June | 2017 | Christopher Stott

From June 2017

Electric Fan & Red Books

This painting is at the George Billis Gallery in New York. It’s another in a series of paintings I have been doing by revisiting my portfolio and applying a new technique to subjects I have painted in the past 17 years.

Electric Fan / 12 x 12 / acrylic on canvas / 2004

The first time I painted a fan, I had a quick technique and was finished the painting in a few hours.

I think being a young father with a 2-year-old son and a 3-month-old daughter may have had something to do with how little time I had to paint. We had also just moved in to a new house that needed major work and I had a job at a university.

I have distinct memories of feeling this crunch of getting a painting done, racing to the finish line, before my son woke up from a nap. I also painted in the evenings for several years, tired and beleaguered.

I am completely on the other side now. Teenaged kids who require no nap times and they occupy themselves marvellously. I left my job and paint full time in a house that needs no work. Goals achieved. I have the next several decades (hopefully) to paint uninterrupted.

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Colored Pencils & #2 Pencils

More new work now at the George Billis Gallery in New York.

This new work is also based on old work after looking through my portfolio from the last decade of paintings.

Western Electric Rotary Telephone – 2004 & 2017

Western Electric Rotary Telephone – this new painting is showing at the George Billis Gallery in New York City.

Thirteen years ago I painted this phone for the first time. It was when I began seriously building my oeuvre. I would paint fast and furious, thinking that a quickly rendered, expressive way of painting was what I wanted to achieve. It never really felt like a natural way for me to paint, but the subject always felt like the right one.

Western Electric Rotary Telephone / acrylic on canvas / 2004 / Christopher Stott — 11 x 14 / acrylic on canvas / 2004

I was painting with acrylics, and if the painting wasn’t done after an hour of work, then I felt like I was taking too long.

Over time I slowed way, way down and focused with an indirect painting technique. A very slow building of layers in oils. In person my paintings are still far more painterly than they appear on the screen before you.

Over the past several months I have experimented with paintings and tried a few different approaches. I’ll still do such experiments now and again, but I have decided to look back over the last 17 years of my paintings and will simply re-paint my own work with my new approach and technique. I want to copy my own portfolio, I want to see if I can make the paintings better, I want to see if I can learn from my own work.

In 2004 I signed up for Flickr where I have archived 740 of my paintings. Most of my works is there, including work done in 2000 as a student. Anyone who wants to see, warts and all, is welcome to browse.

The Blue Table

Two new paintings showing at the Robert Lange Studios in Charleston, South Carolina.

Rotary Telephone & Blue Table by Christopher Stott — Western Electric Rotary Telephone & Blue Table / 20 x 20 / oil on canvas

I found this little blue table at Everything Old Canada and figured I would use it to inject some texture and colour in to a few paintings. It is a bit of an experiment, a study to see if this is something I would want to pursue in other paintings.

Antique Camera & Blue Table by Christopher Stott — Antique Camera & Blue Table / 20 x 20 / oil on canvas