tell you that they cannot remember any details of the five miles they just covered. For me it’s the same thing. …. To me, painting is 100% freeing, connecting, maybe even connecting with God.”

Depression and madness cut Vincent’s life short at 37 years.  Outside of grade school, Pat didn’t start painting until he was 40- and then he did so furiously. Vincent sold only one painting in his lifetime. He would have wanted to sell more, and to have more time to paint, take his distinctive style to the next level. Could Pat be his channel? Or a reincarnation? Well, stranger things have happened…

Pat says he could talk about Van Gogh forever, and whether or not it’s conscious, I feel that he exudes a playfulness that celebrates the parallels. In Ballet of the Silent Mind, a dancer stands before two paintings that show Van Goghian chairs. Chives or Chinese lanterns in vases tribute the composition and vividness of the famous million dollar sunflowers. The many churches in Pat’s work suggest the rambling angles of the Church at Auvers. The dark swirling skies are more than a little evocative of the unforgettable Starry Night. For whatever reason, the spirit of Van Gogh is part of Pat’s work, a blessing and honour.

Or, as Pat suggested, a curse? Because even with this uncanny high honour of effortlessly conjuring one of the greatest artists of all time, it must be odd to represent the limelight that another never had.

And of course, Pat has many distinctions in his style that are difficult to convey in words. The parallels to Van Gogh are in no way detracting from a body of work that is wholly original. The purity of colour, as mentioned, is breathtaking.  Each piece is so glossy and shiny that the paint still looks wet. There’s a surreal, dreamy quality as recurring characters like nuns or accordion players enter the works. And some of the works are unmistakably Canadian, like the beautiful Northern Lights and Silver Birch. Occasionally, an oeuvre veers completely away from everything else, like Apology, which is sort of like Keith Haring and Kandinsky at the same time.

And then there’s the other part of the ‘curse. Depression. “I have battled alcohol since my 20s and I’ve been diagnosed with major depression. I think very creative people are so sensitive that problems or obstacles tend to be too much to deal with. A misdirection of fear or vulnerability,” Pat confides. “The worst enemy of the artist is fear.”

“There have been many days when I cannot paint due to depression. I don’t force the issue,” Pat says.  “But another one of my rules is that there will be no darkness in my work. I will not subject the viewer to the dark places in life. My job is to lift people up… not to share some horrific thing because I feel that I must. There would be no light without darkness, and it’s my job to show light. I really hope that come across.”

Pat says surviving his childhood is his greatest accomplishment. “I will not get into the details of it but I will say that the first nine years of my life were full of trauma, violence, tragedy, loss, and confusion.”

“More than anything…I long to become one with God. Becoming one, instead of being lost. Money or material things mean little to me. I have been extremely poor and middle class. I have climbed the corporate ladder to great heights only to fall off the ladder. I have dined with artists, writers, lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs. I have also dined with the poor, the insane, criminals, addicts, and have-nots. We are all the same, deep down, we all want the same things.”

That’s what I see reflected in the light of his artwork, in the attention brought to vivid objects or paths or angles we may miss along the way if we’re not watching. I see that beauty that’s reflected off the darkness, just as the luminous moon dances diamond ripples across dark waters.

“My eyes have never been wider than they are right now,” the artist tells me.  “There is so much to learn, to forgive and to let go of. If anything I am ultimately grateful.” He feels it is amazing to be here, to be able to create, to feel the connection with spirit, or God, those forces beyond ourselves that are mysterious and majestic.

“If I had a ‘normal’ upbringing, I think I would be selling used cars or vinyl siding,” he says.

Contact artist Pat Moffatt at patttygo@hotmail.com.

See over 100 of his works at http://www.artmajeur.com/?login=moffatt&go=artworks/display_list_galleries.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Home, Sweet, Home: Vessna Perunovich Examines Themes of Home in Emblems of the Enigma

Beautiful, dignified, luminous, deeply intelligent- artist Vessna Perunovich is the kind of woman I wanted to be when I grew up.

