What: New Paintings by Colin Muir Dorward
Where & when: to March 23 at SAW Gallery, 67 Nicholas St., in Arts Court. Vernissage is 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. today, Friday, Feb. 15, at the gallery. Free admission.
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The Dorwards of perception have been hung.
The paintings of Colin Muir Dorward, at SAW Gallery to March 23, mess with perception in various and gleeful ways.
There is the perception of space, which Dorward thwarts habitually, as if he cannot help himself. In Grievance Calculator, the painting that got him on last year’s shortlist for the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, the comfort of domestic interiors is pushed to the margins by a rambunctious swirl of limbs and other things that dominate the centre of the split panel.
Even one’s perception of how a painting is made is challenged. Dorward painted the right panel of Grievance Calculator in his studio at the University of Ottawa, where he will soon complete his MFA, but he painted the left panel at home. Together they are initially chaotic but settle into a coherent and increasingly universal statement on the blurring between work and private life.
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“Grievance Calculator,” by Colin Muir Dorward at SAW Gallery in Ottawa.
Dorward’s work typically straddles disparate worlds. Even in love he does it: he’s an artist and his girlfriend is an economist. (When I ask Dorward, an Edmonton native, if the MFA brought him to Ottawa he says, “Yes. That and a girl.”) He works with paints and she with percentiles, which seems a polarized match, though, now that I think of it, they’re both in their own way focused on the big picture.
Dorward resists getting too focused on details. When I ask him the title of one painting he says, “You know, it’s not titled yet. It was still wet when I moved it here so I haven’t really had a chance to think about it.” Is there a title for the exhibition? “I don’t think so. We haven’t talked about it. I think it’s probably just going to say my name.” (For the record, SAW curator Jason St-Laurent bills the show as one in his New Artist Spotlight series.)
Dorward’s is a refreshing approach, a mix of talent and come-what-may attitude. He says he’ll choose a title “if there’s something in the painting that I really want people to see,” but he’s content with whatever people see. Dorward is a very good and open-minded painter, distinctive but not dogmatic.
Another example: I note the defining mix of styles in his work, where realism happily flirts with surrealism in one, with impressionism in another. He says, “In a way I’m always painting like a realist painter because everything I’m putting down on the canvas is referenced from an optical experience that I’m having as I’m painting. I don’t want to think of styles because I don’t want to be tied into a style. That leaves me free to grab from whatever style is sitting in the back of my imagination.”
In both Grievance Calculator and in Mealtime — a spectacular, seven-foot-wide round portrait — the style plumbed from the back of Dorward’s mind could be described as Van Gogh gone even more mad than he so famously was. Two artists, nude and one-eyed, sprawl over a cluttered studio table and munch on paint. “Anyone who knows me would recognize my face there,” Dorward says. If he’s not recognized, that’s okay too.
All this adds to the beguiling mix of lightness and substance in Dorward’s work, which toy with your sense of them as either serious or humorous, until you realize that in almost every case they are both.
Because the building that houses his studio on campus was once a seminary, and because he was struck by the powerful emotion of artists’ behind renaissance works of Christ being crucified, he wanted to do a painting of “a crucifixion without having it actually looking like a crucifixion . . . without any suffering and pain.” He created a realist landscape of the campus behind a surreal cross, the prosaicness of the former accentuating the weirdness of the latter. Perched atop the cross are two legs, and they look rather comfortable up there. I ask, does this painting have a title? Yes, he says, it’s Legs Enjoying Fresh Air.
In another painting, another pair of disembodied legs gamely tries to get into a pair of pants, which of the many items scattered about the frame are the only ones of any possible use to legs. It’s absurdly funny, yet it’s also a pointed comment on being unfulfilled in a modern, consumerist life stuffed with every gadget and trinket imaginable. The title is, Legs Trying to Fit in.
“It’s a bit of a safety net for me, the humour,” Dorward says. “I think a person that can walk into the room and toss a few jokes around is easier to be with.” He adds that because he’s from a “comfortable” background, he doesn’t feel entitled to make “severe” paintings.
Dorward didn’t win the RBC prize last year. Too bad it wasn’t an award for being unpretentious. He’d be hard to beat.
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“Mealtime,” by Colin Muir Dorward at SAW Gallery. (Photo courtesy the artist)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
