An Itinerary for Painting Through Space

By
Laura Krick

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN

2018

© Laura Krick, 2018

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………...3
List of Images…………………………………………………………………………….4
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………5
Method……………………………………………………………………………………. 6
Defamiliarization and Making the Space My Own……………………..10
A Politics of Aesthetics………………………………………………………………12
Identity……………………………………………………………………………………..17
Reflection on Thesis Defense……………………………………………………..18
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….. 19
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………20

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Acknowledgements

I would like to extend a thank you to my professors for the two years of this program:
Cissie Fu, Jamie Hilder, Justin Langlois, Randy Lee Cutler, Patricia Kelly, Ingrid Koenig, Damian
Moppett, Ben Reeves and Sadira Rodrigues
As well as my supervisor: Nick Conbere
My internal examiner: Mark Igloliorte
And my external examiner: Allyson Clay
Thank you for your insight and support.

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List of Images
Fig. 1 Vancouver Chinatown, oil on mdf, 2016…………………………………………………………………………22
Fig. 2 Vancouver Street Signage, digital photography, 2016…………………………………………………….23
Fig. 3 Commercial Drive Billiards, oil on canvas, 2017………………………………………………………………24
Fig. 4 Emily Carr Studio, oil on canvas, 2017…………………………………………………………………………….25
Fig. 5 Untitled, oil on masonite, 2017………………………………………………………………………………………26
Fig. 6 Untitled, oil on masonite, 2017………………………………………………………………………………………27
Fig. 7 Untitled, oil on masonite, 2017………………………………………………………………………………………27
Fig. 8 Untitled, oil on masonite, 2017………………………………………………………………………………………27
Fig. 9 Untitled, oil on masonite, 2017………………………………………………………………………………………28
Fig. 10 Untitled, oil on masonite, 2017……………………………………………………………………………………28
Fig. 11 Untitled, oil on masonite, 2018……………………………………………………………………………………29
Fig. 12 Untitled, oil on masonite, 2018……………………………………………………………………………………29
Fig. 13 Untitled, oil on masonite, 2017……………………………………………………………………………………30
Fig. 14 Air Duct, oil on canvas, 2018………………………………………………………………………………………..30
Fig. 15 Paolo Ucello, A Hunt, panel, 1460………………………………………………………………………………..31
Fig. 16 Edgar Degas, The Racing Field: Amateur Jockeys near a Carriage, oil on canvas, 18771880 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….31
Fig. 17 Luc Tuymans, Mirror, oil on canvas, 1999…………………………………………………………………….31
Fig. 18 An Itinerary for a 4th Floor of Emily Carr Dérive, Thesis Exhibition Installation……………..31
Fig. 19 An Itinerary for a 4th Floor of Emily Carr Dérive, Thesis Exhibition Installation……………..32
Fig. 20 An Itinerary for a 4th Floor of Emily Carr Dérive, Thesis Exhibition Installation……………..32
Fig. 21 Renée Van Halm, Icycles, gouache on paper, 2011………………………………………………………33
Fig. 22 Untitled, oil on canvas, 2018………………………………………………………………………………………..34
Fig. 23 Untitled, oil on masonite, 2017…………………………………………………………………………………….34

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Introduction
When I moved to Vancouver, Commercial Drive was one of the first areas through which I
wandered. Chinatown came second. Beginning to familiarize myself with streets,
neighbourhoods and the architecture in this new city was exciting to me. Commercial Drive and
Main St. are two parallel streets, and a view of mountains to the North makes it easy to orient
oneself. Making one’s way down the street, the mountains become more visible and sublime in
their scale. At the north end of Commercial Drive, after the ethnic stores and hip cafes, and a
small stretch of residential followed by industrial buildings, there is a fence that blocks you
from the pier with silos, tankers and shipping containers. I began to photograph these along
with other nearby architectural details. In Chinatown, I observed pagodas, dragons on light
posts, bakeries where I could get my fix of barbeque pork buns and Hong Kong milk tea. I found
Chinese medicine stores with walls of shelved jars with sea horses, corals and various dried
plants that were weighed and portioned on scales before being packaged for patients.
As I began my graduate program, my practice involved photographing these neighbourhoods
and documenting my initial impressions of the ambiance. In Chinatown, I was attracted to the
character of the store awnings and signs, including the colours, the dirt and the quality of light
as the sun was setting. On Commercial Drive, it was the eclectic store fronts and views of the
mountains mixed with urban details like telephone wires and stop lights. In my studio, I would
paint from these photographs. I was also interested in the politics of walking and what it means
to belong to a place. It was about the process of being attracted to the unknown, and
familiarizing myself with my surroundings through documentation. The painting process was to
create an impression of the fleeting glance that I experienced when I was exploring these
places.
In her article, “On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be”, Rachel
Jones writes that when attempting to understand something that is “other”, like another
culture or person of another race or sex, the desire to know can turn into a desire to colonize or
assimilate. Leaving that which we do not know open to wonder, we can avoid this negative
consequence. In the earlier work described above the problem of cultural appropriation was
raised. My effort to capture that which was foreign and exotic to my gaze could be interpreted
as an attempt to claim these cultural differences for myself, to assimilate them.
In the summer, I shifted my focus. While I was still making drawings and paintings from my
urban explorations, I began painting the inside of my studio at the now closed old campus of
Emily Carr University. I photographed the patterns of the light on the floor and cropped them
into a tall and thin format so that the painting would give the impression that the viewer is
peeking through a crack in the doorway (Fig.4). I then painted from these photographs,
choosing a palate that altered the local colours, making them more vibrant, and taping off the
geometric shape patterns that the light made on the floor so that they were clean and precise. I
also combined thick and thin paint application; the patches of light were cleanly blended
whereas the hallway receding in the distance was thicker and more gestural. I chose to combine
different methods of paint application in this way to distort the space. I wanted the viewer to
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be able to recognize that it is an interior space and to be able to put themselves in my spaces,
but not be able to place exactly where they were painted from. I wanted to paint light moving
across a floor because light can be an indicator of the passage of time. Even though a painting is
a still moment it can be a record, a documentation of the event of time passing.
In September, I began painting the interior spaces of the new Emily Carr University campus
from direct observation. My interest in architecture, cropping and colour usage remained
central to my practice. What changed was this different way of looking and the time it took to
execute my paintings. The process became more improvisational where I was making decisions
while painting. When I was working from a photograph, I would grid and map out shapes on the
canvas with pencil before the painting process had begun. Unlike my city explorations where I
was seeking out the strange with which to familiarize myself, I began taking a closer look at my
everyday surroundings, to see if I could through the act of painting, personalize them while at
the same time transform them in to something strange for the viewer.
In this thesis paper, I will discuss my method, how defamiliarization functions in my artwork,
and my attempts to make the interior spaces of Emily Carr University my own, and I will argue
that the act of painting can be considered a political act, discussing how ideas from Jacques
Rancière’s Distribution of the Sensible and Michel de Certeau’s idea of Social Delinquency as
well as the Situationist International’s Dérives relate to my artistic approaches. Finally, I will
conclude by discussing how my identity as an artist relates to the above ideas and informs my
practice.

