Chris Simonite's Cubo-Weirdism Blog! A Blog about Chris Simonite's Art by Chris Simonite. Who the Hell else?

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that a friend made some suggestions on how to improve my work, and of course improvement is something most of us strive for anyway, so I welcomed his input. And even if it looked like my work had a sameness to it, I was tentatively trying to do some of the things my friend talked about, such as doing less dry brushing and using more paint.   But after chatting with him, I decided to try to kick it up a notch. One of the things most painters do is what's known as a "master copy". [...]

When I was in Grad School my MFA cohort had a group exhibition in the student gallery at the University of Ottawa fairly early on in the program. At the time I was working on a cut-out animation that featured watercolours and an original song that I recorded myself. When we put on that show the animation was not even close to being ready but I needed to show something. So I decided to show a couple of watercolours and I put an mp3 player and some headphones on a plinth under the paintings. That way you could listen to the [...]

I once heard an argument that since the important work that doctors do is commonly referred to as a "practice", it might not be appropriate for artists to call what we do a practice. I mean, when I make a painting that I want to sell I'm not just practicing am I? But then again when a surgeon does a triple bypass I sure as hell hope they're not just practicing! What I probably have in common with that surgeon is that we both want to get better at what we do, so yeah, practice is appropriate. Even for a finished [...]

For today's blog post I have edited the last three posts to become my brand new bio, or as I have called it "autobio" for my about page. Please let me know if you have any thoughts!   As far back as I can remember I wanted to do or make funny things. As a kid I dabbled in drawing because I loved funny comic strips, when I was four, I told my parents I wanted to be a rich clown. Hilarious, right? I eventually thought about being a stand-up comedian, or an actor who specialized in comedy but I was painfully shy. [...]

It was 2012. I had just completed my MFA at the University of Ottawa where my alter ego Stan Dickie was born. Stan was, of course, an iteration of Stupidism an art movement of one that aimed to satirize the stupid things that we flawed humans tend think or do. The truth is, when I was doing my MFA I always felt like I was a cartoonist, or at least that I had the sensibilities of one, so in some ways when my professors at the U of O would tell me that my work was more like comedy than art, [...]