Here’s a story: Once upon a time, Vessna’s book, (W)hole, was on my coffee table. My date, we’ll call him Frank, thumbed through it while waiting for me to get ready. To me, the catalogue of eerie, dreamy emblems- hands, shoes, cords, blood, goo, fences- clearly spoke of exile, family, femininity, and political homelessness.

“Wow,” Frank said, as I emerged, ready to go, from the powder room. He was holding the book at arm’s length, as if it were contaminated. “Clearly, this is the artwork of a disturbed man hater!”

I was stunned. Despite the stellar chemistry and some genuine affection, it became crystal clear that we had nothing in common. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to date yet, after previous disasters. What do you do when someone doesn’t understand the concepts most sacred to you? Do we still live in that Freudian hell where women who aren’t mute are disturbed? Who could, in an instant, reduce all the power of politics, rootlessness, war, immigration, grief, and exile into the insecurity of the North American male?

On one level, this trivial tidbit doesn’t really matter in the long run. People like different things, right? People interpret things differently.

Yet on another level, it matters so much. It illuminates something remarkable about that elusive puzzle: why is art important?

We know in the deepest part of our soul that art is important. Whether it is hymns or Italian fashion design or Van Gogh’s sunflowers, it matters so very much.

How we respond to something, how we interpret something, reveals what our souls hide. And this gentleman’s soul hid some crazy fears about crazy artist women, and that made it loud and clear that a crazy artist woman like myself would never be understood or accepted by this person, no matter how great the date would go. If being a strong, creative artist who spoke against corruption and inequality and war meant you were disturbed …ultimately the person who thought this would see me this way, too.

Jet two years into the present. Vessna Perunovich’s retrospective and companion book, Emblems of the Enigma, was just on display at the Art Gallery of Mississauga last month, now traveling. Donald Brackett curates the show. (Vessna Perunovich: Emblems of the Enigma by Donald Brackett is available at Amazon online. Visit Vessna’s site at www.vessnaperunovich.com.)

To be fair, Vessna’s work IS disturbing. How could it be anything less? When you’re examining themes of identity and exile, coming from a place that no longer exists, then who are you? What does home mean if you can’t go home anymore? There is blood in this work, reflecting the questions of lineage and genes, the sick memories of war and corruption and destruction and death, and questioning life and the ties that bind. Blood- it is who we are, but who are we if we are torn from our families, our lovers, our land? This is not something lucky born-in-Canada people like myself can know. And that is why Vessna asks us to imagine it.

Brackett says, “Perunovich’s work …is able to make a deft commentary on our shared values as embodied creatures who require metaphysical as well as physical sanctuary. In fact, the search for sanctuary has become an emblem in itself for the multitude of miniature enigmas we all face on a daily basis.”

Most of her sculptures, paintings, installations and performance pieces use a limited colour spectrum of red, black, grey, white and beige. The emblems we see over and over again are bizarre, gooey shapes that feel cellular, biological, and faintly grotesque. Fences and ropes are prominent, suggesting physical limitations and bondage, representation of emotional or political barriers. Occasionally, a severed foot or hand appears, or scrawled, cryptic phrases that feel like dreams or nightmares.

Vessna at Nuit Blanche, 2007

There are no safe spaces for the audience: certainly nothing that’s merely pretty or decorative, and nothing that makes perfect, immediate sense. Why should interpretation be easy for the viewer? Millions of orphaned, lost, exiled, injured, tortured, raped, sick, scared, helpless immigrants and refugees the world over are struggling to make sense of their existence, forge an identity from rootlessness, from war and grief and silence and loss.

I ran into two young ladies at Vessna’s show. Their reaction to her work was completely different than Frank’s, and I watched them with fascination as they fearlessly examined the art and talked together with great excitement about what the work might mean.

The scene was straight out of a small-budget film about Canadian multiculturalism. The spacious gallery, almost empty near closing time, with eerie, bloody sculptures by a woman immigrant from the former Yugoslavia. The Canadian writer girl, fortunate to be born into the best country in the world,  thanks to the struggle of her own ancestors to escape execution after hiding Jews during the second world war. And two girlfriends, spending the afternoon looking at art together. The filmmaker could not project the exact ethnic background of the friends, but they are dark-skinned and beautiful and one girl is wearing a headscarf. Their names are Niwah and Arzoo. The writer is assuming that Niwah is of Indian descent, but can’t be sure. Arzoo says she is from Pakistan, but it doesn’t matter where she was born or lives, what matters is that she is Muslim, and this does not change. Niwah is a photographer, and Arzoo is a clinical researcher and poet.