Method
My thesis project involves making paintings of interior architectural spaces from direct observation
and the creation of larger paintings modeled on smaller ones. I create 12 x 16 inch paintings on
Masonite as well as 48 x 60 inch paintings on canvas. I move around the graduate studio and through
hallway spaces and classrooms, stopping in front of interesting features to paint. I seek to create
multiple viewpoints of interior spaces, making some that create spatial disorientation, where it isn’t
made clear to the viewer for example where the ceiling ends and the wall begins and some that are
more recognizable but still have been altered in some way, whether it be through colour choice,
abstraction, distortion or simplification.
I have moved from making paintings that rely on the way a camera perceives space to the way I
perceive and experience space with my eyes. Painting from life mimics the way we perceive space as
different from the way a camera perceives space, as the frame of the camera crops images rather
than the frame of the edges of the Masonite panel. My compositional choices could be borrowed
from my experience as a photographer and my aesthetic sense of what makes an effective and
balanced composition; however, the choice to include some details and not others, or to alter shapes
and details, is a process that evolves as the painting is being created. In some cases, scanning from
floor to ceiling with my eyes blends architectural details together in a continuous stream, and they
can exist together on the same plane, whereas a photograph crops and displays a separation
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between floor, wall and ceiling. Through my painting, I focus on the immediacy of space to directly
experience and contemplate on my surroundings. I aim to discover and excavate details in the banal
and the everyday that often go unnoticed. I am interested in creating a world within a world—a
corner in a room, a room within the institution, and the institution within the city.
One reason that I choose to paint the interiors of the new Emily Carr University is because of
the plethora of different surfaces, lighting conditions and structures that lend to
reinterpretation and abstraction. Also, it is a new building and a new institution that hasn’t
been used for long enough to become set in its ways. I walk to scout out my next painting
position. I am drawn to forms such as the curving lines of a ventilation pipe or the triangular
geometry of a shadow. The sheen of an air duct reflects something green from someone’s
studio. I began by trying to capture the local colours, which would end up slightly exaggerated.
The cool institutional green of glass skirting the atrium became a wet-on-wet combination of
shades of seafoam. This led to the invention of vibrant greens for the grad exhibition space,
layered choppily over some purple underpainting. I started painting objects in the places I
found them, such as a ladder leaning against a wall, with striated wall shadows from light
shining through the rungs. I would drag an acrylic wash across the Masonite surface to create a
streaky underpainting and then scuffle a sun yellow oil, forming the outline of a floor shadow
and delineating negative space. A white wall lit with day light from a skylight above becomes a
gradient of warm to cool peach, over a bright green underpainting, becoming countless
experiments in complementaries. I make rules for myself, like only using chromatic greys to test
how many different tones can come from mixing only two colours. Ceiling beams become
stripes and a single planar surface that flattens the distance from foreground to background,
eschewing perspective. Emblems of modernity, tubes of florescent lighting evoke the dividing
lines of a highway and branch off from a central horizon line where the ceiling tiles of a
classroom meet and seem to puncture the floor. I revisit spaces from different vantage points.
As I move through these spaces, I create and revise my itineraries, my planned routes for how I
will execute my paintings.
My process begins with walking around and deciding on the best place to set up my chair and
paints. I think about composition, how shapes and lines overlap, and consider possible colours.
When I set up, I start with thin lines to delineate what I want my composition to be. I paint with
oil, but sometimes I apply an acrylic underpainting first. My colour choices change from
painting to painting. I take approximately two to three hours to finish one. I consider formal
and process choices such as brush stroke direction, wet-in-wet applications vs solid color and
which details to include and exclude. I find it is often an exercise of simplification and
distillation. For example, if I perceive that a reflection in a window into a classroom divides a
chair that is sitting in the classroom into two separate tones, I decide that I want this detail to
be the focal point (Fig. 6).
Choosing how to crop is central to my practice. It is a process of translating architectural details
to the painting surface and one of distortion and invention. Previously, when painting from
neighborhoods in Vancouver, like Commercial Drive (Fig. 3) and Chinatown (Fig. 1), I worked
with photographic source images. I was attracted to similar subject matter. An example would
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be my interest in the quality of light at specific times of the day, like golden hour and evening,
leading to contrasts between shadows and light, and specific colours. On these excursions, I
wanted my photographs to be documents of an aesthetic experience of these places. Through
cropping, I wanted to create an impression of the fleeting glance, where the act of walking
briskly down a street, allows for only fragments of visual information to be taken in. I was
drawn to subjects such as a flash of blue shadow cast from a parked van on a curtain (Fig. 3)
and fragments of colourful signage - a few letters or characters, not enough to be read and
understood (Fig. 2).
In Western art history, a link has been observed between the emergence of painting banal and
everyday subject matter and certain approaches to cropping in painting. According to scholar and
curator Peter Galassi, this had to do with changes in perspective and the placing of the viewing
subject. This is evident in his essay for the 1981 MOMA exhibition Before Photography, an
exhibition of paintings and drawings from the 1780’s until the 1830’s that were executed during
the early days of photographic technology and which foresaw certain uses and aesthetics of
photography. Galassi compares renaissance artist Paolo Uccello to Edgar Degas in their methods
of creating a composition. He uses the example of a “pyramid of vision”, a compositional device
brought into existence by Leon Battista Alberti in his writing On Painting, published in 1435. In this
device, a pyramid creates a window for a viewer through which the subject of the painting is seen.
At the top point of the pyramid is the focal point that the viewer’s eye is drawn towards, and the
base is the edge of the painting. For example, in Uccello’s A Hunt (Fig. 15), painted in 1460, the
pyramid is a static form or container wherein everything else in the painting, figures and trees, are
organized; the entire work is composed within this frame. In Degas’ The Racing Field: Amateur
Jockeys near a Carriage (Fig. 16) painted in 1877-80, the pyramid is placed on top of a scene and
shifted until he has found the appropriate vantage point, including some figures and excluding
others. This shift meant that more emphasis was placed on the unique, singular, fragmented point
of view of the artist, rather than a universal static system of perception.
Although the exact time of the shift cannot be placed, Galassi estimates that it occurred around
1800 with a growth in popularity of the landscape sketch. As with my small paintings, these
landscape sketches were often made quickly, and painted in series in an attempt to record the
passage of time, as in changes in light conditions and weather. At this point in history, such quickly
executed works weren’t taken as seriously as larger landscape or historical paintings. Galassi
writes:
It is as if the very ordinariness of the subject were a challenge to the painter’s aesthetic
imagination—a challenge to make something out of nothing…by showing, in their
variations, that even the most humble scene offered a variety of pictorial aspect, the
painters claimed an active, potentially poetic, role in their works (27).
In these paintings, this process of making something out of nothing increased the presence of the
hand of the artist. It was a method of making the banal more interesting. Style had a role to play,
when it wasn’t so much about subject matter. I also seek to make something out of the seemingly
banal. The gestural application of paint and the distortion of forms are ways in which my hand
8

