Rabbits
People often want to know what my story is when it comes to rabbit paintings. Growing up on an acreage just outside of the city, I used to have rabbits as a child, as a teenager and as an adult. When it came time for me to choose a “path” in my final year of art school, I knew I wanted to paint but I didn’t know where to begin, so I turned to my vast repository of family photographs. There were a lot of rabbit photographs buried in that stash, so I picked them out and set them aside to use as references for my paintings. I wanted to learn more about abstract art, but yet again I was stuck… I didn’t know where to begin. Process-oriented abstraction did not appeal to me, and so I realized I needed a reference for my work. I picked up all of those rabbit photographs I had set aside and I began to create abstract paintings based on close-ups of the rabbits. I wanted to reincarnate those long deceased rabbit friends of mine into large, abstract oil paintings.
I also wanted to improve my general painting skills, so I used the photographs to create realistic-ish oil paintings of my rabbit friends. I am not interested in re-creating the photograph of the rabbit (or anything for that matter) with exact precision; however, I do love impressionism, colour, illustration and humor… so my paintings must make me laugh or cringe, otherwise they don`t feel like a part of me.