There is a piece of art in one corner that features a book with a million red pinpricks throughout it. A bucket of latex gloves on the floor encourages tactile exploration. The women don the gloves, touch the book, and the red ink rubs off on their hands. They talk together about how it seems as if the book is in Braille, and that a blind person might be able to read it by touching it. That the unknown makes all of us blind. The red rubbing off on the gloves is the blood, one blood, of all of us here on earth.

I go over to take a look at the book. One of the girls hands me some gloves, excited for me to experience this book of life. I’m not sure if it is really supposed to suggest Braille, for the raised dots in the book are all uniform. Perhaps that signifies that there is only one language, one written in the blood on all of our hands, in all of our veins?

All three of us move onward, to a sculpture where red oozes in and out of two silver cups. The artist is not here, but the conversation nonetheless involves her. Four women, talking about the boundaries of love, sex, of blood, oozing in and out, creating ties and terror between lovers.

This is how the hypothetical Can-film scene ends: The writer waves to her new girlfriends, takes her coat, heads out into the gorgeous day, away from all the strange images of identities merged and severed, back to downtown Toronto where she lives and writes.

On the surface there is little to connect that writer to the art, or to the maker of this strange and profound work, beyond her girlish desire to have equally profound things to say, equal strength and creativity as that artist. But then there is that blood, oozing through all of us. Then there are those bonds, those ties, and those bizarre and cryptic connections that ravel and unravel the human race.

The writer is not entirely sure what brought her here, but it is part of that red string running through Vessna’s works. She first learned about the artist through a friend of a friend of a friend of her own husband, now dead.

He is the one who taught her to live without borders, who came from Serbia also, who bore witness to the exact climate of politics and identity of which Vessna speaks. His mind and spirit and blood and ashes are now permanently meshed with the writer. Two souls who belonged to one another. Home is where the heart is. Home sweet home, even in his absence.

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. She also writes about food, mood, art, and literature. Visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Upstairs in the Crazy House: Touched by Fire, second floor at the Gladstone Hotel

Let’s go back three weeks in time. The day began the same as any other- my eyes pop open just before seven. The orange cat hogging the pillow begins to purr when he feels me stir. And I roll over and wish I had one of those coffee machines you start up with a remote control.

But I don’t have one of those, and so I throw back the blankets and the cat flies toward his food bowl. That’s when I noticed that colour had crept back into the paintings on the wall and the patterns on the blankets. Cautiously, I looked all around. The world was breathing and pulsing with life. And that’s how I knew that nearly half a year of the dead, defeated, hopeless hell they call depression had come to a complete halt.

These are the kind of days I make full use of. Alive days, I call them. I have my share of hope and reason and relative confidence. Sure, my moods veer dramatically to and fro on any day, but generally they waver about within a larger framework of either melancholy or inspiration. Though my black spells can last much longer than six months, this time calling it melancholy was putting it mildly. This last spell was so intensely dark I didn’t know if I would ever believe in anything ever again. It was a crippling grief at betrayal by everything, including my most beloved friends, and my own mind. Everything was dead, including God.

On a day like today, I can handle the burdens of grief I carry for the dead and walk with head high. I can accept the petty feuds that fuel the social circuitry, the misconceptions, the missed connections, and accept them with grace. I can feel my own heartbeat, and know its part of the pulse of the larger puzzle.

On a day like yesterday I was explaining all of this once again to a lady in front of me and to the men behind the mirrors. It makes me laugh how the universal voice of the shrink is sort of calm and breathy. Do you ever hear intrusive thoughts that aren’t your own? they always ask. Voices telling you to hurt others? I do actually chuckle, and they make notes about that. Never, I say. My mania is all mine, when it comes. I tell them I don’t hear voices- I just have a zillion ideas all at once. I start a thousand things and don’t finish them. I thrive, fly, full speed ahead. Most of this is wonderful, except when too many things later end up under an umbrella of “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” It’s all fabulous, except when I appear impatient or distracted and I’m actually really interested. I tell them about the t-shirt my friends wanted to get me: it says, I’m Talking, and I Can’t Shut Up.

