Flip! may be a virtue made of a necessity. When confronted with her first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery with only a few months advance notice, the artist altered her working method from working on one, to working on several paintings at a time. While her approach to painting remained essentially the same, the paintings in Flip! are not as densely composed and have fewer layers of paint than her previous work. One might say that if Sheila Gregory's large expansive works are epic novels with a large cast of characters and subplots, the 20 paintings in Flip! Are a series of finely wrought short stories. GH
A revolution in how I paint
The following text is an edited transcript of a conversation between Sheila Gregory and Gordon Hatt on October 10, 1998:
GH: How did the short lead-time that you had in preparing for the original showing of Flip! Lead you to a different approach to painting?
SG: Flip! was the first time that I had ever worked on several panels at one time. Normally my working practise is one painting per month, and there is a lot of time spent labouring in and around each and every centimetre of a canvas. With the short lead-time for the exhibition and the challenge of creating an enormous new work, I had to rethink my studio practice: "How can I paint an 80 ft. piece that is almost 6 ft. tall in my 350 sq. ft. studio?" Those challenges are part of the intensity that drives me in the studio. Part of it is also the colour intensity, the mark-making intensity, the bearcat sensibility I like to throw into what I am doing. I really push for, and try to push myself to new edges. The work has influenced all work since then for me. I now work on a "multiple-paintings-at-one-time" approach where works are drying on the floor, stacked up to my waist height almost every other night. I have eight paintings lying on the floor around me as they are drying and in the morning I put them away and a new group of eight will come in and dry on the floor for the next set of challenges. Flip! was really important to teach me a new way of being able to work at a faster rate and in a more challenging way, overall.
GH: I would like to ask you about the influence that your participation in geological and archeological expeditions in the north has had on your work.
SG: In 1989, 1990 and 19941 had the opportunity to go up north for two-month periods of time, working on a geological crew, and the last time with a crew from McGill exploring Tule whaling villages. So, the influence of the last two trips really had the most profound effect on the work I had been doing since 1990: namely, rethinking fragments and how we derive meaning out of many pieces of a scattered, fragmented whole. Also, (I was interested in) the archeological point of view of trying to pull (those fragments) together, to then examine what the whole subject was. We were counting the cumulative number of harpoon heads (in the north) and various other data in order to assemble a sense of the history that had gone on prior to our point in time.
There are some interesting revelations in looking at the world from a scientific point of view. And there are parallels in the visual world and how, especially in the archeological sense, a lot of sight reading is initially done visually through aerial photography – flying in and, from above, choosing the best area for studying for a summer. A lot of that is picked up just through visual land formations. As your eye becomes visually attuned, you walk around and identify areas of occupation that require studying or mapping.
So, in the working process later in the studio the problem is: "How do you then distill that experience and turn it into part of your own working contemporary practise, and what do you really want to deal with there?" Going back to the archeological fragments, Flip! is comprised of 20 similar fragments or modules. They are all the same size canvases, 70 x 48 inches.
The starting point for me is usually composition, and the challenge to create a very interesting composition within one picture plane. In this particular painting, I throw the compositional tool out to the gallery director or the end manipulator of the piece to compose and thereby to derive their own meaning from the elements I have created.
GH: Do you see the marks you make on canvas as being meaningful?
SG: I was asked recently how much devotion I have to the palette that I choose. When starting a work, I let the colour work intuitively. Once I start a new series, I make a conscious decision to begin with a different scale or chroma than the previous one, which in the case of Flip! Tended to be very bright. But generally, it is not a consideration that I deal with. I spend more time thinking compositionally. Once I make that shift, I just go into the art supply store and I buy colours say, more on the earth level and the studio becomes the repository of those colours.
GH: What is the basis of that colour choice?
SG: I think it's intuitive. There was no conscious choice on my part to say it's going to be a series of very bright paintings. It started that way and it just kept going in that direction. There are two panels, however, within Flip!, which are entirely colour restricted – the two blue panels, #I0 and #13. I had restricted the palette to blue, white and black (there is very little black but there are some greys mixed in). I chose blue strictly as a challenge to myself to work on a restricted level within a very unrestricted palette, (which Flip! generally tends to have). I thought over all, that the two blue panels would be effective in stopping the eye – changing your thought process. (preventing it) from locking-in. giving you a breath, before moving on. Again, I didn't know how the whole thing would order itself up when installed (by a gallery director or curator). I made colour restrictions in those two panels but nowhere else.
I think I have been fortunate enough as an artist that I have never felt worried about where the colours start and where they end. I felt very secure intuitively with my choice of colour and how I move that into the picture plane. So, I didn't set it as a starting point, that. for example, it has to have a number of pinks and a number of yellows and so on. It just happened. The sense of having to be aggressive isn't really a thought in my work. My work tends to be rather loud and in your face; uses a lot black. There is a linear element in the work, cartoon-like references, but I think over all the colour adds into that level of impact and aggression that I bring to the work – that exuberance that has become part of my style. It's pretty hard for me to make softer paintings.
GH: What are the steps leading up to the completion of a single panel?
SG: In the case of Flip! there were 20 panels requiring two and half weeks of canvas stretching and priming. There is the anxiety of wanting to start, and in that time. thinking about what you will. Finally, the moment arrives when you have your paint in hand and you christen each panel with a colour. I couldn't put all 20 paintings in the studio at one time. I had a system devised where I could paint nine paintings each day. With Flip I wasn't putting them on the floor to dry. I arranged a house of cards in my studio where at the very beginning I just washed in one panel top to bottom in pink, and other yellow, another green and another blue ... just a flat break up of colour. I had nine of them in the studio resting side to side in a house of cards fashion. The widest wall point that I have in the studio is about ten feet. and the ceiling is about nine feet high. So, those nine paintings are drying and they come out of the studio and the next day the other nine come in, followed by the last two. I worked in cycles and it would alternate between a level of hard bodied acrylic (from a tub) and the next day might be a spray-painting session. There is a tension between what the brush is doing and what the spray paint is doing. And the spay-paint needs one day minimum to cure before it can be repainted. What I do in those beginning months is to blindly build forms, not knowing what is going to happen, what will be kept and what will be buried over. It is an additive process of just pulling out of the mind another form every day. I'll respond to a dot on a canvas and start with a colour, a line, a form, and build the form around it and set up a challenge- not working myself out that challenge that night – and two days later I'll come back and work my way through it.
GH: What is the nature of the challenge?
SG: It is the composition within one painting. Often there are bottlenecks or problems. It may be too centrally focussed. If it's too symmetrical, your mind tells you to offset. or it is too boring. too much the same. no variety. But the speed at which you have to keep working ... I would set myself a problem on each of the canvases and not worry about it because I would have another two days before I would have to get into it. (It allows you) a freshness to come at whatever that panel's problem might have been from two days prior. You can attack it with a completely open view. There is a lot of responding intuitively, quickly, and with the advantage that those two responses have . . . It was normally my process to over-deliberate and continually rethink and sit a lot before moving, whereas in the Flip! process I'm moving a lot more than I'm sitting and reflecting about the work. It was a real challenge to my working process but I thought overall it has been a really positive one since it has influenced everything I have done since Flip! was completed. That is how dramatic a shift it was: a revolution in how I paint.
