The series Fabula and Young Artists are paintings and drawings I worked on between 2002 and 2008 in order to delve into the anxiety surrounding subject matter in contemporary painting. For each of the Young Artists painting or drawing I placed myself in the role of one of my own students whom I photographed at work during studio class—I played ‘medium’ picturing my hypothetical ‘self’ in one panel and my hypothetical art in the other.

I examine the significance of multi-valent stories and their “telling” to the construction of self and culture. In picturing students at work, I recall both the ‘behind the scenes’ daily lives of young artists, as well as my own years as a young painter. The series is composed primarily of diptychs, portraying young artists at work in the studio in juxtaposition with the subject they are, hypothetically, interpreting. The monochromatic world of an artists’ mundane struggle with technique is contrasted with the vital choice and commitment to a subject, as expressed in colour.

In Fabula the multi-valent factor became planes of interconnected expression in a single telling, layering times places, and events.

read text written by art critic René Viau

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