This striking pair of contrasting houses catches my eye whenever I walk towards Acadie metro station here in Montreal. De l’Acadie Houses is painted from a photograph taken last July.
While looking through my camera roll, I discovered that I had taken a photo of just the off-white house on the left several years back.
Villeneuve Ouest Stickers is based on a photograph I took in June 2023 while walking through the Plateau. I was drawn to this whimsical door with its flower stickers applied rather sloppily yet arranged in a beautiful composition.
When I’m paying attention to my surroundings, I tend to appreciate people’s informal acts of repair, concealment, or embellishment.
Notebook (Weaving) is part of an ongoing series in which I make drawings and paintings of spreads from my own (and sometimes others') sketchbooks as an acknowledgment that the magic is in the process.
The dark form collaged onto the right page of this notebook is an inkjet print-out (with low ink, warping the colours) of a photo of a frame loom weaving by my friend Ali Columbus.
This work was included in The Sweetest Little Thing fundraising auction benefitting the Owens Art Gallery and Struts Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick in February 2024.
In November 2022, I attended the Can Serrat International Contemporary Art Residency in El Bruc, Spain. My participation had been postponed from June 2020 due to the pandemic. This was my first-ever residency and first trip overseas in fifteen years.
Masia Can Serrat is an old Catalan farmhouse where I lived for one month with an ever-changing group of about fifteen artists and writers. On the left side of Can Serrat Windows is a nighttime view of a door in the Writers’ Room. On the right is a daytime view of the stained glass window in the mysterious Pigeon Room.
With a lot of help, I was able to pack everything I needed for Spain in a carry-on suitcase. As I boarded the airport bus at Lionel-Groulx metro station in Montreal, I realized that spending three years telling myself and others that I’d someday be doing a residency in Spain was one thing, but actually going was quite another.
The Carry-on is a record of the moment I arrived at Can Serrat and opened up my bag on the bed in my assigned garden view room.
At Can Serrat, I experimented with making mail art using interfaced pieces of cloth. Some of the fabric postcards were completed and mailed out, while others were brought back in my suitcase, unresolved.
I started to play with the unfinished pieces, stitching pairs of them together to create a seam down the middle, adding more embroidery, and putting holes in the corners so that they might be hung without needing frames. Masking captures a moment in the studio when one such work was laying backside up on my notebook.
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