That may be, but I didn’t really feel like talking at that particular moment. Sure, I’m ‘working’ on my issues. Always have. It’s just that there are a lot of ‘em. And though I like therapy, I really do, it is an exhausting commitment. And on ‘plateau days’ when I’m normal, and not up or down, I can’t see a great deal of need for it. There’s that feeling that maybe the black dogs won’t come back, and maybe the chaos and flurry of dreams and nightmares won’t come back, either. I can do without the meaningless despair years just fine, thank you very much. And because my thoughts aren’t racing right now, I’ve got some handle on how to get it together from here on in, and don’t want to answer all the questions over and over again, ever again.

Still, the most important part of therapy just might be the group. When you hear the stories of others, you find coping techniques. You compare notes. You make jokes that the world at large might not get.

I killed a few birds with one stone yesterday (what a horrible expression! who wants to kill birds with stones?). I’m committed to not missing therapy appointments, but I used the chance to swing by and visit a friend who’d recently been formed. (To the uninitiated, that means ‘admitted’ or ‘signed in’ or ‘committed.’) Believe me, it’s not the first or the last time I was upstairs in the crazy house. The only surprise is that I’ve only been a visitor. I guess there’s a bright side to this stuff running in the family: you already know you have it, so it doesn’t broadside you in the middle of a normal existence. You never really lose it, because you lost it a long time ago.

So on a day like yesterday, I wasn’t all that surprised to run into a number of old acquaintances at Touched by Fire, an art show presented by the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario. It’s amazing how many coworkers, colleagues, and relatives you run into at various meetings, clinics, and associations. While I’m pretty upfront about my lifelong struggle with depression, being an artist and all that, not everyone else is so vocal. But don’t be surprised: we are everywhere. And last night, we were all at the Gladstone Hotel, where more than forty ‘mentally ill’ artists exhibited a stunning array of painting, sculpture and photography. (I always feel trepidation describing a way of being as a ‘mood disorder’ or an ‘illness’ because in all fairness, it’s those who think the world is running smoothly who are delusional. It’s those who are well adjusted and feel no pain who are possibly sociopathic.)

The Mood Disorders Association of Ontario is an incredible resource for people who experience depression, social anxiety, bipolar disorder, panic disorder, and so on. They are also a resource for families and for professionals. They have ongoing support groups that include peer support, education and self-care, and recreation. They have speakers on mental health, an extensive reference library, campaigns for specific outreach endeavours, and every possible kind of help and hope a person on the brink might need. One amazing feature the MDAO has is www.checkupfromtheneckup.ca, which helps you anonymously determine online whether you might be experiencing any mental health concerns. They also have an annual subway campaign debunking stereotypes and myths about mood disorders. (One of the prominent myths is that mental illness is rare. Don’t kid yourself. Mood disorders are very common and you know all kinds of people who are struggling with them right now.) The MDAO supports a number of paradigms on mental health, and so they offer information about a wide variety of treatments from traditional to alternative. Educate yourself, or find a lifeline by visiting www.mooddisorders.on.ca.

Touched by Fire is an ongoing initiative of the MDAO, “a program to stimulate and celebrate the work created by artists with mood disorders.” It shouldn’t be news to anyone that a world without crazy people would be a world without art. No Van Gogh, no Mozart, no nothin’. After bipolar artist Rebecca Burghardt committed suicide, her father and others in the aftermath sought to build not just “a memorial, but a road forward against mood disorders.” Touched by Fire is an ongoing online exhibition (www.touchedbyfire.ca) and an annual gala that showcases creative contributions by artists with mood challenges.

Closer than she Appears by Susan Strachan Johnson

Last night hundreds of visitors flocked in to see amazing works by artists like Susan Strachan Johnson, Pat Moffatt, Michael Yee, Xenia Vakova, Sunny Crittenden, and more. Of course, I was there for my longtime partner in art crime, Joey DAMMIT! whose influence on my own artwork is obvious to everyone except the blind. He was exhibiting Shirley Temple Black from a show he did about depression called Only Happy When it Rains.

