Gordie Painting

I’m a Canadian artist who has shown in galleries for thirty years. I’ve had over thirty solo shows and my work is in many esteemed private and corporate collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, The Canadian Embassy in Beijing, Shaw Communications and Edmonton City hall. In my series, "Grid," I paint square by square, row by row. The painting may appear digitized but is meticulously hand painted. I've always used the grid to scale up my photos but leaving traces of the process creates a tension between the image and the squares of tone and colour which are reassembled by the eye. I think about Gerhard Richter as I make all those choices in each square of the grid – deciding how much and where to blur things. Each square ends up being an abstract painting in a way. I've always used the grid, as artists since the Renaissance have done to scale up their images, though in these paintings I've allowed it to be seen. In the modern era the grid becomes a subject unto itself underscoring the abstraction. The frontality and regularity of the grid has been explored as a separate subject matter in contemporary art by such artists as Chuck Close, Brice Marden, and Agnes Martin. My row by row construction of a realist image is meant to reveal the abstraction of the paint handling, the history of the technique, and to connect these with a contemporary digital environment. I’m interested in the layers of transformations – from the transformation of the model, to the photoshopped image, which then becomes a ubiquitous image seen in grocery store aisles and on coffee tables. Unlike the mass produced glossy magazine cover, paint is a kind of skin, a unique surface.