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No Common Ground.

These paintings began with thick, aggressive gestures on a rectilinear support. The surface is worked and reworked and eventually things start to emerge from the muck. Blocks of thick paint become walls in and around my studio, another area becomes a floor, and so on. Eventually a space is pictured that is not entirely real, nor entirely fictive. At a certain point I begin to cut and build upon the surface. In this way these spaces are no longer bound by the edges of the support but are allowed to grow organically in any direction. However, the spaces always begin with paint on a flat surface so there is always a tension between the pictorial and the sculptural. These spaces and their inherent tension parallel my own physical and psychological experience of the places I inhabit.

James Gardner is a recent graduate from the University of Guelph, and is currently living and working in Guelph.