Joey DAMMIT! with one of his favourite works

I have to admit that my fear of crowds nearly caused me to run screaming before entering the sardine-packed room, despite my eagerness to see Joey’s disarming smile. My heart was racing in terror at the sight of zillions of fortysomethings sipping fine wine and the idea of somehow making space for myself among them. Then I thought about the other people who might be terrified to be there. Knowing that tonight I wasn’t the only nutbar in the house made it a little easier to enter, that, and the free wine and guacamole and smoked salmon.

Now Sunny Crittenden was also terrified by the scene. She wrote about her apprehension on her website (www.sunnycrittenden.com). I was immediately drawn to the chaos (and the tampons) in Sunny’s assemblage, Mania in the Key of Psychosis. There was an instant recognition factor in the dense, hurricane layers of ideas and objects. Often I create art with a similar vehemence, a whirlwind of objects and images and textures. Often I create more than one piece at a time- up to 20! But then there are other times when my work is much calmer or streamlined, or slow, depressed, nonexistent.

Viewers of Sunny’s Mania piece were astonished to see the sweet, calm simplicity of her other works. If this isn’t a window into the mind or the mood, nothing is. Sunny said that Mania in the Key of Psychosis was something she made just before a major break with reality- you know, psychosis. It was frantic and urgent, and every little detail inside had a direct emotional significance. She’s only selling the piece because she’s ready to part with that part of herself. It’s a ritual in it’s own way.

I understood right away about the layers of details and their loaded meanings. My own works may seem random, and they are. Yet the most personal ones are endless layers of very significant symbolism. Every word or image in my furious collages might have meaning in my manic universe.

Sunny sure didn’t seem psychotic. A very bubbly and creative young woman- very…well, sunny. On her site she writes very openly about her shyness, her ‘illness’ (remember, I hate to use that word for what is to me just reality. It’s like calling a tidal wave or a volcano an aberration. It’s just nature.) But I know too well how hard it is for other people to think good ol’ fearless Lorette is actually crippled with shyness. You may view me as very open and gregarious. But that’s what wild mood swings are all about. It’s all true. It’s just another part of me.

Mania in the Key of Psychosis by Sunny Crittenden

I was also really taken with Xenia Vakova’s No Public Parking. A simple geometric map painted on found wood, with the title stenciled in. Too bad the piece was already sold! I like maps and shapes, a semblance of order in disorder. Xenia says, “While I was in Halifax, provinces away from friends and family and unable to find a therapist/counsellor, depression hit me in a big way and I was forced to quit school for the time being and return to live with my parents.  During that winter, I continued the series by painting this same map onto a sign I found downtown, which said ‘no public parking.’ It is common for me to start a series and get only through one or two pieces before I lose interest.  Perhaps one day I will return to the shapes of the original map, or make a new one using the same principles.” Xenia’s only 21, and already a veteran of art and of the mind games mood ‘disorders’ play. Her art wouldn’t be the same without them.

No Public Parking by Xenia Vakova

The textures and the kind of storybook-macabre illustration powers in Closer Than She Appears, by Susan Strachan Johnson, were also stunning. A photographer I’d spoken with at length upon arrival

Dragonfly 6 Escher by Ralph Martin

snapped it up. I’d first met Ralph Martin at one of Joey DAMMIT!’s art shows, and I’m blown away by his photography (www.ralphmartinphotography.com). He photographs doors and windows, and close-ups of nature, revealing exquisite patterns and shapes in the world around us.

I was sorry not to run into Pat Moffatt. I was intrigued by the intense light and shadow of his paintings, with thick brush strokes. I will not be the first or last to compare his work to Van Gogh. The subject matter of Pat’s oeuvre is also the momentary landscape, a tree, a flower, perspective of a room. The Canadian Arles. In Moffatt’s statement, he said he worked quickly and intensely until finishing, just like his great teacher.

