Coloured Mud

Three Stacks of Books

36” x 48”

The two books with the raised spines and gold details on the top of columns one and two are from a friend originally from England.  One is a Matthew Arnold book of poems and one is Shakespeare.  The books really are exquisite works of art unto themselves. Some of the other books with the canvas spines are old university textbooks that belonged to my parents.  The really water damaged and wrinkled book on the top of the third column is a book of Tennyson poems with a publication date of 1891 and inscribed with my grandmother's name.  She only achieved a grade nine education and this would have been a school book.

I mention all this because I think of the intersections of people in time, those people in our lives, and the knowledge and experiences we share. We loan books to each other, recommend them, and sometimes they are left to us by loved ones who have passed on. The stacks of books literally represent this type of collective memory.

I was partially inspired to do this book series by the book objects of the German artist Anselm Kiefer.  The 'books' are about the material, about history - they contain no words, only masses of muck and deterioration.  He is quoted as saying, "I create history, I do history, history is my mud."

Oil paint is itself a coloured mud applied with a stick to canvas - in the process of painting the many textures of these books I can't help but feel connected to history and all the other artists who used the same materials centuries ago and since.

Anselm Kiefer

Three Stacks of Books (Detail)

36” x 48”

This painting will be in the "Larger than Life" group show at the Wallace Galleries in Calgary from October 1-13, 2011.

Detail of:  Three Stacks of Books

36” x 48”