becomes present in these pieces. I also find it challenge to take my surroundings and
imaginatively restructure them, provoking an experience of space that could not be had by simply
walking around the building.
Galassi writes further about this attraction to banal subject matter and how this is related to
cropping as a compositional strategy:
What made a pictorial “something” out of “nothing” was – literally and metaphorically
– the painter’s point of view…It is precisely the mediating conditions of perception –
the cropping frame, the accidents of light, the relative point of view – that make the
pictures seem real. Separated from the ideal drama of older art by the triviality of their
subjects, the pictures are also divergent in form. It is as if the expository order of
traditional compositions were an obstacle to the spirit of immediacy the artists sought.
The works appear to be formed by the eye instead of the mind (27).
Through painting from life I am seeking an immediacy with my surroundings that I would not have
had, had I begun with a planned composition or a photographic image. I am commenting on my
surroundings and diverting from the built environment I find myself in and through this, am
creating a divergence in form and communicating my own personal perceptions and point of view
as well as my experience of the space. I began making my small paintings to record the passage of
time, be that of light in a space or the displacement of objects. However, cropping with the eye is
only my starting point; I then diverge from what it is I see and my painting becomes one of
imagination. For this reason, my work could be said to be composed with both eye and mind.
In Degas’ time, the cropping process gave the viewer a sense of the immediacy of the moment
and of a scene one could enter from a specific point of view. Cropping in contemporary painting
sometimes serves a different purpose. In the paintings of Luc Tuymans, for example, the exclusion
of information creates an image that isn’t immediately discernable to the viewer as in his painting
Mirror (fig. 17) where only the title informs the viewer of what has been painted.
In removing the photographic process from my painting practice, I have moved the cropping
mechanism from the fleeting glance to the prolonged viewing. When I was painting from
photographs, the prolonged viewing took place in the analysis of and translation from the
photograph. The choices I made for composition, and in some cases colour, were already mapped
out for me by the previous decisions I made with the camera. Through the execution of the
paintings for my thesis project, I am breaking away from this method. I am now interested in the
immediacy of painting from life and the roughness or spontaneity that results from a quickening
of pace. I am conquering the fear of not knowing, and resisting the need to pre-determine the
outcomes of my projects.
Although my itinerary for working is set—I am moving around the studio and the hallways of the
4th floor at Emily Carr University—I want each painting to be different from the last. Rachel Jones
stresses that ingenuity in art is achieved through unlearning past behaviors.

