biography - e. gary blundell

"The landscape was certainly a fine one, immense and dusty in heat of morning.  Human or even animal hardly belonged, though there were clues to both, in the stubble recurring patterns, geometric to the point where they suggested rites…"              Patrick White, 'Sicilian Vespers'  

“Even random phenomena may make a pattern which, out of the tension of its mere existence, will generate effects and influences.”  John Banville, ‘Kepler’

“…the fragmented landscape…like a puzzle repeatedly assembled or disassembled…”  Roberto Bolano, ‘2666’

"There are no natural objects out of which more can be learned… than out of stones."  John Ruskin

My work is a life long struggle to connect to the world through painting.  Painting is a way toward the infinite.  I see a through-line from the edges of the universe, to the surface of the Earth, to the cells that we are made of.  Natural structures are formed and demolished causing endless patterning.  Humans build and destroy creating the pattern of civilization.  My paintings begin with and are about my relationship with these patterns. 

 As a trained geologist, I often begin with rocks. They contain astounding patterning, chaotic and ordered, and extremely varied.  Already abstracted, they are full of dynamic energy.  They tell great tales of the history of the Earth; millions of years of deposition, movement, collision and erosion.  Slow and vast in proportion, the history of the Earth’s rocks establishes an archetypal framework for my work. 

 My paintings reflect landscape as transformed through development and always imbued with human experience and memory.  I believe that we project onto the natural world, creating myth and ritual, because we are a product of it. I see landscape painting as a mirror of human psychology.  Moreover, through painting, I have begun to see the surface of the Earth as a kind of flesh, something that reminds me of my own body; the tearing away of rock and soil by wind and water as equivalent to my own aging and deterioration.   

 My earlier incarnation as a scientist allows my investigations to be provocative and creates a comfort level for accidents. Through experimentation, I have learned that all outcomes are valuable.  Accidents offer different directions allowing works to move farther and farther from their starting point.  The process is both calculated and liberating, a state of breakdown and reformation, a struggle between the cerebral and the sensual, between Heaven and Hell, an unfolding story or evolution and a search for the appropriate ending.

Gary Blundell was born in London, England and immigrated to Canada in 1962.  He remembers lying in a field as a child watching some balloons disappear into the vast emptiness of the sky.  He remembers looking at everything on the ground.  After graduating from University, he traveled throughout Europe looking at art.  He then began to paint.  He is inspired by Rembrandt, Turner, Soutine, Bonnard, Anselm Kiefer, Rothko, Van Gogh, Francis Bacon, Egon Schiele, David Milne, Paterson Ewen, John Brown and Susanna Heller, among other visual artists, and dozens of musicians and authors like Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, Jonny Greenwood, Virginia Woolf, Patrick White and many more.  His work has been exhibited across Canada and in England.  He was artist-in-residence at the Art House in Yorkshire England, the Straumur Arts Commune in Iceland, the Norfolk Arts Centre in Simcoe Ontario and at Pouch Cove in Newfoundland.  His work can be found in collections throughout Canada, the USA and Europe and on his website, www.hotspurstudio.com. 

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