ERIC CAMERON: Springs Eternal
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"Process Painting: Red, Yellow and Blue on White"
Eric Cameron, "Process Painting: Red, Yellow and Blue on White," 1968, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 45.72 cm. Photo by Douglas Sharpe.
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"Eric Cameron"
Eric Cameron.
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"Process Painting: Red, Yellow and Blue on White"
Eric Cameron, "Process Painting: Red, Yellow and Blue on White," 1968, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 45.72 cm. Photo by Douglas Sharpe.
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"Exposed/Concealed: Laura Baird IV (412)"
Eric Cameron, "Exposed/Concealed: Laura Baird IV (412)," 1994-1995, acrylic gesso and acrylic on film canister, 9 x 12 x 10 cm, collection of the artist. Photo by David Brown, University of Calgary, COM / MEDIA.
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"Springs Eternal (500) (detail)"
Eric Cameron, "Springs Eternal (500) (detail)," 2001, acrylic gesso and acrylic on spring, 38 x 5 x 4 cm, collection of the artist. Photo by David Brown, University of Calgary COM / MEDIA.
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"Alice's Rose-is-a-rose-is-a-rose"
Eric Cameron, "Alice's Rose-is-a-rose-is-a-rose," 1996-2001, acrylic gesso and acrylic on rose, 15.3 x 64.8 x 21.6 cm, The Nickle Arts Museum. Photo by John Hails.
ERIC CAMERON: Springs Eternal
2004 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts
By Rod Chapman
Professor Cameron looks every inch the part of a tenured faculty member at the University of Calgary. In class and in public Cameron favours tweed jackets, conservative ties and striped button-down shirts. When he speaks it is in the measured, refined accent of academe, traces of his native England present even after 35 years on Canadian soil.
In the privacy of his studio at home, however, the artist emerges. Stripped to the waist, kneeling in front of his latest piece, Cameron pushes the boundaries of art. In the process he has created a remarkable body of work that in March of this year earned him a coveted Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
At the core of his work to date are his Thick Paintings, a series in which everyday objects – it might be a book of matches, a packet of sugar, a film canister or a head of lettuce – are transformed into surprising new forms through the process of applying hundreds, even thousands of layers of acrylic gesso. He paints first one side, allowing it to dry, then the other side, repeating the process over and over again. Two half-coats grey. Two half-coats white. It’s a daily ritual, one that delivers him into a meditative trance in which he “remembers how to do it in the muscles of the arm, rather than in the mind.” The process often continues for years, even decades, until the piece takes on a life of its own. To one work, Thick Painting: Lettuce, he has applied more than 9,500 half-coats of gesso since 1979.
“When I started doing my thick paintings almost exactly 25 years ago, I discovered they didn’t get thick very quickly,” he says. “What did happen is that they started going their own way – I was continually surprised by the strange behaviour of the material I was working with.”
The significance of new forms arising from ordinary objects continues to fascinate the artist, but these days his work is taking on another dimension. In a new series called Heavy Paintings he takes ordinary springs purchased from Canadian Tire, covers them in layers of gesso and suspends them over mirrors using an elasticized string. “The effect is of denying gravity, of reflections within reflections producing a strange sort of space that is something like the notion of eternity,” he says.
Eric Cameron’s work is housed in the collections of numerous Canadian galleries and museums including Calgary’s Nickle Arts Museum and the Glenbow Museum.
Rod Chapman is a contributing editor to Galleries West.