9

Rachel Jones writes:
To work without knowing where one is going or might end up is a necessary condition
of creation: of the generation of difference rather than the reproduction of the same.
One of the counter-processes that tends to block or shut down such “artistic working”
is the quest for knowledge itself, understood as a desire to reduce the strange to the
familiar (16).
As I am trying to make each piece unique, I am building on what I have learned from the execution
of the previous pieces. I seek to expand my knowledge of painting techniques and my knowledge
of rendering interior spaces. Although I don’t know how each piece will turn out, I become
acquainted with these spaces through painting them. As the spaces become more familiar to me, I
work towards making them my own while I make them seem strange to the viewer, inviting them
to see these spaces anew.

Defamiliarization and Making the Space My Own
Ostranenie, the Russian word for “defamiliarisation” or “making the familiar strange” was
coined by Viktor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as Device” in 1917. In this essay, he wrote:
And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in
order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to
create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of
art is the “estrangement” of things and the complication of the form, which
increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of
perception is, in art, an end in itself and must be prolonged (162).
Through painting, I want to bring attention to details in the interior spaces of Emily Carr University
that are often overlooked. I choose Emily Carr University to paint because of both access and
because it is the most intimate of my surroundings. This is a space I have gotten to know in depth,
and a space that I can rightfully claim as mine, unlike the city that is not and never can be mine
completely.
Through the installation of my pieces, I want to take the viewer on a meandering path through the
spaces of Emily Carr that is an alternative to how they might experience the spaces themselves. At
the same time as I am showing the viewer how I have chosen to travel through and alter these
spaces I am asking them to, through the viewing of my installation, move through these spaces
themselves. Through installing pieces that I made from opposite ends of the 4 th floor side by side,
I am setting the viewer up to have a disjunctive journey through the space (fig. 18, 19, 20).
Through alteration and distortion of the spaces I see, and the translation from observation to
support, I want to complicate the forms, so that I can prolong the experience of the viewer who
then has to decipher what it is they are seeing.

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I have combined more recognizable spaces with ones that are more difficult for the viewer to
locate because while I want the viewer to enter and experience these spaces through the lens
that I have created, I want to challenge the viewer to figure out where they could have been
painted from—to recognize certain architectural details.
Luc Tuymans is a painter who succeeds in making the familiar strange. He represents the banal
and the everyday along with historically charged subject matter derived from secondary sources,
such as historical imagery from photographs and films. I was initially attracted to his minimalistic
renderings of interior spaces, his monochromatic colour palate and his decision to leave the
information out of his paintings that would make them decipherable. For example as I mentioned
earlier, in his painting Mirror (Fig. 17), most of the mirror is cropped out of the frame and it is only
the title that informs the viewer of the subject. His process generally consists of two stages. First,
he considers the image and the idea, a process that can take as long as months or years, often
altering the image digitally or building a maquette to consider how the subject appears in space.
The second stage is the painting stage that is usually completed in one day.
As in my paintings made from photographs, much of his decision-making process takes place
before the painting has begun, in the photo selection process or the maquettes. My preliminary
decision-making happens in the physical act of walking and observing. When I paint from
observation, I am still making choices throughout the painting process.
In “Painting and Atrocity: The Tuymans Strategy”, Peter Geimer writes that Tuymans' paintings
succeed in unsettling the viewer because they are recognizable and yet indecipherable: “Luc
Tuymans paints figuratively and yet his pictures deny a palpable legibility”; his pictures “change
between perceptibility and retreat to the undefinable” (23). Unlike modernism’s “making the
familiar strange”, which according to Geimer was an attempt to combat the supposed “end of
painting”, Tuymans' strategy was to prove painting’s competence in light of themes of
contemporary history, through commenting on atrocities such as the holocaust and how
painting can represent the unrepresentable.
Using a style that has been dubbed a “‘deskilled’ aesthetic’” (Kantor 170), Tuymans paints wet
into wet, which contributes to the painting’s sense of “speed and immanence”. He also depicts
deep space through the use of perspectival rendering, while at the same time refuses that
space through the “overt display of its painterly construction” (174).
My paintings oscillate between the recognizable and the indecipherable so that my viewers can
either place themselves in my pieces or feel displaced. Part of the disorientation or engagement
that I wish to achieve, is achieved through the creation of spaces that look like interiors while at
the same time are estranged to become experimentations in form and colour. These
experimentations are what create these alternate spaces of the imagination. As in Tuymans’
paintings, my technique combines a speedily applied wet-in-wet, the rendering of architectural
structures and details in ways that suggest depth and gestural brush strokes.

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Another artist who uses defamiliarization, is Renée Van Halm. Her works disorientate the
viewer through her use of collage. She makes collages from images she has collected from
décor and fashion magazines as well as from architectural and design sources. She then paints
from these collages. The cropping takes place in the collaging process. These collages “employ
absence as a determining structure”, (Sawatsky 22) in which she has removed a figure or a
product from an advertisement so that something is felt to be missing from the composition.
Van Halm often emphasizes this sense of something missing through leaving a clue or a trace
such as a piece of hair or a fragment of an arm (Fig. 21). In one series of paintings, her method
is an attempt to upset the accepted hierarchy of foreground to background as well as
subject/object relationships through a tension between figuration and abstraction (Van Halm).
Through her painting, she is able to use the avant-garde invention of collage to create
fragmented environments that disorient the viewer, prolonging their perception, and bringing
their attention to details in the everyday that are often overlooked.
To compliment the small paintings, I also make larger-scale paintings based on the small works.
The challenges in this change of scale are in the physical and conceptual acts of translation that
arise from this process. Through my process I am taking what I learned by responding to the
spaces the first time, when I created the small paintings, and amplifying these forms. Certain
techniques can be implemented on a larger canvas that cannot on the smaller masonite panels.
For example, for one of my larger paintings, I added mineral spirits to oil paint in order to apply
a drip underpainting, then used tape to create clean, crisp lines before covering the tape with
thick oil paint (fig. 22). In the smaller painting that I used as a model, these lines were gestural
oil line washes (fig.23). So I took an idea, that the lines be transparent, and translated a
technique that is applied on a small scale to a technique that can only be applied on a large
one.
Through my process, I am embracing the modernist geometries of the architecture around me
and finding a way to personalize my observations of the utilitarian structures. My subject
matter is an emblematic piece of contemporary Canadian art-school architecture, and through
altering the details that I observe and augmenting the colours, I am creating alternate spaces of
the imagination. I am subverting the cool detachment of the building, transforming its purpose
from one of function to one of form, inspiring personal expression.

