Spectacles of Sentiment

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Award Recipient

Mary Plumb Blade Award – Honourable Mention

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Routine Romance
47.5 x 58″, oil on canvas, 2023

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Recently, I have been exploring painting as a process of romanticizing mundane objects and moments of my daily life and abstracting them into spectacles of sentiment. I am especially interested in the dual definitions of the words “romance” and “spectacle”; a romantic is described as someone who is sentimental, but also naive and idealistic, while a spectacle is an exhibition or phenomenon but also a lens to see through.

There is a link between the tendency to romanticize and the process of abstraction in painting. I am looking at both as human conditions, as creative endeavours we indulge in to make sense of ourselves and find ease in our circumstances. When we romanticize we create narratives that describe something as better than it is and by abstracting in my work, I am freeing the subject of its reference to the real world. In both cases, a transformation occurs, one that makes more from what already is. I think this relates to the ways we look at uncertainty, forming reason when there is no tangible explanation and assigning significance to coincidence. 

The spectacle is the result of these processes; exhibiting and encouraging alternate ways of seeing the subject in its altered state. Spectacles of Sentiment is an ongoing venture into making sense of my life. Through abstracting my reality into gestures of paint, I am creating illusions of my direct experiences, perceiving small events and poeticizing them into spectacles of their own. 

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Scuba
60 x 72″, oil on canvas, 2023

Sensitive Farmers
60 x 72″, oil on canvas, 2022