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

As 2021 draws to a close it's time for me to look back on my year, assess my work and start to think about what I am going to do in 2022. One thing I know I'll be doing for sure is making work for a group show I'm in with my artist's collective, The Frost Shield Kerfuffle. That show is called Damaged Landscapes. I still don't know what I'll be doing for that exhibition but you can probably guess that I'm thinking about it a lot. The show is next summer, but even as a long Winnipeg winter (there's a reason people call this city "Winterpeg") sets in and might feel endless, I know that the deadline for this work will sneak up on me pretty fast. But I suppose that also means the warm weather will come back, but I digress…

If you're familiar with my work you're aware that landscape painting is not my typical subject matter. I'm so used to doing portraits, and so confident with that genre that I wonder if there is something I can do with portraiture that could fit into the category of "damaged landscapes". Not that I'm not interested in learning a new skill and pushing myself, but only time will tell if landscape painting can become a "thing" for me. We shall see.

But of course, I've been pondering this for while. I've mentioned before in this blog the concept of "landscapes of the mind" that has been floating around my head for the last year or so, but is that just me trying to fit a square peg in a round hole? Do I have to paint literal landscapes, or can I play with the definition a little? And what the hell is a landscape of the mind? I guess it would centre around exploring portraits in a psychological kind of way. But calling that landscape is probably a stretch. But then again, our collective minds do a lot of damage to our literal landscapes. So, I`m still going to think about this…

But, it's Tuesday and I always post new art on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Today's post is a painting I did back in April that I haven't shared yet. It's a little study painting that in my notes, I called "Weird Mountain Face", I guess because it's kind of shaped like the Mountain from How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And I guess this is kind of an example of the concept of Landscapes of the mind, or at least one direction the concept could go. I also wonder what something like this would look like a lot bigger, and at some point I'm planning to make some unusually large paintings (for me at least), and this might be something to experiment with.

^{Unititled (Weird Mountain Face), 9" x 12", oil on canvas, 2021.}

Now you may be asking yourself: "what does it mean?". And of course, that is open to interpretation. I mean, I could write a big long artist statement about it, or even a short one, but I'd like to know what you think it means! Or whether you get anything at all out of it. Feel free to comment here or on social media!