September 2010, Winsor Gallery Fall 2010, James Baird Gallery email: stevedriscoll@sympatico.ca Born Oakville, Ontario, Canada 1980 Group Exhibitions Awards Commissions Media Articles Other Where we live, where we love (2009) Blackwater Woods (2009) Notes From The Underbrush (2007) Pipedream (2003) Not on the floor, please. (2001) Triptych (2000)Upcoming
Contact
For more information on STEVE DRISCOLL:Conversation (the book) please visit the websiteCurriculum Vitae
Solo Exhibitions
2009 "From the back seat of a canoe" James Baird Gallery, St. Johns, Newfoundland
2009 "Where we live, where we love" Winsor Gallery, Vancouver, British Colombia
2009 "Blackwater Woods" Moore Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2008 "Conversations" David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2008 "Conversations" James Baird Gallery, Pouch Cove, Newfoundland
2008 "Conversations" B&K Projects, Copenhagen, Denmark
2007 "Notes From The Underbrush" Moore Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2006 "You Must Also Look Elsewhere" Moore Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2004 "The Toronto International Art Fair" Toronto, Ontario
2004 "120 Volts and a Can of Propane" James Baird Gallery, St. Johns, Newfoundland
2003 "Pipedream" Moore Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2001 "Not on the floor, please." Gallery 401, Toronto, Ontario
2009 "Pool NY Art Fair" New York, New York
2009 "Triangulating New York, Toronto & Bermuda" National Arts Club, New York, New York
2008 "Germ Welfare" Shore Institute of the Contemporary Arts, Long Branch, New Jersey
2008 "Summer Show" Moore Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2006 "Critics Select" Shore Institute of the Contemporary Arts, Long Branch, New Jersey
2006 "Winter Show" Moore Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2005 "Big Show" 1139 College Street, Toronto, Ontario
2004 "Winter Show" Moore Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2004 "Beyond the Firewall" The Worm Factory, Toronto, Ontario
2002 "Summer Show" Moore Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2002 "Juggernaut Cocktail" Angell Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2002 "Go West" Tatar Alexander Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2001 "Mini Me" Spin Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
2000 "triptych" Atrium Gallery Cafe, Toronto, Ontario
2002 Ontario College of Art and Design Medal Winner for Drawing and Painting
2002 Nora E. Vaughan Award
2002 David L. Stevenson Scholarship
2001 Dorothy Stevens Award
2001 Curry's Art Store Award
2000 Curry's Art Store Award
2002 The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir "Music Meets Canvas" presented at the Roy Thompson Hall
Rockwell, Steve. "Conversations" dART International #23 pg. 12, Fall 2008
Hayward, Karla. "A Maverick of Multi-Media" The Telegram, NL, October 10, 2008
Brodahl, Thomas. Surfstation, surfstation.com, September 28, 2008
Hatch, Robin. "Urban Planner" toronotoist.com, September 28, 2008
Baird, James. "Urban cowboy amongst the flowers" Current, NL, Oct 3, 2008
White, Michele. "Beyond The Firewall" Canadian Art, www.canadianart.ca Spring 2005
Art Ads dART International Winter 2004/2005
Rockwell, Steve. dARTICALES dART International Winter 2004/2005
Earnshaw, Ameesha. "The Urban Cowboy" Lucky, Australia, 2004
Richardson, Mikey. "Thoughtcrimez" Shift, Japan, www.shift.jp.org 2004
Bennett, Tara Bradbury, The Telegram, Newfoundland, May 9, 2004
CBC Evening Local News, CBC Television Toronto, July 30, 2002
Hastings, Sasha. "Cocktail High" Now Magazine, July 26, 2002
"Best Bet: Juggernaut Cocktail" Eye Magazine, July 11, 2002
Book Publication: Steve Driscoll CONVERSATIONS, Edited by Laurel McMillan, ©2008
"Death Mountain" Ad Campaign, jointly with Sakis?Building Mural: 384 College Street Toronto Ontario jointly with Matt BahenShow Texts
Where we live, where we love” is a collection of work that captures the Canadian experience. Constructed through memories of cross-country driving trips, portaging and hiking, these paintings depict the vast and diverse backcountry of Canada.
