The General Electric Works, 1974-1975
Both my Spadina Grid Paintings and my Mystic Cloud Drawings ended about the same time around 1974. Each series of work had become too limited by their dimensions, media, grid system and conceptual parameters. As a kind of gesture of rebellion from these constraints, I produced about fifty-seven drawings that I titled The General Electric (GE) Works.
Without much pre-planning, I began with small, semi-automatic pencil drawings. These expanded to include ink, watercolour and gouache. I produced fifty of these works before they abruptly stopped; I’m unable to remember why.
Perhaps the reason the project stopped was that I was ready to detach myself from working in series; they seemed too open-ended and I wasn’t yet ready to commit myself to working that way. I probably also realized they were somewhat derivative of the work of another Toronto artist, whose name I won’t mention.
These works have never been exhibited. A few are in private collections.
The idea of working in this entirely open-ended way did not occur to me again until the early 1990s when I produced the series, Three Boasts on a Beach. That series ended when I moved to Italy in 1992. It next occurred to me when I began the project, The Artist and the Model.
