Happy new year to you all, if I haven’t said it already, and welcome to The art of the matter, my blog about, you guessed it…art.
I’d like to thank each and every one of you for showing interest in my paintings through your likes, comments, and follows.
These days with all the distractions, it’s a huge effort to sit down and take time to read a blog, so if you are actually reading this, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your presence here means a lot to me.
Painting is the creative process I use to make sense of what I’m feeling in the world, and writing is how I make sense of this process.
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is James Postill, I’m 51 years old, currently working as a painter for the
City of kelowna. I’m happily married to my wife Judy, and I have three great kids that I’m proud of, who are young adults now.
Not the least importantly, we have a dog named Vito who is the undisputed center of our universe. So what to write about…
At this moment I’m driving to work in pre-dawn January mist, trying to figure that out.
I find that I can do a lot of things while I’m driving, even writing. Just hit the record button and off I go…blah blah blah.
If I am honest, driving to work in the dead of winter in the early morning is not my favourite setting when it comes to writing.
If I am really honest, much as I am grateful for the steady income that sustains my art practice, I have no desire to be driving or working anymore. Period. I guess I’ve gotten to a point where 30 years of it is enough.
In spite of this though, I seem to have found a balance between life and work. At night I find time for my studio practice, which for the past two year has been a mixture of airbrush acrylic painting and oil painting on large-scale canvases and panels.
Since 2010, most of my subject matter has revolved around painting scenes seen through rainy windshields.
Sometimes a part of me wonders why I keep painting the same subject matter over and over again?
A considerable part of my working life has been spent commuting, so it’s possible that some inspiration came from seeing through the windshield all the time.
I guess the truth of it is I don’t get tired of it. There’s something that keeps bringing me back to rainy windshields, like they are my meditations made visual. I just recently finished a rainy painting whose inspiration came from a photograph taken by this fantastic Vancouver photographer named Sonika Arora, who graciously allowed me to use her photo as a reference.
She’s a Vancouver-based photographer who captures an amazing spectrum of moods in her cityscapes and landscapes.
Someone on instagram showed me this photograph, and I knew I had to try to interpret it.
My paintings are usually done over a few sessions, usually because of my time constraints working full time. If there’s an advantage to this, it does give me a chance to think about the painting and ponder my next move.
Being a commercial building painter has introduced me to different paint products which have spilled over into my art practice. For example, as a base coat over gesso, I use a product called Sure Step, which is actually meant as an anti-slip coating for around pools.
To best describe my paintings’ surfaces, they have the look and feel of fine stucco.
Here’s an up close picture of one of my canvases.
You can see the gritty surface, and oil paint, knifed onto the airbrush paint.
Thank you for taking time to look at this, and read a little bit about me. I hope we can get to know each other a little better as time goes on. Feel free to send me an email and tell me about what you do!
Happy creating,
James