Provincetown Painting

I spent my sixteenth summer on a family farm in Ontario, Canada, with only a book of Van Gogh’s drawings and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Something clicked in my brain and when I went back to Nova Scotia in the fall I decided to become an artist. Art School and fifteen years of experimentation with Surrealism, stripe paintings, abstract pieces, glazing pieces and kinetic sculpture gave me an extensive grounding in techniques. Back on earth I finally decided to turn to realism which was my goal in the first place. I’d like to think that all those adventures in techniques gave me a broader range of choices and tolerances than might be typically found with a realist. At age twenty with my BFA and a new wife I moved to London where for the next two years I did a series of pencil drawings on a plain white ground. Then we moved to Spain where both of us wrote short stories for a year. Once back in Canada I started my first major project, the Bridgetown Series, (1979 to the present) which was a portrait of a small Nova Scotia town. It was a complex portrait. It consisted of paintings, watercolour and watercolour dry-brush, of the townscape, the landscape, the people and the animals. I regarded them all as a sequence of portraits. The object was to record first hand village life before the arrival of cable TV and the rest of the urban electronic universe. It would not be possible to paint anything like that again. The Series led to the creation of my first art gallery, dedicated to showing that series only, and to a book A Rural Life written and illustrated by me, and to many television programs about the series done by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and TVOntario. Later in Toronto I opened a new large loft space gallery in the middle of the art district designed to house my next series on store windows from North America and Europe. At the same time I started my own film company, Tolmie Films. The object of the Window Series was to discover and present urban images as a counterpoint to my earlier rural work (1984 to the present). These paintings are mostly in oil and tend to be fairly large, the largest to date being nine by seven feet. I chose shop windows because the derivative nature of shop window designs echo and even retail our cultural illusions. They are our beliefs hiding in plain sight.