A Politics of Aesthetics
In the first year of the MFA program I was interested in maps and the personal routes taken
when exploring a city. What does it mean to belong to a city? When does one begin to identify
with it?
I am interested in art as a way to work within a structure, while at the same time deviating from
it, just as a map that delineates a route can be circumvented with some creativity. I am
compelled to deal with architectural structures, language as a structure -- both of painting and
words -- political structures, and paintings themselves as structures. Structures are more
12

engaging when challenged and painting can be seen as a form of deviant documentation.
Rather than the photograph, painting can distort and disorient as a method of bringing
attention to everyday structures, and subverting them. The surface of a painting is a signifier for
the ideas that underlie it. In my paintings, I am creating new forms from what I observe,
establishing my independence from the architecture at the same time as I am engaged with it.
Through the deliberate choice to create autonomy in the shapes and the formal elements I
produce—lines that are uneven or parts that are left unfinished to let the underpainting peek
through—I am expressing my autonomy as an individual. I am diverting from the functional way
to move through the spaces of the University when I move through them with the intention of
altering the existing spaces and creating new ones. I am reimagining the institutional structures
as an artist and student.
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes about experiences of space as expressed
in personal narratives or stories. He refers to “tours” or personal accounts of routes taken, as
opposed to the authoritative making of maps, which is a scientific “colonization of space”. In his
opinion, when we moved from the itinerary to the map we moved from ordinary culture to
scientific discourse. He considers the creation of personal stories within the structures of
colonized space as social delinquency. He defines it as such:
[S]ocial delinquency consists in taking the story literally, in making it the principle of
physical existence where a society no longer offers to subjects or groups symbolic
outlets and expectations of subjects [how we are supposed or expected to use the
space], where there is no longer any alternative to disciplinary falling-into-line or
illegal drifting away, that is, one form or another of prison and wandering outside
the pale (130).
The personal narratives of my travels through the spaces of Emily Carr University could be said to
deviate from the map of the institution. Perhaps not an actual map, but the structures inherent in
the making of art, such as the historical expectations of painting or a primarily male cannon in the
history of Western art. The act of painting in hallways that were meant for walking isn’t exactly a
deviation, structures are often malleable in the context of the art institution. Students have the
freedom to use the space as they wish, what is being altered is the conventional ways of using the
space. Jacques Ranicère believes that painting can become a political act in that a voice and
everything that is attached to that voice, such as gender, circumstance, point of view, and
disability, can become visible. Although what can be seen visually in paintings, the visible
surface—composition, color, form—these elements are signifiers for the ideas that underlie them.
Through the contextualization of ideas addressed in a painting, the artist’s voice has the potential
to be communicated. Through the making of art, in any space, there is a power that can be
obtained for marginalized voices that would otherwise be silent. In the Politics of Aesthetics
Rancière discusses modernist discourse around painting and the revolution of pictorial abstraction
as examples of a democratic art. Rancière posits that by rejecting perspectivist illusion, painting
regained mastery over its surface. Rancière writes however that a ‘surface’ “is not simply a
geometric composition of lines. It is a certain distribution of the sensible” (10).

