-
MAGGEE DAY: PAINTING THE VIEW FROM MY DOORSTEP
15 SEPTEMBER - 15 OCTOBER -
Maggee Day
Oil and WatercolourDay’s work challenges traditional conventions of representational painting by exploring new ways to utilize tools in our contemporary world. The artist combines traditional painting techniques, rendering approaches from the digital realm and loose vandalizing brushstrokes to create complex paintings. Day becomes physically and emotionally charged as she fearlessly layers pigments. Intimate in scale, her works facilitate a moment of pensiveness, whilst her larger pieces consume viewers, pushing audiences to challenge their perception of three-dimensional space.
-
The doorstep is where Day's exploration begins. The view is pulled apart into abstracted colours and shapes while retaining some semblance of three-dimensional space and elements within. By selecting this familiar location as the site of her study, the artist explores sensations and feelings through a lens of objectivity, embracing the mundane and every day.
-
Day makes a conscious effort to distance herself from themes of wilderness and traditional methods of landscape painting and instead use her current reality as a prolonged study of space.
Through my investigation I have learned that seeing is both social and neurological; a painting is both mediated through historical tools of perspective and the artist’s subjective perception.
-
Day embraces accidental movement by changing her order of procedures and materials to highlight and celebrate moments of choice as a painter. This decision opens up a margin of error between what the artist intends to do in contrast to the realities of art-making. The application of paint then becomes a process of authentic movement, enabling the artist to fearlessly colour large scale canvases.
-
Artist's Observations
"The purple-brown wood chips in the garden lay overtop the almost black soil. There is a collection of different leaves sitting on top of the dirt. They all range from orange yellow, to brown orange, to a purple brown. There is an array of plants that average different greens, from a light mint blue-green, lime green-yellow, dark green, and even more muted red-greens, or dark blue-greens. Within each plant is a variety of warm and cool tones of that colour, pale blue reflections of light and/or yellow-brown areas where leaves are dying. Through the garden I can see a sidewalk, cars parked on the road, small modern houses, three story apartment buildings, and in the distance I see other apartment buildings, and lights. Everything seems gray, less detailed, and dull the further I look."
-
-
Emily Carr MFA
-
-
Painting that oscillates between abstraction and representation.
Day does not consider her works to be completely abstracted as they start from observations and photographs that are then broken down through her translation process. Extracting information from these references, the artists intensifies detail and emotion. Day continues to questions where the line is between abstraction and representation lines. Is it a sliding scale that every painting sits on? Can a process-based painting practice be representational?
-
b. Ontario, Canada Maggee Day is a visual artist working predominantly in the medium of oil paint. She studied at OCAD University in Toronto, ON where she received her BFA (2016), and completed her MFA at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC (2020). Day has exhibited across Canada and was awarded the 2018 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in painting. Day lives and works in Vancouver, on the unceded land of the Coast Salish peoples.
-
Studio Visit
-
Inquire about available works
