BUZZon - MacInnis’ Millions

I was living in Montreal when the 1992 selection of Best Canadian Stories, which I edited each year with my daughter Maggie, arrived in the mail from Oberon Press. The cover art chosen by the publishers was a bright and whimsical drawing by Stephen B. MacInnis, an odd and charming image with a hint of cartoon and folk art about it.

Four or five years later I moved to PEI and discovered that Stephen MacInnis lived and worked in Charlottetown; we would run into him now and then at local events. I saw more of his vivid and slightly magical images in galleries. We bought a pencil drawing from a one-day sale, at an outrageously low price, and it hangs on our wall, in the pine frame I made for it.

I think it was in Beanz one day a year or so ago now that a couple of bright framed abstracts caught my attention. They led me to get up from my chair and walk closer to study them from close up. Stephen MacInnis again, and the pictures struck me as even more satisfying than the images of vividly odd and unlikely figures I had been seeing.

As part of a current show, The Confederation Centre Art Gallery has on display until March a thousand such abstracts by Stephen McInnis, and they continue to excite me. All of the pieces in the gallery show are created on sheets of paper twelve inches square. The artist explains on one hand-lettered sheet how he began working on paper of that size on January 23, 2009, because it was available and he liked the challenge of going back again and again to the same format. It was also a format in which he could work comfortably while part of his life was taken up with two small children. (His daughter seems to have had a hand in at least one of them.) He had a box just the right size to contain the completed works, and he decided fill it; then he went on with the series, and decided to put them on sale for $100 each. Belatedly, MacInnis discovered that Julian Schnabel, the American artist and film-maker, had done something similar, but in his case it was a thousand drawings at a thousand dollars each.

All this suggests an intriguing combination of practicality, whimsy, and perhaps increasingly, obsession. The one foot square works have continued to pile up, and work number 500, which is the hand-printed summary of the project, tells us that he has in mind to produce 10,000 such works, his own million dollars worth of art.

In the current show of the first 1000, one wall of the gallery displays 126 sheets (by my count) unframed and highly varied in technique. MacInnis describes how he began with drawings but gradually moved on to mixed media, combining drawing, painting and collage.

A few feet from that busy wall stands a plastic display case that contains a heap of several hundred more painted sheets of paper. On a low platform loose drawings are piled in samples of the square boxes where MacInnis began to store them. A few pieces are on display framed, the plain black frame and white mat accenting the liveliness, skill and power of each one. The series shows some leaning toward bright primary colours, a lot of brilliant reds and blues. While entirely abstract, the foot square objects are expressions of a fine and subtle sense of design. There is something both fascinating and outrageous about the whole idea, but if this is conceptual art, it is a concept offering a springboard for the achievements of a skilled hand and eye.

Studying the individual pieces reminded me of the day I saw some of them (or something very like them) on the wall at Beanz, and voting with my feet went to see them close up. One way of saying yes.

Father’s Hands ←		Something to Re-read →

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by David Helwig