Jim Gordaneer

By Robert Amos May 3, 2004

} Jim Gordaneer By Robert Amos Jim Gordaneer, Fairfield Suite at the Fran Willis Gallery (1619 Store Street www.franwillis.com until March 27. Gospel singers, “the jockey and the bimbo”, the inner harbour shown from numerous fluid perspectives: these are Jim Gordaneer’s new paintings, and they fill the Fran Willis Gallery with an abundance of colour, surging movement and a wide variety of subject matter. To help me come to terms with it all, I recently spent an afternoon in Gordaneer’s studio. Gordaneer, at 70 years of age,works in the converted garage in his backyard. It is a comfortable, paint-encrusted space with an old wheelchair pulled up to his easel. This workmanlike room has seen a huge production over the years. As a painter of abstracts, Gordaneer first came to fame in the 1950’s, a youngster on the fringes of Toronto’s legendary Painters Eleven group. Some of his early work is currently the subject of a year-long display at Oshawa’s Robert McLaughlin Gallery (www.rmg.on.ca). Gordaneer’s painting has seen a lot of evolution since the 50’s. I first met him when he was teaching at the Victoria College of Art in 1977. Influenced by Jack Wise, Gordaneer’s lush imagery struggled to emerge from a dense chaos of calligraphic brush marks. Soon Gordaneer and the other teachers at the College were caught up in the “hard edge” movement, inspired by Joe Kyle, the principal of the college. Gordaneer said they were concerned with “the formal elements of the painting surface; composition, flat space. There was content,” he confessed, “but I didn’t feel it.” Work of that period now seems a little vacant to him, and he is retrieving many of those large canvases for continued development. In the 1980’s, Gordaneer and a number of his young associates engaged in a lengthy exploration of visual representation with philosopher Raymond Lorenz. They were dedicated to escaping from the strictures of our usual system of perspective - in which straight lines appear to converge at the vanishing point. The Chapman Group, as they named themselves, set out to create highly-resolved pictures of all types of imagery - figurative, still life, landscape. While the subject remained recognizable, it was plotted onto curved space, convex or concave or a combition of the two flowing into one another. This is called “topology”, which is explained as a study of that which remains constant within change. Some people thought Gordaneer had gone right off the rails with these convoluted spatial forms, but with hindsight we can see that his painting practice is large enough to absorb powerful ideas and still continue to grow. In the early 1990’s a mysterious ailment caused Gordaneer to fall into a coma for six weeks, and when he emerged from the hospital he refocussed, giving up his very effective teaching career. And, with the later death of Lorenz, the Chapman group was cast upon its own resources. The experience of the philosophical exploration has had a lasting effect on the artists concerned, but as Gordaneer says, “we all had to kick the ladder out from behind us.” Since then Gordaneer has been constantly on the sidewalks of his Fairfield neighbourhood. Setting up his easel in front of the most ordinary scenes, he paints the back alleys and boulevard trees in a provocative and loopy sort of way. Larger and more considered work is created in his studio. He spends about 2 1/2 hours every day, painting. Often it’s an image clipped from the newspaper which inspires him. Not that he is copying it - not by any means! “It’s just a glimpse of subject matter,” as he says, something to get him going. Figures emerge from the canvas in the course of his painting. “How far or how little they emerge is up to the individual paintings.” Lest his paintings become too factual, he works by turning the canvas round and round. This habit results in the surging dynamic of his painting. “When I work on it rightways up, I’m conscious of the figuration. When I work on it upside down, then I’m thinking of the space,” is his explanation. “I see the painting and the subject matter as a sort of dance,” Gordaneer continues. “I work back and forth.” Every painterly element is at work in his paintings - rich colour, matt and gloss finish, spatial illusions, energetic surface treatments and subject matter that just won’t quit. Race horses, deck furniture, rear view mirrors... they are all there, and much more is waiting, ready to emerge into sight. There has been a lot of talk about the end of painting, but Gordaneer continues, even if his life’s production has caused storage problems. Why does he bother with all this painting? It is a field for endless discovery. “I think it will always be here - pushing pigment around,” he concludes with a smile. It’s hard to think of an artist who has pushed it further. ___________________________________________ Copyright © 2003 Robert Amos Robert Amos is an artist and art writer who lives in Victoria, B.C.. He can be contacted by e-mail and you can view his paintings at www.robertamos.com

• Posted: 2004-05-03