I wanted to break all the rules of gallery etiquette and touch the paintings. Perhaps a greater writer could better describe the intensity of these works. In that intensity, the rapidness of their completion, the immediacy of the ‘wet-paint’ feeling they evoke, there is tremendous beauty. This is not what I was referred to when I said I woke up three weeks ago and saw colour infused back into patterns, breath inside of life. But it IS what I will see when the scales tip and I start to “go up.” The vibrancy and intensity at that time is so gorgeous that every single pain and grief I’ve borne is worth it, in spades.

The Fishing Shack by Pat Moffatt

There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia!
Jean Dubuffet

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. She is a food writer for Gremolata Magazine, a voracious reader and reviewer, and a dedicated follower of Cosmo Kramer. Visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Our Long Goodbye by Lorette C. Luzajic

Depressed by Lorette C. Luzajic

7A-11D at the Gladstone

At my very first art show, I focused on removing all kinds of phrases from their original contexts, and pairing them with an arresting image of some sort. They were simple cut and paste collages that immortalized my little pink scissors, now the emblem of Do-It-Yourself for my creative spirit when it falters. The collages were pinned to a sheet, tacked up behind doors, clipped to a clothesline: there was even one on the lid of the toilet seat.

Perhaps the defining question of this particular exhibit- one of the mixed media I used for Voodoo: Art Can Bend Your Mind- was this: “What is the artist trying to say?”

Given that I had zero gallery representation and doubted I’d ever have any, and sick of all the yappity yap art talk I overheard next to $80 thousand dollar paintings of a white canvas or a close-up of genital pores, I decided to hostess an accessible art show ‘for the people.’ I thought that art could and should bend your mind, that it should be affordable so more artists could sell something while they were alive, and that it should be fun or provocative or disturbing or beautiful. I didn’t want to create the kind of alienation that made people think “I don’t know anything about art.” I wanted to engage the rest of the world in a forum where their reactions were just as valid as the urban trendy androids who namedropped like there was no tomorrow and had shitty taste on top of that.

Nowhere does this type of alienation between the art/artist and the public exist as markedly as in performance art. And there’s a group of performance artists seeking to practice, produce, and entertain or edify the public. For a decade, they’ve been doing their thing, and they are called 7A-11D.

Yes, it’s already confusing. The group’s name is already a little fuzzy and forgettable- something like Performance Art Toronto would be boring, sure, but it would help the audience sort it out and make for easier googling. Or they could use a blunt and memorable moniker like Trout or Sick Minds or Stage Rage. But they didn’t, and for now they are 7A*11D.

Last night at the Gladstone Hotel, they had a ‘funrazor’ to help raise money for their autumn performing arts festival. I thought I’d check it out. You all know how much I enjoy the festivities of men in dresses, and with catty Keith Cole as MC/hostess, I was surely in for an evening of surprises.

Hmm, problem was, Keith Cole wasn’t wearing a dress. A sequined top and a bouffant wig, yes. Dress? not so much. No, just dangling away in all his/her glory. So….what is the artist trying to say?

That’s the question I asked more and more as the night went on and my yawns got bigger. Is all performance art porn? By the time I stole out- before the show had ended- I felt like some sort of prude. It’s not like I haven’t been there, done that, whatever it was, but I have to say, for all my frank truck driver talk and my sexy joie de vivre, I found the live- er, performances- tawdry, forced, and distasteful. Was everyone trying to say something profound about sexuality in their art, and missing the point entirely, or was I the one missing the point?

I don’t know. But I sure didn’t need to see…a human, er, hand puppet. I didn’t need to hear the flexible contortionist punani licking jokes that went on for the whole of the evening, regardless of how sassy the yogalicious girl toy was.

But to each their own. There were, occasionally, a few performances that veered from the unsexiest sex statements into something reasonably weird and funny, like Elle’s human fly costume that gave Bono a run for his money. There was also a whole lot of duct tape going on, including one performance which consisted of a full head-wrap: then the artist held the microphone up to his skull and tore the tape, and half of his skin, off with full sound effects. Again, I asked, “What is the artist trying to say?” The sound of one scalp scraping?

