Biography

For the most part, this site is now dedicated to a video and music project began in 2018 called House Wind. The paintings are remnants of a dormant practice; I painted almost everyday from 2000 through 2011, at the same time becoming immersed in art history as part of the practice. Then, for reasons that are still a bit of a mystery, I hit the wall and threw off the brushes for a 12-string guitar.

 

The original statement I posted on this site about painting still holds: There are a lot of things that influence how I paint, some obvious (Early Flemish art, Francis Bacon) and some esoteric (the psychic photographs of Ted Serios, Japanese portrait sculpture), though certainly the biggest influence has been the artists and art lovers with whom I’ve developed running dialogues over the years.

 

During the years I was painting I worked as a media monitor, watching and listening to TV and radio news and making summary notes about the stories as they unfolded. (Recently immortalized in Ruth Ozeki's novel The Book of Form and Emptiness--we bantered about this obscure, now-obsolete job for years.) Mediated images were absolutely central to how I went about making paintings. Most images were taken from the screen. Even the printed photos and bookplates that I drew from were often shot on video, played on screen, then re-photographed, the degraded image becoming the source from which I painted. Some of this approach to image-making has carried over to the way I shoot video, partly as an antidote to the plague of hyper-resolution. Here is my favourite example to date, made in 2021: "Lunar Gleam = Your Face" - House Wind . For more House Wind videos see the links on the Menu.

 

One key artist with whom I shared a running dialogue was Toronto painter John Brown, a dear friend who passed away in March 2020. My essay celebrating Brown's work may give some sense of how I fantasized my own practice might have played out, had I possessed a modicum of Jack's brilliant, uncompromising approach: https://www.johnbrownarchive.ca/wp-admin/Criticism/Budden-embodiment.pdf

 

House Wind music is on Spotify, etc. For more information about this 12-string "prepared guitar" project see my didactic blurbs on Bandcamp: https://housewind.bandcamp.com/

 

 I also write the odd art and music review to help me keep plugged into the local scene. Here's one I particularly enjoyed writing: https://www.citr.ca/discorder/winter-2018-19/art-review-marisa-kriangwiwat-holmes-at-artspeak/

 

In 2023, I live in Vancouver and work as a historical researcher.