Beings

About Beings

These works began in a studio in the woods in the mountains, by the river, with light snow now and then, very cold, mating Elk roaming the trails, and no one else but the paintings and me.

 I began the sketches for the Beings works right after a particularly hard time in my life, in 2023. About a month after that ordeal ended, I was unexpectedly awarded a two week residency at The Banff Centre of Creative Arts. There I was, in an art studio/cabin in the woods, with complete privacy. Alone time. The opportunity to start life fresh. 

Over the course of the first day’s work, a Being began to appear in the painting. So, there it was, Me and They. Through the paint, colours, and weirdness of forms, Me and They began to tell each other what we needed to become complete in ourselves. Or, no, they said, not that, start again, so I wiped it off, back and forth and so on, like that. And so the daily creation continued, with about 16 of Us done over a two week period.

When the two weeks were over, I took everything from Banff back to my studio in Hamilton. 

I started cutting head shapes out of birch panel, using a table jigsaw. After cutting out and sanding, I primed them and made them to stand upright on a small half-moon stand with a slit in the middle.

The process of painting them into being alive was a back and forth process between us, over a period of weeks for each one. I would ask them what they want and my own state of being would feed back into them. And I would be affected by their state of being in return. And so we are, alive and together in a strange loop.

All photos by Toni Hafkenschied.

All works represented by The Susan Hobbs Gallery.