Eric Cameron: Thanatos

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Eric Cameron, "Thanatos #222," 2018

latex on Remembrance Day poppy and fishing wire, 2.8" x 10.5" x 2.5" (photo courtesy of TrépanierBaer Gallery, Calgary)

Calgary artist Eric Cameron has been working for almost a decade on his Thanatos series, named for the ancient Greek personification of death. It seems a fitting project for an artist in his 80s as he comes to terms with the final phase of his life.

“For me the highest aspiration of art has long been to help reconcile us to the imponderability of the great imponderables that circumscribe our existence, including the most imponderable of all, ourselves,” says Cameron, born in Britain in 1935.

Death is inevitable for us all, of course, and Cameron is in an enviable position with a long and notable career as an artist, writer and educator on both sides of the Atlantic. He has taught at the University of Calgary since 1987, moving there after a decade at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax.

Cameron is one of the most conceptual painters of his generation in Western Canada. He gives primacy to process, adding repeated day-after-day layers of paint or gesso to everyday objects – a beer bottle, an alarm clock, even a head of lettuce – transforming them in strange and transfixing ways.

It’s easy to see the work as a metaphor for life itself, with its daily accruals of experience that gradually shift and change us, sometimes armouring us within a hard shell.

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Eric Cameron, "Thanatos," 2018, detail of installation (photo courtesy of TrépanierBaer Gallery, Calgary)

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Eric Cameron, "Thanatos," 2018, installation view (photo courtesy of TrépanierBaer Gallery, Calgary)

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In Thanatos, on view until Nov. 24 at TrépanierBaer in Calgary, his pieces dangle from above, calling to mind stalactites, or perhaps snail shells or even malformed teeth, although they are as vivid as any paintball funhouse. Cameron views the series as one of the major projects of his career.

He began dipping objects in paint because he thought it would be less work than the laborious brushing he had used in his earlier Thick Paintings. He continued to experiment, intrigued by the forms and surface textures that began to emerge. Some time around Remembrance Day in 2009, he started dipping poppies, opening the door to Thanatos with this powerful wartime symbol of death and remembrance.

“By that time, the process of dipping had been refined beyond the preliminary ventures with objects tied onto string or coloured cords,” he says.

“I would begin by sewing the ends of 100-yard spools of fish wire onto the plastic flower part of the poppies, further secure the fish wire to the needles with duct tape, and suspend the whole thing from the exposed beams in my basement studio and proceed to dip each poppy into cans of brightly coloured Expressions latex paint or into one of the cans of pure white gesso left over from my Thick Paintings project.”

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Eric Cameron in his Calgary studio in 2018. (photo courtesy of TrépanierBaer Gallery, Calgary)

Art historian Ann Davis, in the introduction to a 2011 book, Cover and Uncover: Eric Cameron, notes he is essentially trying to eliminate distinctions between art and life.

“His immense contribution not merely consists of the act of painting objects, but more importantly, includes concomitant analysis, which has led him to embrace and reveal the mysteries of life.”

Cameron, whose honours include a Governor General’s Award in 2004 and the 1994 Gershon Iskowitz Prize from the Art Gallery of Ontario, has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and other institutions.

Thanatos is on view at the TrépanierBaer Gallery in Calgary from Oct. 20 to Nov. 24, 2018.