For all the openness I had, the truth is, it’s likely I won’t be concerning myself with much in the way of performance art from here on in. I gave it a go, and it’s not for me. But it might be for you, who knows? The artists take it all very seriously, and here’s their agenda of goals so that you can decide if you want to check them out or support them:

Our goals are:

* to foster the development of a local performance art community
* to gain increased recognition for the performance art activity that takes place in Toronto and across Canada
* to activate interest in and expand audiences for performance art
* to encourage the exchange of ideas, information, and strategies in the field of performance art
* to explore definitions of performance art and facilitate an awareness of and critical discussion about its form and content
* to develop sources for the sponsorship, promotion, and dissemination of performance art
* to document work for archival and pedagogical purposes

(www.7a-11d.ca)

I don’t know if last night’s disappointing cabaret did anything to help them achieve these goals, but they did raise a shitload of money for their fall festival, and that’s great, though I’ll be giving it a miss. I guess I just don’t understand art, darling. While I did chuckle, briefly when the ‘fat femme mafia’ undressed completely and began wiggling like a bowlful of Jello on stage. But it all comes back to that question- what is the artist trying to say? And I’ll admit it: beats me.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Wonder Bred: an art show manifesto

this manifesto is from an art show in 2003 called Wonder Bred. I came across the artist’s statement recently and think it sums up much of my writing work as well as my visual art.

My work cannot be limited by cavalier academia, which inquires about such elusive ideas as, “What is art?” Nor will my imagination be limited by mass culture and its trends, here today, gone tomorrow, back next season, so last season. My art spans the world of the intellect, the soul, the mystical, and the shopping mall. Whatever I feel, wherever I find wonder, whatever I wonder, I create.

I concede that these creations are clever, born of a caustic wit and a need, never outgrown, to play, to play tricks, to play with toys. They aren’t ideas formed in art school, with serious labour applied to anatomical attention or to space and light. They have a certain unschooled feeling about them, yet my imagination is not uneducated. To the contrary, I devour voraciously every aspect of as many cultures as I can digest. My education began early; looking at dead insects, raising my hand fifty times in Sunday School to ask questions no one could then or can now answer. It continued in the Niagara Falls library, reading about fish and poetry, about Michael Jackson, the occult, Indian tribes, and other anthropologies. I am formally schooled in journalism, but prefer the Enquirer to the Globe: it tells far more about human nature.

Hence, celebrity finds its way into my wonder. The academics might push away the importance of pop culture, striving for the higher mind, yet I know what guerilla scholar Camille Paglia knows: that academia has little place in ancient or modern anthropology, that the clues and the cues for who and what we are begin with the commonplace. Celebrity and shopping fills in a void where we have become spiritually hollow. We seek to consume, in a desperate and almost ritualistic manner, the fantasy that fame and wealth create. Celebrity fails us, as religion did, but failing pantheons are all we have ever had. We must question the failure of our gods, or our God, and of ourselves, as they reflect too poignantly our own shortcomings. If we have the ability to analyze, we can grow. If we lack this ability, we can depend on artists and reporters and teachers to show us the variety of signs, but there is no place where we can find complete truth.

Andy Warhol was an artist who changed the face of art completely and permanently. Whether we love or hate his excessively simple works, and his often distasteful archeology, we must see that his contribution to the changing of the imagination was incredibly important. Andy didn’t live by any rules but those of his own neuroses- the same rules by which we live our own lives! He pushed the boundaries of what is art, because he didn’t care about the answer. He bridged what we refused to link: mad with mundane, sacred with ordinary, massive manufacturing with elitist craft. He was a creepy pervert who loved speed and feet; he loved to observe the madness of freaks and film it, with zero form applied. He believed in shopping and barely felt the suicides of his friends; he wore sloppy shoes and spoke so quietly no one could hear him. Much of his work was actually made by others: without Photoshop, he couldn’t manufacture his ideas fast enough. He had to manufacture, as if he were a company. He couldn’t spend weeks on a piece when there were a thousand pieces to be made, so he printed hundreds of replicas of his works in hundreds of different shades. Repetition was the hallmark of his work, yet the things he captured weren’t mundane. Monroe, electric chairs, dollar signs are far more reflective of Western religion than the exquisite and carefully rendered works of the Renaissance.

