The October Gallery, London, England had a solo exhibition of my work in 1982. When I travelled there to attend the opening, I just stayed in Europe for the next 16 years.
When I left Toronto in 1982, it seemed still a small town, but by the time I returned here in 1997, I felt it had evolved into a truly cosmopolitan city. Towards the end of my residence in London, I had began to paint pictures of some buildings in the Toronto area, pictures that were eventually to be printed as the Toronto Real Estate Board Calendar for the year 2000.
Before that point, I had always painted from real life because I didn’t want to lose the immediacy of being there. I found, however, that because I can remember how things look and how they feel, there is still plenty of scope for interpretation when using a photograph as a reference. The fact that my eyesight is rather astigmatic helps to make my pictures distinctive, because my perspective is a bit twisted. When I study a subject, I am confronted by an endless amount of information.
The closer I look, the more I see. I must choose what to include and what to exclude from the picture. I try to encapsulate the essence of a thing in the most economic possible way, concentrating on the lucidity of the colours. I paint slowly. If the painting is small, it may take up to three months to complete. The most time it has ever taken to complete an oil painting is 20 months. I paint slowly, applying the colours in as pure a state as possible.
