Bambi – Artist’s Statement
My career as a painter has focused primarily on the creation of large scale, realistic, figurative paintings on wood panel. I explore issues of intimacy and identity through the situation of the nude in the Canadian landscape; specifically images of my partner and myself set on the Canadian West Coast. The role of landscape in forging identity is a prevalent theme in my work, as are sexuality and gender conditioning, inherent in the use of the nude figure.
Recently, my painting has developed toward photo-realism as an exploration of the conceptual and aesthetic space between painting and photo-based art. In my exhibition, Vanity Suite, I created an installation with paintings involving the viewer as voyeur, walking in on the drama of a male figure watching a female figure on the opposing wall perform a striptease in the ruins of a West Coast clear-cut.Rather than each painting existing unto itself, each contributes to the whole event. The individual pieces must be experienced collectively.
Bambi, unites my established medium, painting, with installation and video projection. Disney’s tale of the death of innocence, Bambi, brings forth childhood memory, composed, like surrealism, of fantasy and reality. In my interpretation of this classic, each in a series of four paintings on wood panel develops into the next. As in the film, a narrative unfolds in the relation of the images to one another.
True to the film version of this narrative, Bambi, the vulnerable fawn, and his mother, the ill-fated doe, are central characters in each painting. However, in a departure from the animated versions, mine are realistically portrayed North American white-tailed deer. The third character, a crouching female figure, referencing Fischl’s Scene V, from his 1994 body of work, alludes to the “Death of Painting” controversy. The action in the narrative, that of being hunted, evokes response from both the animals and the female figure. The characters dodge incoming arrows, conscious of the constant threat of death.
The bleached portion of wood panel on which the female figure is rendered bathes her in light, suggesting a tense separation between the figure and the scene to which she is privy. She witnesses the action and reacts to its ominous tone, but exists more as a specter than a participant.
In the video projection, this work resolves itself. The final painting of the four features a life-sized, orphaned fawn, curled up asleep. Projected onto the painting and blanketing the surrounding wall, the image of the female character rises slowly, triumphantly, from her crouched position and strides out of the scene. The female figure becomes animated and larger than life, the embodiment of strategic survival and persistent strength.
Bambi explores new thematic territories as animals replace humans as subject and film narrative replaces allegory. These shifting priorities parallel the tension and imbalance amongst the mediums. Using a photo-realistic painting style and engaging in surrealist ideology through composition and video projection, Bambi unites tradition and technology, fantasy and reality, and creates a visual language for that union.