Self Promotion

A Presumed Necessity, However Discomfiting

I don’t exhibit my work very often these days, partly because I hardy ever get asked to, and partly because I dislike what we may as well call the physiognomy of an exhibition opening: a few cursory looks from scattered attendees, a few ernest peerings at the printed titles of works, a few desperate, silly questions about how the art got this way, and sometimes a few parting assurances that it was nice to see me again blah blah (both my wife, Malgorzata, and my daughter, Meredith, will, I know, feel restive at what they see as 1) my galloping cynicism and 2) the general, allover bleakness that comes upon me whenever I am too far from my comfortably cluttered, old-shoe studio in our beloved Swan House.

Thanks to an abiding interest in my work, however, by brilliant Toronto-based, Chinese-Canadian photographer/writer/publisher Lee Ka-sing (begettor of the long-running art-weekly The Monday Art Post—to which I have contributed poems and paintings for over a decade now)—I am having another exhibtion. At his gallery.

The exhibition is a small one. It is made up of a selection of my notebooks and a number of paintings on paper (“from my painterly past,” as the invitation states), that have for the most part not been seen before; most of them have in fact been zippered up for a long time in a huge black folio lurking in the corner of my studio. These are paintings I have always liked quite a lot, and because I’d like to see then again, it ocurred to me that other people might enjoy them as well. Who knows?

Left: Bee Balm or Honey Pump (to Joseph Beuys), February 11, 2014

Right: Communicating Vessels, May 2, 2015

The notebooks are very important to me. I began keeping them around 2010 and at first they were just a depository for my scratching down ideas for possible paintings and for free-radical words and phrases and lines that might sometime bully their way into poems. Very soon, however, they became ends in themselves and the pages, though not very large (usually 12” x 9”), began to bear what I came to think of as fully finished paintings. To date, I have over 60 of them. There will be 10-12 of them in the exhibition (I am publishing a few sample pages below).

Left: Unicycle, November 1, 2016 Right: Green Wagon, Movember 1, 2016

Left: My Drifting Eye, My Mendicant Eye, November 14, 2020. Right: Don Quixote Underway, November 13, 2020.

Left: Autumn Tree, October 18, 2022 Right: A John the Baptist Candle, October 18, 2022

I work very quickly. So quickly it gives me quite a lot of pleasure (joy sometimes) to look back over them—just to see where I’ve been. This isn’t (gawd knows) any sort of merely narcissistic pleasure. The fact is, the stuff that teems, often riotously, through these jostling pages all looks now as if it had been made by somebody else entirely! Clearly some simmering, muscle-flexing, devil-may-care genius!

Tabasco Flower, July 17, 2025