I’ll participating in Art on Ice again this year on February 10 here in Ottawa. Art on Ice is a great little event where we get to hang our paintings on the side of the Ridea Canal Skateway for a day and freeze our butts off. It was originally scheduled for Feb. 2, but weather and ice conditions conspired to force the postponement. The weather for this weekend looks like it’ll be great.

More info about Winterlude can be found here:

Winterlude

click to see.

More specifically, some of my hockey mini-paintings were listed in the Toronto Magazine’s Gift Guide that came out on Sat. Nov. 24.

Here’s the online link: Have you been Good?

The paintings are here.

here’s a quick update about some of my current artistic goings-on:

brainmade handworks
The collaborative artworks that I did with Floyd Elzinga of artifice (http://artifice.brainmade.com) will be at Floyd’s booth (K-36) at the One of a Kind Show in Toronto after this Saturday. Floyd will have a booth full of his very cool metal wall sculptures, so if you don’t see the collaborations on display and you would like to have a look, please ask Floyd and he’ll be able to help you out. The pieces will also be at Floyd’s Open Studio in Beamsville, Ontario on Saturday, December 8, so you can see them there as well. Photos of the pieces posted here.

Great Big Smalls III
I will have some of my mini-paintings at the Cube Gallery in Ottawa for their annual Christmas show Nov. 29 – Dec.23. (http://www.cubegallery.ca) Check their website for details. The openings are always a great party if you can make it out.

small gets bigger
I’ve been working on a pretty small scale for the last few years with the mini-paintings and I’ve done upwards of 370 of them so far. This fall, however, I decided to mix it up a bit and I’ve started a series of full sized plywood paintings. They’re looking great so far, and I hope they survive the creation process. For larger pieces the process can be a lot like a road trip: it starts out great but eventually everyone ends up tired, smelly, over-caffeinated and in a state somewhere between irritated and homicidal. Unfortunately, the main drawback of doing larger work is that I’m probably going to be short on mini-paintings until the spring or summer.

• I’ve done some cleaning up on the website, removing some old things and adding some new things:
• new autumn mini-paintings
• ‘Northern Basserel’, which is a large painting with a bit of a comic book feel to it that I did earlier this year.
• a new series of paintings that I’m currently calling ‘flatland people-scapes’. They’re very different than the mini-paintings in terms of the subject matter, and seem to have more in common with the kind of work I did when I was much younger. Check out how history repeats itself

If this banking company had a Canadian branch, I would definitely be putting my money in here:
Triodos

They do ethical banking, and while they might not be big (yet), they at least help to counter-balance ethically-challenged corporations like Shell and ING.

I can’t remember where I first read about them, but the possibility of putting your cash into a carbon neutral fund with a bank that only funds things that are beneficial for people and the planet apparently caused them to get swamped with new customers in the UK. Come on Canadian branch!

I finally just tried to do a checkout to see if I had this shopify thing set up properly, and apparently I don’t!

I’ll post back once I’ve figured out how to fix it.

If you’re in Ottawa at any point during the month of July, you will be able to see the results of the recent collaboration between painter Marcel Guldemond (myself) and sculptor Floyd Elzinga at Chez Lucien in the Byward Market. (137 Murray Street, Ottawa, ON K1N 5M7
Telephone : 613-241-3533 ) This is the first chance for anyone outside of Toronto to see these works up close.

About the work:
Floyd and I have known each other for a longer than we care to remember, but this is the first time we’ve tried working together, and we’re very excited about how well things have been turning out. So far, the working process involves Floyd shipping me chunks of steel from Beamsville to Ottawa, which I then use for paintings, and me shipping paintings to Floyd, which he then incorporates into sculptures. Anyone who knows us will not be surprised to hear that there is an almost appalling lack of planning or forethought involved in the process: I have no real idea what he’s going to do and he has no idea of what I’m going to do. Actually, speaking for myself, I have no real idea of what I’m going to do either, but that’s another story altogether.

Well, enough of the blah-blah-blah-yeah-yeah-whatever writing about art: the working name for this series of work is brainmade handworks, and I’ve posted some of the photos of the pieces here: brainmade handworks online

Floyd’s website
Marcel’s website

cheers,
—
Marcel

With regards to that last post I posted, how do I keep doing paintings of landscapes when things seem so bleak? I’m not really sure, maybe it’s just a desire to keep going with something positive because life’s too short to be stuck on the negative all the time. Maybe it’s also the need to appreciate the beautiful bits in the stream of being as they go by. If that resonates with people who take my paintings home with them, then maybe that adds some lightness to the world too.

My wife just showed me this article a few days ago about the rapid and dangerous build up of plastics in the environment.

Every time I read one of these articles about environmental destruction, and I do all the time, I have what I assume is the natural human reaction, which is to get completely depressed about how badly human kind has “bitch-slapped the planet”, and then that feeling gets mingled with a competing sense of admiration for all the scientists and activists who get up everyday and do something about it, knowing full well how hopeless it all seems. They don’t make the headlines too often, but they’re there. And we can help them, even if donating some money is a lame/lazy way to help, because the internet makes it so easy. Sure, there’s guilt involved, but if you’re going to feel guilty anyway, then why not channel some of it into helping people who are working to make a difference?

Here’s the article:
sea of plastic

For daily news about climate change (most of it depressing): www.climateark.org

Maybe that’s the hardest part about this internet age: how does the average person avoid becoming a clinical basket case with the absolute daily flood of news about how greed, corruption, sheer blind stupidity, and the irresistable force of the (justifiable) desire of all human beings to want to have at least a half decent life are leading us to a precipice of environmental destruction that is going to make the 1930’s and 1940’s look like a cake walk? I suppose most first world people deal with it with a healthy dose of denial and forgetfulness. Otherwise, how do you remember to see that world is a constant beautiful shimmering display of the cosmic soul? You might remember on a sunny day when you hear a bird in the trees, but then you remember that the populations of many birds are plummeting at a truly alarming rate? That’s a hard one that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

It looks like I’ll be able to get some of the pieces from my recent collaborative efforts with my old friend Floyd Elzinga for my showing at Chez Lucien this July. The pieces are very unique and turned out very well. Hopefully I’ll be able to add some of the photos to the aporia web site soon.