Dave GordonDave Gordon is a painter living in Kingston, Ontario. He taught for 20 years at St. Lawrence College, and is also a part-time teacher for the Limestone District School Board. Dave has also travelled and taught in China, and has had solo exhibitions in Kingston, St. Catharines, London, Toronto, North Bay, Sydenham, and Peterborough Ontario.
Artist Statement: I paint in watercolour and acrylic. I have also used photography, found objects and text in my work. My subject matter references the landscape around Kingston, ON, and also the books that I read, politics and film, the landscape in my head. |
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RECENT SHOWS
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Date: September 16-30, 2023
Reception: September 22, 4pm -7pm Location: Window Art Gallery This show takes its title from Walt Whitman’s writings after recovering from a stroke at the age of 54. He had witnessed the trauma of the Civil War up close. After visiting the war hospitals and ministering to the wounded and dying, he found peace and comfort in nature. “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? - Nature remains...I restore my book to the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity of book or human life.” The natural world Whitman was living in was a lot less threatened by the impact of human activity than our current fraught situation. This summer’s fires, floods, droughts, tornados, typhoons and weird weather everywhere show that man-made climate change poses an existential threat to life on Earth. Whitman’s endorsement of “concrete outdoor Nature” is a reminder that we need to protect the planet. Specimen Days’ is a collection of sketches/observations written over an extended period of time - war memoranda, nature jottings and travel notes. This exhibition is similarly a random selection of recent and older works mostly featuring specimens from Nature. |
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DAVE GORDON: Specimen Days
(Review of Specimen Days written by Ulrike Bender. Ulrike is a member of the Kingston School of Art. This review will appear in the art school's newsletter. ) For two weeks this month, the Window Art Gallery welcomes back a founding member of the Kingston School of Art for a solo exhibition that pays tribute to the vision of poet Walt Whitman, who took solace in nature after experiencing the trauma of the American Civil War and suffering a stroke. In 1882 Whitman published a book of autobiographical sketches entitled Specimen Days. Like parts of the book, Gordon’s acrylic paintings pay homage to the natural world, but the artist comes at Whitman’s vision from the perspective of the 21st century and his own unique creative blend of whimsy and gravitas. The first clue to Gordon’s playfulness appears in the small portraits of insects and birds hung on one wall of the gallery. Whereas Whitman considered a “specimen” a commendable or memorable type of personality, event, natural object or locale, Gordon has chosen a more literal interpretation. He has mounted his beetles and scarabs on canvas—like specimens—and augmented them with mug shots of birds. The result, at once reminiscent of a display case of fantastical creatures and a colourful rogues’ gallery, also hints at a disturbing reality. Our biodiversity is shrinking worldwide, from the woodlands of Ontario to the tropics and beyond. Individual birds also appear in several of Gordon’s larger landscape paintings, which offer intriguing references to climate change. An Australian cockatoo is fancifully positioned on a limb in the woods of Ontario in summer; a mythical firebird, red but not burning, brings perhaps doom, perhaps luck, while flying through a regenerating forest; a cardinal on a grey day sits on a black denuded branch of a wisteria thicket, perhaps bringing a glimmer of hope expressed by the sliver of cerulean sky above. Grey, too, is the cityscape of Toronto as a giant white whale—a Moby Dick Cloud—menacingly enters and fills the space above the skyline. Unlike an earlier painting of a fluffy Moby Dick floating in an ultramarine sky, this cloud depicts the unmistakable presence of doom. Covid also makes an appearance in the clouds, sometimes as large black opaque spheres, and sometimes, as in The Blues #2, as large quirky blobs of black, blue, turquoise and lavender. In Chicken Weather--Waterspouts, Gordon’s whimsically named seascape, three animated small tornadoes spray across, up and out of the picture frame, looking for all the world like … chickens. The minimalist scene made this viewer smile, but in the context of the exhibition as a whole, I questioned whether I was looking at beauty or calamity. Two paintings of creatures in Gordon’s signature loose, painterly style evoked in me the same emotions. With compelling intensity a beautifully detailed goshawk, situated against an interplay of rich green foliage, gazes at its surroundings while perched on a sinuous branch. In an underwater scene, forceful brushstrokes move a small school of strikingly accented Koi across the top half of the image. How much longer can we appreciate these creations of nature? As Gordon writes in his artist’s statement, “Man-made climate change poses an existential threat to life on earth.” Walt Whitman believed that untouched nature could restore one’s psyche. In the painting entitled The Spirit of Walt Whitman at Bon Echo, Gordon has the elderly poet’s head hovering among the trees of Bon Echo Provincial Park. At first glance the juxtaposition appears ludicrous, then disquieting, and ultimately interrogatory. Whitman’s poetry, it turns out, is inscribed on a rock in the park. And so the incongruity of the elements in the landscape give way to understanding—a man with a white beard, nearing the end of his life, oblivious of the future, puts his faith in the natural world. Gordon painted two versions of this scene in 2001 as part of a series called “HeadLands.” The larger of the two is in the Agnes Etherington collection. Today however, with the passage of time, the impact of human activity, and his own accumulation of years, he felt the necessity of having an exhibition with the second smaller version of the work, which speaks poignantly to our urgent need for physical and psychic restoration. Specimen Days continues until Friday, September 29. Dave Gordon works in acrylic and watercolour and has taught visual art for more than 30 years. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in Canada, with work in the permanent collections of the National Gallery and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, among others. He is a founding member of the Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. |
"The Spirit of Walt Whitman at Bon Echo" at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Spring 2020
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