Every painting has a story to tell, and I’d like to share the tale behind this piece of contemporary abstract artwork I recently finished. It’s an acrylic mixed-media painting called Stats 101 and it measures 60” x 40”.
I think it’s a really fun piece, so I’m eager to share not only the story behind it but to show the creative process and final result as well. Therefore, you can see photos of its various stages during the past year in the gallery further down the page.
It Was a Rainy Day in December…
This painting had its origins last year during the Christmas season. And for anyone familiar with Vancouver, the weather shouldn’t come as a surprise. December is typically quite wet in the city.
It was the end of the semester at UBC (the University of British Columbia) and my daughter was writing her final exam. So, I decided to go down to the campus and hang out while she wrote it. As she sat in the lecture hall, I wandered to the west end of campus and walked down the steep hillside steps to Wreck Beach.
It was raining, but it was really beautiful. And there were actually quite a few people down on the beach. As I strolled along the sand, taking in the lush nature of my surroundings, I happened upon a discarded book. It was a wet, tattered and torn textbook called Understanding Statistics.
My immediate reaction was the feeling I had gotten from my daughter about that whole “first-year” experience you get at university. It’s that early phase in your post-secondary education when you take all these non-elective, core courses outside your major or area of interest. They’re usually survey courses like “Statistics 10” and the farthest thing from joy you can imagine. Totally enjoyable, gruelling, overwhelming, and brutal.
I found it kind of amusing – and perhaps serendipitous – to find this abandoned textbook on the beach. I was compelled to pick it up and started turning its soggy pages. It was, of course, full of these math formulas, differential equations maybe, I wasn’t sure, it’d been so long since I took math. But the way the book and the chapters and the pages were laid out – the words, graphs, equations – it spoke to me from an artistic perspective.
The Relationship Between Mathematics and Contemporary Abstract Expressionism
From an artistic standpoint, math is beautiful. So, I hiked back up the staircase from Wreck Beach and picked up my daughter from her exam – with this dripping-wet copy of Understanding Statistics in my hand. I took it back to Grandma & Grandpa’s for Christmas and set it on the toasty hearth of the fireplace, turning the pages every now and then over the course of the holidays.
The first thing I did when I returned home was paint a series of Little Gems using ripped-out pages from the book for collages. (Read this post or this post to learn more about how I use my Little Gems to develop my art.) And in my opinion, some of those paintings turned out beautifully, having a really edgy, textured contemporary art look to them.
I had this old 60” x 40” frame and also had some canvas lying around, so I borrowed some stretcher bars from my friend Elsa, another artist here on Gabriola Island, then I just started collaging pages and pieces of pages onto the canvas and really digging into the themes and the numbers – and really riding on the energy of how math can be really frustrating, especially when you’re forced to do it in a first-year course you don’t even want to take.
But also, math can be much like art in the way that you’re in the process of figuring things out. And that’s what an abstract painting is. You’re trying to make it all work, trying to balance the marks and lines and gestures – and the whole composition. They’re all part of the equation. You’re wanting to add excitement, but you also need to add areas of negative space to exemplify the exciting bits. So, you find yourself adding new elements and taking things away. And, after a six-month journey of addition and subtraction, I finally finished the painting the week before last.
The Final Result
Meeting with another artist last month – who paints intuitively by following her heart – pushed me to finish the painting. I ended up stencilling the textbook’s title across the front of the painting – Understanding Statistics – which to me, is one big metaphor.
The truth is, I love this painting, and I’m really proud of it. There are so many layers to it and there’s so much thought put into it, and it’s just a really fun piece.
