White Slip

Shoreline

Whip

When talking about my work I have always referred to them as original works. People have talked about the prints as being drawings. What I am really wanting to do is differentiate between something like a giclee print of a painting or a drawing, and what I am doing. This is new media and people sometimes have difficulty placing it and understanding it. My work only exists in its final state, so I don't like to talk about it being large prints of my drawings. This is also why I don't like my work mentioned along with photopraphy. I am a painter who is using technology, without letting technology use me. That is why I talk about these as being drawings, even though they are digital prints. They are not photographs or enlargements of a finished product. Again they only exist in their final state.

As quoted in Vancouver Magazine in May 2011, "Twenty-year Alberta painter invents a new practice blending automatic drawing, land art, and digital manipulation."This is something that I want to stress, which gives my work its uniqueness and allows people a way to find their way into it.

New Show

Close Call

New work is finally in at the printers. Proofing is being done and the new prints will be available later next week. It is always both fun and hard on the nerves waiting for the proofs. Today I decided with my Calgary dealer Deborah which image will be used for the invite. We are going with Close Call a brand new image and the last one that I made and included in the show. After months of preparation my solo show Watermark opens on April 7 at the Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary.

Every day I draw. I make upwards of ten thousand drawings a year. No matter where I go or what I am doing I draw. I always have paper with me, or a sketch book. Large or small it does not matter. I love paper. The feel of it beneath my hand. How blank and endless the opportunities are with it. How one simple line can transform an entire plane.  The immediacy of drawing has always appealed to me. To this day I am still excited by a mark on paper, different materials and new directions.

                                                                      Hallaw, 2011

With the introduction of the dowsing rod into my work several years ago I brought in an outside influence. Where my hand would normally go right the rod choose to go left. I was then left to deal with the removal of the personal. Later I could react to the foreign mark reinvesting my personal meaning into the work.

Construct, 2011 Dowsing Rod Print

I am interested in taking art in a new direction. I am innovative beyond the boundaries of painting and drawing. I am interested in going where visual arts have not gone before. New media, materials and techniques

VISUAL ARTS by SCOTT ROGERS

Strange creaturesCurtis Cutshaw’s subtle, energetic works >>PREVIEW THE DOWSING ROD SERIESRuns until June 16 Curtis Cutshaw Skew GalleryThe link between photography and painting has been explored almost perpetually since the advent of the photographic process in the early part of the 19th century. But photography's connection to drawing has been less well established. It seems inevitable that the growing interest in drawing as practice in contemporary art would lead to some investigation of its relation to photography. Curtis Cutshaw's work, currently on view at Skew Gallery, deals with a heavily mediated hybrid between photography and drawing that nonetheless retains a shadowy connection to modernist painting. The seven works in the exhibition are black framed and of equal size. In the pure whiteness of Skew, they have an eerie quality. This fits appropriately with the vaguely numinous aura surrounding the subject matter of the work. It’s a complex arrangement of methods that begins in performance and ends in a digital image. The performance aspect of the project is dowsing, or more specifically, using a dowsing rod to determine the presence or absence of water. Cutshaw uses this dowsing rod as a drawing tool, attaching a brush to its end and drawing ink across a piece of paper ostensibly guided by the stick and the waters below. From these drawings, Cutshaw then creates a digital image by scanning the image into Photoshop and retouching its colours. The final product emerges as a C-print. The multiple levels of manipulation inherent to Cutshaw's process result in images loaded with expressionistic marks, but conspicuously lacking tactility. Each image is filled with swooping drips and splatters, but the sense of the artist's removal is evident. This creates an interesting juxtaposition between the mark and its representation. By removing the direct contact of ink on paper and leaving only its impression or trace, Cutshaw creates a simulacra-like image. Each photo becomes the empty signifier of drawing. They are the remains of representation after the loss of the original, like the map that came to replace the territory in Borges's parable or Roy Lichtenstein's brushstroke series. What is odd about Cutshaw's work is that despite the separation from the real in his images, a sense of a spectral object is implied. The photos evoke some lost or non-existent 3D thing that is organic, fluid and ephemeral. The images almost take on the appearance of imaginary sea creatures or microscope photos of bacteria. Strange that these abstractions created by duplicating arbitrary marks should imply depth, duration and life. Perhaps Cutshaw's most interesting art historical influence (one that Lichtenstein also drew from) is abstract expressionism, particularly the work of Jackson Pollock. Cutshaw's work is a sly inversion of Pollock's process. For Pollock, technique was a kind channelling, where his body would supposedly take internal creative impulses and distribute them across the surface of the canvas. The distribution of paint became the only content of the painting – an expressive index of the pure artist. This notion of the artist (read: white, straight, male painter) contributed to a mythologizing that still dominates the contemporary art world, often referred to as a cult of the genius. In defiance, Cutshaw's work undoubtedly draws external content into the scenario, thereby making problematic authentic personal expression. Whereas Pollock supposedly took his inspiration from a hermetic internal process, Cutshaw links the creation of his work to a dubious activity associated with natural energies. The implication is that creativity is a complicated social response to the world outside and not simply an isolated incident contained within specific formats or media. As a result, Cutshaw's use of combined media, external energy sources and the avoidance of heroic scale, critique art-world notions of authority in a subtle way.

I often wonder if people have any idea what it is to be an artist? The worries an artist has? For myself the making was and never has been a worry. I can always make. My worries come from once the art has left my studio. Will they get it? Will they buy it? Can it pay the bills? How much do I have to give of myself in so many ways and get so little in return? How long can I keep doing this? Do I have a choice? The answer is no. I have to make. There is not a choice. I have always made. I will always make.
 I have seen a lot of really good art go unnoticed. I have always found this a troublesome thing. A fellow artist once said to me "well I can always fall back on being rich." I had no idea what he was saying. I asked him and he said if we worked as hard as we do on something else as we do our art we would be rich. It was funny but very true.

Today I am posting a preproduction close up of one of my new prints. I hope you enjoy.