13

Rancière explains his concept of Distribution of the Sensible as a relationship between politics
and aesthetics. He defines aesthetics in the Kantian sense as a system of a priori forms
determining what presents itself to sense experience. This means that the theoretical
knowledge one obtains influences how and what is perceived. Rancière defines ‘aesthetic
practices’ as “forms of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they
‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to the community” (8). The “Distribution
of the Sensible” determines those who have a part in the community as citizens and “reveals
who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the
time and space in which the activity is performed” (8). Politics “revolves around what is seen
and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak,
around the property of spaces and the possibility of time”. Thus, becoming visible as an artist is
achieved through the participation in a common language shared by a community who spend
their time similarly, in spaces in which a common activity is performed, and spaces where
certain paradigms of knowledge influence how and what we perceive.
I also consider the politics of color expressed through my painting. In David Bachelor’s book
Chromophobia, he writes about attitudes towards color throughout the history of Western
philosophy. He writes that figures like Rousseau, Kant and Le Corbusier often reduced color to
surface effect, arguing that it lacked substance and associating it with “others” or those who
lacked power, for example, the bodily, feminine, queer, pathological and with Near East and
Eastern cultures. Le Corbusier, for example, held the view that color was “suited to simple
races, peasants and savages” (Bachelor, 41). Color is a surface and structure in painting that can
bring the viewer’s attention to underlying political ideas.
In an essay that she wrote for Rene Van Halm’s exhibition Dream Homes in 2003, Lisa
Robertson describes walking the city and enjoying the surface effects of colors and signage:
When we walk in the inscription splattered street we are interested to question
the relation of surface to belief. This question defines our stance as citizens.
Thinking about color we open up a space in the surface, the potent space
between substance and politics. A tiny freedom drifts there and we adore it. But
our gluttony for the ethereal has not to do with fame or glamour or scale.
Through gluttony we come to resemble history. Through gluttony we are
indexical (144-145).
Lisa Roberston, writing about the pleasures of walking and looking at colors, is inspired through
this aesthetic experience to think about the political, and the active body in its relationship to
its surroundings, such as the nuances of neighborhoods and their inhabitants. Through this
pleasure or what she has termed “gluttony” we become part of the history of a place, its
architecture and its past and present politics. I have been interested in the relationship of
aesthetics to history and philosophy in the same way as I am interested in painting as a
structure that contains both surface and depth. Looking at painting is a visceral experience, and
color contributes to this. Looking at painting is experiencing it through embodied looking.
Paintings contain within them the history of the language of painting, and looking at paintings
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can mean engaging with history, philosophy, economics and other realms of knowledge. By
altering the colours, I wish to provoke an embodied viewing, where although it might be
difficult for the viewer to place themselves in my spaces, at the same time I am transporting
them to and asking them to experience an alternate space. Even in the paintings where I have
paid attention to the local colors of a space, I have exaggerated them so that they have greater
vibrancy and still succeed to dislocate and disorient the viewer.
The Situationists were interested in maps and the structures of the city, and valued walking and
exploration for their political potential. In their view, the political was present in the creation of
art as well as the liberation of everyday life. Their concept of psychogeography, or the study of
the effects that cities can have on the emotions and behavior of individuals, inspired the
concept of the dérive, or “the drift”, an exercise that involved moving through the city in
groups, sometimes taking routes frequently travelled and other times deviating from
conventional passages. For example Debord explains their activities as “slipping by night into
houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris
during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in
subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc.”. The goals of a dérive would be “to study
a terrain or to emotionally disorientate oneself” (Debord).
One behavior inherent in the exploration of cities and places is the slowing of pace, with the
intention of taking in details that would otherwise be passed over. My navigations through the
hallways, classrooms and studios could be seen as a dérive across the fourth floor of Emily Carr
University. A rule I have made for myself is to slow down my pace and adjust my eye level to
observe details that are above and below the conventional gaze level. I am making a study of
the different spaces and through the distortion of the architectural details, my paintings
disorient my viewer, just as the act of getting lost disorients walkers.
One of their other concepts détournement was also central to their practice. Détournement
involved altering already existing images, whether advertisements or paintings, to modernize
them and to comment on the commodification of art and culture. Asger Jorn, one of the
members of the group utilized détournement when he took existing paintings he came across in
junk stores and flee markets, and painted over them with expressive, gestural stokes. Jorn
revived an artworks political potential by detourning it; by playfully taking an old idea or trope
and modernizing it by combining it with something contemporary. In his 1959 essay
“Détourned Painting” he writes:
Be modern,
collectors, museums.
If you have old paintings,
do not despair.
Retain your memories
but détourn them
so that they correspond with your era.
Why reject the old
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if one can modernize it
with a few strokes of the brush?
This casts a bit of contemporaneity
on your old culture.
Be up to date,
and distinguished
at the same time.
Painting is over.
You might as well finish it off.
Détourn.
Long live painting.
The memories that I am detourning with my painting practice is the avant-garde strategy of
defamiliarization. Defamiliarization is a modernist trope and my attempt to use this device as a
way to comment on current social and historical structures has been called nostalgic. I argue
that in our contemporary political climate, progress is often achieved in different, more subtle
ways that in the period of high modernism within which this concept originated. It is through a
subtle gesturing and a borrowing of the language and techniques of modernism that I am able
to allude to a “progressive” past, sparking a conversation about what that movement achieved
and contemporary political objectives to achieve change in an incremental way.
In his article, “Modernism Post-post modernism: Art in the Era of Light Modernity”, Luke
Smythe argues that we are still in a variation of the modernist period, a period that he has
labeled “light modernism”. He contrasts this present modernism with the period of the avantgarde, which he terms “heavy” or “evangelical” modernism. The “heavy” modernist period was
defined by heavy industry and a Fordist economical model along with more rigid social
constraints, universalizing mindset and more prevalence of collective social movements. “Light”
modernism on the other hand is defined by post-Fordism, greater fluidity, uncertainty of one’s
place in society and social isolation, where political action has become more fragmented, with
the appearance of more diverse social causes, with greater individual power to communicate
opinion through outlets like social media, where ideas are circulated enabling conversations
that are capable of provoking change, but on a more moderate level.
Smythe writes:
Thanks to the loss of a supportive climate of impending social transformation, as
had been present during the early twentieth-century heyday of heavy evangelical
modernism, to a growing recognition of the failings of prior modernists, and to the
increasing complexity and obscurity of the mechanisms governing contemporary
life, socially minded artists have in recent decades been obliged to downgrade their
ambitions. Whereas evangelical heavy modernists were wont to set their sights high
and pursue goals of far-reaching social and cultural transformation, their postevangelical successors have been forced by dint of circumstance to content
themselves with more modest objectives (375).

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A current challenge for artists is the fight for the validity of their art practice; to prove its
competence to those that disvalue its political potential. Smythe also writes that artists of light
modernity attempt to regain the heaviness of their art practices through attempting to form
communities to counter the current culture of disorientating and disempowered individualism,
and sometimes in returning to traditional forms of art making like painting in an attempt to
push back against the weightlessness of a post-medium condition (378). Part of this cultural
disposition is the freedom of artists to pursue any political objective with little opposition from
institutional structures, diluting the political potency of their statements. Smythe continues:
Whereas heavy modernists of a bohemian persuasion were obliged to lodge their
claims for cultural and social freedom in the face of widespread opposition, as
brought to bear by attitudes and institutions that were hostile to their activities, the
growing permissiveness of light modernity has seen the social field become
increasingly hospitable to bohemian objectives in recent decades (374).
Through a return to painting and a borrowing and elaboration on the language of modernism, I
am subtlety and playfully crafting a political gesture that motions towards a break with the
institutional structures inherent in the art school of Emily Carr University, at the same time as I
am engaged with and working within these parameters, using the aesthetics of the places I find
myself in to create alternate spaces of colour, form, and imagination.

