Art exhibit projects the human condition onto Saint John streetscapes
New Brunswick-based Paul Mathieson creates complex paintings of universal themes
Paul Mathieson's new exhibition began with walks around Uptown Saint John.
In a pre-pandemic world, he sketched, took photos and jotted notes of inspiration. Then, like everyone else, the British-born artist found himself restricted to the visual parameters of his home.
"Once you're in your room and you're locked down, so to speak, you've got to find other sources [of inspiration] to introduce to what you're doing," he said.
In his home on the Kingston Peninsula, he combined his observations with a range of influences: from Pablo Picasso's ink work Don Quixote to the cult-classic science fiction series Fringe.
The result is his new exhibition: Straight On And On The Level – But The Artist Isn't, which opened at the Spicer Merrifield Gallery in Saint John on Oct. 14.
The show is filled with art to be deciphered and interpreted, set against a backdrop of familiar Saint John settings.
The best description of his work is something his wife Victoria said to him one day in the studio.
"When you're looking at a painting, like this one here, it's like looking at a book," he recalled her saying. "But you're not getting the sequential movement, as you do get through a book – page one to 343. What you get is the whole gamut of the thing in one space."
Complex images with universal themes
Mathieson was born in 1949 and raised near Newcastle upon Tyne in England. Ten days after he and his wife married in 1975, they moved to Saint John. Prior to retiring in 2006, Mathieson taught art at various schools in the area.
Throughout decades of painting, his work has always changed.
"Picasso said, 'Artists are the greatest thieves, the crime they commit is when they steal from themselves,'" Mathieson said.
"And what he meant by that is that you don't repeat yourself. You don't get onto a treadmill and produce the same product of a vase of flowers ad nauseam. You move on."
Aside from other art and media, he said this work comes from "life, people, all the things I see, things I see on the street, things I see in the news, the politics of the world, sometimes it's desperate, and I kind of walk that thin line of hope and despair."
"I admit there's a complexity to the paintings," Mathieson said. "But on the whole, the ideas are not that complex."
Drawing inspiration from everywhere
One of his new works, "The Arrival" grew out of a small image in The Guardian newspaper. His brother receives the paper daily, and a few times a year will mail Mathieson a collection of clippings that might interest him.
In one of them, he saw an image of two soldiers hoisting another on their shoulders.
The photograph reminded him of the Biblical Parable of the Prodigal Son, where the father celebrates his son's return. He began to sketch the image and paired it with a photograph he'd taken of the Maritime Bus terminal.
"And then I began to elaborate that idea with what happens when somebody arrives."
Mathieson thinks it's important that the background of a painting reflects the ideas in the foreground. In "The Arrival" the scene takes place in front of a business called Six Fingers.
The name came from a six finger hand print featured in the introduction to the television series Fringe.
"And I thought, when you're arriving back from a journey…there's a kind of reward. So there's an addition to what has happened before."
Throughout the exhibition, Mathieson reinforces his themes through street art and posters within his streetscapes.
In one piece, a lyric from Bob Dylan's 2001 song Mississippi is paraphrased on the wall. The graffiti reads: everyone's got to move, if they're not already there.
"I don't feel guilty about [copying] that at all, because he actually stole the line from a Japanese poem."
Beneath the black lettering is a weathered poster portraying Picasso's Don Quixote, which represents the quest that precedes an arrival.
Reflecting and looking forward
Another work in the exhibition, Public Dancers, deals with sexuality.
The painting comes from reflections on the acceptance of the LGBTQ community he's witnessed in his lifetime and the catalyst was the wedding of his niece, who is lesbian.
The painting is a celebration of that acceptance.
Mathieson sits in the middle of it, reading The Telegraph Journal. On the cover, the name Martin O'Malley is visible. A nod to the journalist who once wrote "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation" in a column in The Globe and Mail, a line later borrowed and made famous by former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
In the top left corner, a woman climbs out of a second story window.
"That's somebody wanting to come out…and join in, become part of it," he said.
This piece also includes a poster depicting David Hockney's 1961 We Two Boys Together Clinging, which Hockney described as homosexual propaganda and painted six years before homosexuality was legalized in England.
Though Mathieson has been painting for about 60 years, he said his style and work will always be evolving.
"You don't just stop, you know, and I've got no intention of stopping, at all."
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