Paper and Pipe Painting

The painting grew itself naturally to become a visual representation of the non-visual senses, primarily the sense of smell, and particularly the sense of smell in relation to our lesser appreciated sense of nostalgia. The smell of pipe tobacco, the dry warmth of old browning paper, the slow wick of Parisian perfume on your nightstand. Painted in the depths of one of Toronto's many lockdowns, I can see now how clearly I was manifesting my nostalgia for the life I had lived before the pandemic. The pipe I had smoked in England, the metal tin from Toulouse, filled with charcoal for my plein air drawings, and the Parisian wick and perfume, which my mother kept by her bed. I can see now that I was drawn to the sense of smell itself as a sort of trojan horse, and that in truth I was being drawn to the primary nature of smell. A smell can be easily remembered, but only elusively, with its reality clouded behind the passage of time, the sense of smell necessitates an immediacy that can never truly be reproduced by any artificial attempt. The best I could do at the time was a visual representation of the memories, a reminder of the once immediate life, relegated then, to the cloudy smell of these familiar objects.