Identity
I have been asking myself how much of painting is about communicating identity and
circumstance to a viewer. In her essay entitled “The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity,
Indexicality, and Highly Valuable Quasi-Persons” Isabelle Graw writes about the anthropological
ideas of Alfred Gell who suggests that paintings are social indexes and indexes of agency in
which you can see traces of the producing person. Gell also believes that a strong bond is
created between the painting and the beholder as between two people.
When I think about my identity as an artist, or what makes me visible through the creation of
my art, I consider how I could be considered “other”. I note my gender and my stutter. In her
article “Painting and its Others: In the Realm of the Feminine” Shirley Kaneda writes:
Poststructuralism has brought out the multiplicity of criteria for any given text.
When one eliminates the notion of a decisive reading, the notion of closure and
dominance comes to an end. By their very exclusion, those who are
disenfranchised or repressed (women, gays, racial minorities) are in the best
possible position to define ‘otherness’ for our culture. This means submitting to a
discourse of ‘difference’ in which how something is put forward is more important
than the gender and race that puts it forward; how it is stated (the means) will
determine the conditions by which it will be received and judged (72).

17

By focusing on how something is put forward rather than the gender or race that puts it
forward is empowering and I see it as a way to cease talking about master narratives in
painting. Kaneda later states that we no longer want to talk about “painting”, but rather
“paintings” (72) which would eliminate the need to talk about dominant knowledge structures,
or a history of painting that is exclusive. It also suggests that each painting made is capable,
through its style or method, of deviating from past or repressive institutional structures.
While looking into the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, I came across an article by Christa AlbrechtCrane discussing his essay “Style, Stutter”. She is discussing stuttering in a metaphorical sense,
a stuttering of method in which oppressive conventions of language are disrupted and new
languages are created. These new languages, because they are not so easily understood,
provoke thought in readers and viewers. As a child, when I would get stuck on a word, I would
often try to hide my stutter by switching to a different word. Occasionally the word I chose was
not really appropriate for the context of what I was trying to say, and the other person would
either get confused or just think it was weird. It was a verbal collaging of sorts.
Crane gives the literary example of the character Bartleby in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby The
Scrivener” who defies his oppressive circumstances by declaring, “I prefer not to”. She writes:
He evades meaning by opening himself up to not being understood, yet at the
same time refusing the system and defining himself no longer by the identitylanguage around him. In that sense, he stutters, stammers, breaks off
understanding, abandons a definitive space and enters a virtual realm of
intensity, becoming anything-what-ever: non-catagorizable in the language of
his peers and his culture (128).
Through a metaphorical stuttering then, I could achieve what de Certeau calls social
delinquency. I could separate myself from the identifying language of the institution and
dominant knowledge structures and enter into this “virtual realm of intensity”. But this
stuttering is also a way to speak that communicates ideas and participates in a dialogue with
others. Donna Haraway invents words to deviate from western master narratives and
patriarchal structures. Virginia Woolf writes in a stream of consciousness style to deviate from
older more conventional writing structures. These are stutterings of style that have spoken to
me throughout my life as an artist. Unlike my speech that stutters involuntarily, through a
painterly stuttering, I seek to be understood.

Reflection on Thesis Defense
It was posed to me by my supervisor and the external examiner as to why I have chosen to
paint the interiors of Emily Carr University. I answered that part of the reason was access to
these spaces, and part of the reason was because I am commenting on surroundings that I have
gotten to know intimately; these are spaces where I rightfully belong. In my earlier work, I was

18

painting the city and neighbourhoods that were not mine, or not mine for very long as I am new
to Vancouver.
The other reason I chose to paint the interiors of Emily Carr University was because I am
commenting on my place within the institution and my power to exercise my subjectivity within
its structures through the alteration and distortion of the spaces and architecture and the
creation of alternate spaces of the imagination.
One professor in the audience wanted me to elaborate on how my art was achieving a political
aim. I answered using Jacques Ranciere’s example of Distribution of the Sensible where voices
become visible through the creation of art by participating with others in a dialogue that is
shared. My voice is being communicated through my choice to paint within the art institution,
an activity which is in dialogue with other artists who share the same setting. Also, by altering
the architecture and colours of Emily Carr University, I am creating alternate spaces and
pushing back against institutional parameters. Through my paintings, I am addressing the
political in a metaphorical way. Ideas themselves are political and their dissemination through
metaphor is just as powerful as a physical attempt at political demonstration, for example.
Conclusion
Through the process of painting I am finding my delinquent, stuttering voice and my place in
the world as an artist. I struggle with how to make myself heard and relevant. I am talking
about personal journeys within institutions, as well as within institutions within the city. How
does one talk about architecture when not an architect or history when not a historian?
Rancière posits that the making of art and aesthetics are political acts that can make voices
visible. De Certeau believes that it is possible to be rebellious within a system. Through my
painting I demonstrate that it is possible to claim subjectivity within an institutional setting. It is
possible to push back against its structures. Through defamiliarization, I am participating in a
metaphorical stuttering of method. I am breaking away from oppressive structures and
imaginatively restructuring the existing architecture; distorting and complicating the forms I
see, to both prolong the perception of the viewer and to bring their attention to details that are
often overlooked. I am thinking about paintings as surface as well as the underlying ideas and
references. In the future, I will continue to paint the architecture of the spaces I find myself in.
New contexts will add new layers of meaning and commentary to my practice. My explorations
are twofold: how to get my imaginings and spatial experiences to manifest in the painted form,
and how to assert my agency as an artist.