"When I sit back and let memory wash over my mind's eye, I relive the joy of these experiences. Times with friends, times alone, but always present is the untouchable life of ever-changing imagery" ~Driscoll
Much like memories, these paintings separate into fragments. Sections of the image depict place in a tactile or tangible way, while other areas appear to abstract before your eyes, like a blurred flashback where the recollection is only partial. Driscoll's paint handling leaves an unexpected mark which makes the work seem constructed rather than painted. Using materials not commonly found in a painter's tool box, a heavy sense of materialism is apparent.
When you leave one of these works, what you are left with is not an image, but rather a feeling of place that is etched into your own memory.
Blackwater Woods is collection of works that reflect on living in the Canadian landscape. In 2008, I found myself wandering through six different countries, looking at and thinking about vast amounts of art. Pausing to reflect on what I had seen, I realized that my thoughts were being filtered through my surroundings in each place. The further I traveled away from home, the more intense my desire for something local; a tree from High Park, a stand of birches from Killarney. The intent was not to depict these images in photographic detail, but rather to catch the moving memories of these daydreams from afar.
These works are of flowers, just flowers, arbitrary vessels to hold an alchemy evolving over several years from the absence of image, structure and intentionally. Driscoll's previous work represented a merger of Color and shape, a free flow where three-dimensional objects protruded from a perfectly smooth surface. The effects often appeared random and contradictory. The current body of paintings is, in a manner, inverted, adopting a dense network of carved lines not unlike veins, creating stops and gullies for the viscous flow of material. The remnants of last year's work are now found in each branch, leaf and petal. The organic pattern of the carvings is in the detail. The material separates and disperses but only after careful and precise calculation. The textural surface of the painting is a terrain of color as rivers, lakes and ponds.
A pipedream is the long shot. It is a bargain fantasy raised of empty elements. In Eugene O'Neil's "The Iceman Cometh" his characters wait in anticipation and fear for the Iceman, to stave off the crushing impact of time in an environment they can no longer understand.
Built upon a support of iron bars are layers of resin, loosely brushed paint, and an assemblage of cast materials. The industrial undercarriage contrasts with the imagery in the work: appropriated images from the Group of Seven. These romantic icons of a nostalgic intimacy with nature, reconstituted, fight their way to the surface through the chaos of paint drips and debris undermining and reveling the hand.
The work is about argument and disruption; it is whole in general and fragmented in the particular. In approaching these pieces surrender to the familiar, and allow it to guide you in their unraveling. As in Kafka's world, what we can know is disjointed and becomes only vaguely recognizable, pinned against the steel of an overwhelming authority. It is within this structure that the individual eventually succumbs to despair and begins to create his pipedreams. But the vocabulary has been determined and the artist is neither free nor able. He is a haphazard scavenger of tradition and technology, where each clumsily present each other in the service of some new question.
We are generally limited by connotations, symbols, imagery and juxtaposition. As mere facilitators, perhaps, we can more effectively create dialog. A main interest within the work is the interaction of the material. Its innate form compromises the historical illusionism of paint, replacing it with its own physicality, a presence of depth and surface.
Urethane is a material commonly used as floor finishing. "Not on the floor, please" relocates it to the wall. Wire mesh is an armature supporting the urethane in its liquid form and freezing it in time. A method closer to sculpture rather than painting.
The process begins with minimal intervention as the material flows freely over the wire mesh deciding both form and direction. In the initial pour, is its completion. It is falling that informs our involvement. The work defines itself.
A byproduct of this free pour has been referenced to geographic land masses and weather movement. More important however is the dispersal itself. The actual and not a reference.
In my work I investigate abstraction as it moves toward the threshold of representation. I treat the physicality of the paint as though it were the emotion itself. Upon exhaustion I let the work sit. This fallow period allows a more critical and reflective return to the canvas. A condition of re-examination and question of self and work.
White is introduced as editor, in an attempt at keeping only what is necessary. Sections are built and collapsed, leaving each layer partially visible, tracking the narrative. Brush strokes are emphasized as evidence of the building process. Rips, tears and cut-outs bind the relationship between the work and state of mind. The insertion of decidedly placed wooden blocks affirm a persistent, unyielding refusal. The contradiction of foreign objects act as anchors, three dimensional focal points, question the relevance of my intent. A metaphor for misunderstanding.