NEWS

January 2023

Ministry of Casual Living - Window Gallery
Sunday, January 29 to Sunday, February 26, 2023
Millie’s Lane (formerly Odeon Alley)
766 Yates Avenue, Victoria, BC
(north side of Yates, a short walk west of Blanchard)

BRIAN GRISON
Untitled, 2022
gesso and acrylic on canvas on birch panel
48 x 36 inches

Statement about the Painting:

I have never been a figurative artist. I did not enjoy or do well at figure drawing or painting in art school. My latest project, the artist-and-model, is therefore an unexpected development for me and my art practice. The relationship between the artist and model and their connection to most aspects of society, began about 30,000 years ago, and is still controversial today. This broad subject is the focus of my current project.

These new voices and narratives in my thinking, are a challenge to my art-making. In the conceptual issues of this project, the dialogue between the female model and the male artist, and their conversation with me, is a theme that reaches back to Ancient Greece. As well, the relationship between the viewer and the posing female model is central to the meaning and purpose of much contemporary art. It is also one of the dominant themes of modern advertising.

In this particular painting, I enlarge the role of the model. She still encompasses the ancient notion that the first art teacher was female. Now, she is also instrumental in the life of a youngster discovering the ambition of becoming an artist.

May 26, 2018

         A screen print, Three Boats on a Beach with Biomorphic Shapes," which I produced in 1992, and first exhibited in a large solo exhibition at the Prints and Drawing Council of Canada in Toronto in 1992, will participate in a one-day fund-raising auction at the Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George, BC. The print, in an edition of sixty, was printed by master printer Allen Sheppard, in his Hamilton studio, Antipress. This project was funded by Joel Starkman who took the thirty even-numbered prints into his own collection. Several of the prints are now in public collections: among these are the University of Toronto, the University of Victoria, Carleton University Art Gallery, Gallery 2, Grand Forks, BC and the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

November 24, 2017 to April 2018

          A drawing of mine, Becoming an Artist, is participating in an in-house group exhibition, Pop Goes the World!, at the Woodstock Art Gallery in Woodstock Ontario. The other artists in the exhibition are Glenn Elliott, Greg Curnoe, Robert Creighton, Julio Ferrer, Tom Benner and Derek Michael Besant.

November 1, 2017

          On the first of November I flew to Toronto with my girlfriend, Laura Dempsey, to attend the the opening of The Kingston Prize exhibition at the Peel Art Museum and Archives in Brampton on November 4.  After this party I spent a week in Toronto and several days in Ottawa - visiting galleries, museums, relatives and friends. The trip (as far as the Toronto and Brampton portion) was funded by a Travel Grant from the Canada Council, for which I am grateful. My contribution to the exhibition/competition was a mixed-media drawing, Self Portrait, which won the People's Choice Award, for which I am also grateful. Since I managed to pay for the whole trip in advance, I was able to spend all the grant funds and the award money on much-needed art materials. To see this drawing here, please scroll down to my "News" entry for August 5, 2017.

September 30, 2017  

          I held a opening party of my new studio in Victoria on September 30. Having turned seventy years old this year, this party also began my one-month, every-fifth-year birthday sale of artwork. Many works, oil paintings, drawings, prints and chapbooks were sold for only $70 each. With the raised funds I was able to buy a new lap-top computer, frame a bunch of drawings, do a bit of travelling. I found new homes for a lot of art and met interesting new friends and collectors.

August 7, 2017

          On August 10 to the 24th, I exhibited the triptych, Three Thinking and Drawing Lessons, in the Ministry of Casual Living display window in Odeon Alley, on Yates Street, just west of the Odeon Theatre, in Victoria, BC. Earlier this year, the triptych was displayed in a similar exhibition window at the Burnaby Art Gallery.

          This three-part mixed media drawing on paper is the latest in a long series of works in which I consider the many links between learning to think and learning to draw. Reflecting my sense that one is always learning to think and draw, I will continue to work on the triptych between exhibitions. In this way, I hope to close a bit of the gap between dreaming and knowledge.

August 5, 2017:

          A recent mixed-media self-portrait drawing was accepted as one of thirty finalists from across Canada for the 2017-2018 Kingston Prize exhibition. The show travelled to three Ontario locations:
Firehall Theatre, Gananoque, from October 6 to October 22, 2017
Peel Art Gallery (PAMA), Brampton, from November 4 to January 21, 2018
Harbourfront Centre - Artport Gallery, Toronto, from February 2 to April 22, 2016

         In this mixed-media drawing, I acknowledge the natural shift in my studio practice from objective concerns for the problems of art making toward a more autobiographic range of subjects that reflect the conditions of physical and psychological aging. I recently discovered that the self-portrait, whether actual or metaphorical, might be the most autobiographic and psychoanalytic subject an artist can pursue.

             There are many ways to represent one’s self. In Self-Portrait, I presented four of them. There is the presumed objective depiction of the physical self. There is a version of the remembered self. There is a secret self that one dreams of and tries to emulate. There is also a kind of Platonic self. As the viewer of this drawing will discover, seeing all these aspects of the self-portrait at once is difficult, suggesting that vision, like knowledge and understanding, is illusive.

July 29, 2017:

          Between July 29 and August 17, 2017, two recent drawings participated in a group exhibition, Psychedelia, at the Martin Batchelor Gallery, Victoria.

          The drawings I produced especially for this exhibition are not particularly psychedelic. Only a few of my drawings from the 1960s vaguely contain subject or stylistic reference to psychedelia. However, I have been interested in pataphysics for many years, and I have occasionally produced individual works, or series, that reference this 'science'. In this website, the two series, Thoughts Faster Than Light and Dreams of Knowing are examples of this interest. Among other things, pataphysics is the science of the impossible. With reference to the two drawings shown in Psychedelia, there is probably no such thing as masculine or feminine psychedelia, no such thing as an ancient science of psychedelia and, therefore, no possible pataphysical or any other commentary on these 'inventions'. To appreciate this irony one would need to be stoned, and perhaps that is psychedelic.

March 20 - May 14, 2017:

Adventures of a Drawing Boy
Burnaby Art Gallery:
Bob Prittie Library (Metrotown) | 6100 Willingdon Avenue
Shadbolt Centre for the Arts | 6450 Deer Lake Avenue

          For this series of mixed-media drawings on watercolour paper, I developed a project that is a commentary on the mental life of the student. The appropriated image of a boy making a drawing is a stand-in for the typical student, who is engaged in a practice similar to the process of making art. 

          The apparently random composition and deep layering of images is meant to create distractions from the drawing boy. It is also meant to represent the mental processes that interfere with the student/artist’s ability to concentrate. 

          This two-part solo exhibition took place at both the Bob Prittie Library and the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, two satellite exhibition spaces of the Burnaby Art Gallery.