Robert Gay

Born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario Canada. Currently residing in Toronto. My work follows in the long tradition of painting. For me painting is the primal impulse to mark. It’s a visual record of the mind, the body, and the human spirit. It’s about a need to both create and to destroy. Maybe it’s out of sheer frustration that I paint, maybe it’s out of a need to violate or to contradict, or possibly, it’s simply about the pure enjoyment of mark-making, either way, there is a strong feeling present and I feel compelled to react to this feeling.

The content in my work is often ambiguous and rooted in a surrealistic trust of intuition. The work is related to the gestalt, an incompleteness that suggests rather than illustrates. In some works an obvious image appears, other pieces are less obvious and are often layered with fragmented ideas, incomplete thoughts, and multiple meanings. Each painting usually begins without a preconceived image. They begin with a series of random mark-making. Marks, images, textures, and colors often appear, then are revised, altered, corrected, rejected, and at times even accepted. The works are based on an improvisational search for correctness with an emphasis on documenting the history of the ...

BA Fine Art: Studies include Art History, Fine Art, English Literature, University of Ottawa. George Brown College: Social Service Worker degree.