19

Bibliography
Albrecht-Crane, Christa. “Style, stutter.” Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, edited by Charles J.
Stivale, McGill-Queens Press, 2005, 121-130.
Bachelor, David. Chromophobia. Reaktion Books Ltd., 2000. Press.
Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” Translated by Ken Knabb, Situationist International
Online, cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of
California Press, 1984.
Eastham, Ben. “A Necessary Realism: Interview with Luc Tuymans.” Apollo: The International
Art Magazine, 8 Aug. 2015, apollo-magazine.com/a-necessary-realism-interview-with-luctuymans/. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Galassi, Peter. Before Photography. The Museum of Modern Art., 1981. Press.
Geimer, Peter. “Painting and Atrocity: The Tuymans Strategy.” Thinking through Painting:
Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas, edited by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and
Nikolaus Hirsch, Sternberg Press, 2012, 15-36.
Graw, Isabelle. “The Value of Painting: Notes on Unspecificity, Indexicality, and Highly Valuable
Quasi-Persons.” Thinking through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas, edited by
Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsch, Sternberg Press, 2012, 45-58.
Jones, Rachel. “On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be.” On Not
Knowing: How Artists Think, edited by Elisabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum, Black Dog
Publishing Ltd., 2013, 15-28.
Jorn, Asger. “Détourned Painting.” Translated by Thomas Y. Levin, Situationist International
Online, cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/painting.html. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Kaneda, Shirley. “Painting and Its Others: In the Realm of the Feminine.” Painting, edited by
Terry R. Meyers, Whitechapel and The MIT Press, 2011, 72-80.
Kantor, Jordan. “The Tuymans Effect.” Painting, edited by Terry R. Meyers, Whitechapel and
The MIT Press, 2011, 169-174.
Loock, Ulrich, et al. Luc Tuymans. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003. Press.
Renée Van Halm. Renée Van Halm, www.reneevanhalm.com. Accessed 28 April 28, 2018.

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Robertson, Lisa. “How to Color.” Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft
Architecture, edited by Lisa Robertson, Clear Cut Press, 2003, 133-150.
Sawatsky, Rachelle. “On the Style of Renée Van Halm.” Renée Van Halm: Cross-Cutting/Inside
Out, edited by Jennifer Cane, Burnaby Art Gallery, 2012, 17-25.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art, as Device.” Translated by Alexander Berlina, Poetics Today, Sept. 2015,
151-173.
Smythe, Luke. “Modernism Post-postmodernism: Art in the Era of Light Modernity.”
Modernism/modernity, John Hopkins University Press, 2015, 365-379.
Van Halm, Renée. Cross-Cutting/Inside Out. Burnaby Art Gallery, 2012. Press.

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fig. 1 Vancouver Chinatown, oil on masonite, 12 x 9 inches each, 2016

22

fig. 2 Vancouver Street Signage, digital photographs, 8 x 12 inches each, 2016

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fig. 3 Commercial Drive Billiards, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches, 2017

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fig. 4 Emily Carr Studio, oil on canvas, 18 x 36 inches, 2017

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fig. 5 Untitled, oil on masonite, 12 x 16 inches, 2017

fig. 6 Untitled, oil on masonite, 12 x 16 inches, 2017

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fig. 7 Untitled, oil on masonite, 12 x 16 inches, 2017

fig. 8 Untitled, oil on masonite, 12 x 16 inches, 2017

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fig. 9 Untitled, oil on masonite, 12 x 16 inches, 2017

fig. 10 Untitled, oil on masonite, 12 x 16 inches, 2017

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fig. 11 Untitled, oil on masonite, 12 x 16 inches, 2018

fig. 12 Untitled, oil on masonite, 12 x 16 inches, 2018

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fig. 13 Untitled, oil on masonite, 12 x 16 inches, 2017

fig. 14 Air Duct, oil on canvas 48 x 64 inches, 2017

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fig. 15 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. A Hunt, Paolo Ucello, c. 1460. Panel.
https://www.ashmolean.org/hunt-forest

fig. 16 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Edgar Degas, The Racing Field: Amateur
Jockeys near a Carriage, oil on canvas, 1877-1880. http://bridgemanimages.com/enUS/asset/33818/degas-edgar-1834-1917/the-race-course-amateur-jockeys-near-a-carriage-c1876-87-oil-on-canvas

fig. 17 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Mirror, oil on canvas, 210 x 47 cm, 1999,
by Luc Tuymans, Luc Tuymans, Phaidon Press Ltd, 2003, pp. 175.

fig. 18 An Itinerary for a 4th Floor Emily Carr Dérive, Thesis Exhibition Installation, 2018

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fig 19. An Itinerary for a 4th Floor Emily Carr Dérive, Thesis Exhibition Installation, 2018

fig. 20 An Itinerary for a 4th Floor Emily Carr Dérive, Thesis Exhibition Installation, 2018

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fig. 21 Renée Van Halm, Icycles, 2011, gouache on paper, 32.0 x 24.7 cm. Used by permission of
Renée Van Halm.

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fig. 22 Untitled, oil on canvas, 48 x 64 inches, 2018

fig. 23 Untitled, oil on masonite, 12 x 16 inches, 2017

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