Inspired by the things I love and the things I loathe about Andy Warhol meant using some of the cues from my own imagination. Unlike Andy’s work, mine might contain a commentary. My take on the electric chair comes in the form of Canadian psycho Karla Homolka. She occupies a special place in my personal archeology because I went to high school with her, attended the memorial for her sister, whom none of us knew then that she had killed. Using digital tools to colour my portrait of her, I call the piece, “I Shop Therefore I Kill”, demonstrating my belief that too much reverence for objects leads to a narcissism special to the 21st century- the inability to differentiate between object and human. Traditional religions, both monotheistic and pagan, did not lose the way we have lost, the sacredness of the thing: objects were ritualized in ways we have lost touch with and seek to recover by buying more of them.

The desire to fill an emptiness created in part by our culture extends to all sorts of addictions. The ancient shamanistic act of vision questing is also a hunger in these times, but we use magical substances to escape reality rather than to transcend the ordinary and recover the real.

When we lose our sense of wonder, we cannot glean the satisfactions that we require from our objects and from our consumption. We have removed all of the spiritual and literal nutrients from our excavations. We can recover the nourishment that our soul demands simply by stopping to look into the madness of our creation, to see the way a star glitters on the Cartier in the window, to chew the hell out of boring old poets to get at the heart of what they were trying to say. The classroom and the supermarket forget that this is how to edify the masses, but there is no way around it. We must open our souls to the life and decay around us, to play with portents as if this world were a playground, to twist back the ideals sold to us into their original, or into new shapes. We must go back to the way we discovered things as children, and ask millions of questions, to tease the living daylights out of our authorities, to revel and reveal, to laugh and to sob and to wonder.

I might go shopping
Just to buy those things that are eluding me
Just to buy something from the mall
I feel so empty, so I might go shopping
Just to buy those things that will make me feel
Just to buy those things from the mall

-from Go to the Bank by James

manifesto from Wonder Bred, by Lorette C. Luzajic, www.thegirlcanwrite.net

Awfully Gorgeous: Dana’s Damned Dollies

Another art party at Shampoo Hair is always cause for celebration. Of course it’s super cool when a resident hottie fetches your beer from an ice-filled shampooing sink. It’s even cooler to gaze around at hipsters in their inspired vintage outfits, no doubt killer mixing pieces from Kensington’s clothes bounty. But coolest of all, the creative community comes together casually to enjoy one another’s company and to look at and talk about art in a relaxed manner without pretension. These are art shows for real people who want to have a good time, not be bored to death and worried about saying the wrong thing. The flavour recalls the good old days when the Idea Museum created gallery spaces by exhibiting hot local artists in Cabbagetown apartments, inviting a DJ, and leaving the hoity-toity scenesters in the pages of Toronto Life where they belonged. Whatever happened to that Brat Pack?

This time, Jessica Whitbread double duties as both the brains and the beauty behind the Shampoo series, merging her curatorial acumen with her natural flare for a party, and voila, the results are Awfully Gorgeous. Montreal artist Dana De Kuyper is the creator of these Damned Dollies, strangely festive little poppets that make the macabre cute and cuddly. You might recognize Dana’s dollies from the pages of Strut, Bust, or Elle Quebec, but don’t miss them while they’re on display for the next few weeks at Shampoo, 32 St. Andrew Street, Toronto. They’re so affordable that you can pick up a handful, and the varying characters will absolutely remind you of specific personalities or friends.

Recent years have seen a revival in doll making, with a kind of gothic bent. Year before last, Ugly Dolls, those impossibly sweet plush toys that flew from the shelves, won Toy of the Year Award. Those string-a-long monster doll key chains dangle from every cell phone and key ring in sight. As a toy lover, this is all great and dandy, but Dana’s pieces feel like real characters because they are one-of-a-kind, stitched and bitched by her inventive hand into unique being.

Those cranky sour types I don’t like might ask what kind of importance the art of weird dolls could possibly bring to the table. But those who know the meaning of life would say make play, not war.

Visit Dana: www.damneddollies.com

Visit the writer at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.