My visual art tends to tell a story in its own way. These paintings are not currently for sale.
Skychief
I wish I could say that this is about the high cost of gasoline, but it’s really about the precarious joy of nostalgia. The old truck and gas pump reflect the peculiar way my mind dips in and out of the past. Nostalgia is dangerous because it idealizes memory, glossing over the ugliness that has always been an aspect of reality. My writing is coloured by old streetcars, incline railways, and lift bridges, and in my stories the past has a way of intruding on the present.
Paddle Wheeler
The old southern steamboat is splashing its way through the Milky Way, tossing up starfish. A lot of my paintings show mundane things drifting through a star field: cats under lamp posts, pirates, fishing boats… Images like these make me feel free, which is where my imagination needs to be. Like my paintings, my novels are rooted in the here and now: a handsome Labrador, a soapstone carving—but when I write about life and death, I hear echoes of the vast eternity that surrounds us.
Hamster Wheel
I had a hamster, and I called him ‘Oppy’ after Robert Oppenheimer, because Oppenheimer developed the atomic bomb and Oppy, in all likelihood, didn’t. What he did do was run circles around his cage, seemingly having good time about it. How’s that for a metaphor for life?
Roller Coaster
This painting is all about exuberance—not only because of the roller coaster, but because the crazy landscape seems to be getting in on the act. There’s so much whooping and dipping, the painting seems to have spread out of its frame. I’ll have to watch that. I love the colour scheme, though, which is slightly bilious. That’s how you would feel with all that whooping and dipping.
Haunted Outhouse
The cool palette, the gothic architecture, the funereal top hat—this is a mood piece that evokes the ghost story through an odd little vignette. The moon wears a comic mask. Masks that bring to mind the dramatic faces of comedy and tragedy are a theme in my work. Maybe they show up because I’ve spent my adult life in and around story-telling. Or is it that masks hide the truth, creating mystery?
Owl Eyes
This very blue night scene shows a moment of alarm: between a night owl who is bursting out of the upper left frame, and an owlish man driving a noisy roadster out of the lower right. In the night sky there is a strangely shaped crescent moon that seems to have a rounded base. I was thinking about a Brancusi sculpture called Space Bird which looks a little like a skinny new moon, but that shape has got no business floating in the heavens. The nice thing about being an artist—or a writer—is that you can just do it any way.
Winter Parking
Some of my paintings might laughingly be called realistic. This one brings out two themes I embrace: a cautious love of the past embodied by the old Ford, and a taste for the ethereal which is there in the drifting snow and mirror-like reflections. It’s another mood piece. Requiem for Thursday is a mood piece too, with the bitter cold hanging heavily over every page.
Lift Bridge
This is a photograph I took when I was writing Requiem for Thursday, and it belongs here because I played with the colour trying to evoke the merciless and murderous winter that is almost like another character in the novel. It reminds me that a story teller has the right to filter reality for the reader, imbuing a Burlington street, an old school house, or a painting on a wall— with the long, blue foreshadow of evil.
Douglas Cockell 