Analogue | David Gillanders + Constructed Recollection | Leslie Hossack

About

Analogue | David Gillanders

I once had a friend who was building a crate to ship a big painting. It had to be good, and the plywood sides, braced by 1 x 3s, simply would not line up cleanly with the rest of the box. The wood was a bit warped, or cut slightly wrong, and my friend said something that has stuck with me ever since. “I hate it when materials assert themselves!” Working with materials is a tricky business. Over time they teach us what they will and won’t do. Every painter I know, and I dare say every painter, is compelled to engage with the materials of painting. Every bit of it, from the choice of surface to work on, to how that surface is prepared, the kind of paint used, how it is applied … all of it is a conversation with the material world.  Every painter knows that the materials will always assert themselves.  They will fight us. But in painting there is sometimes a lucky alchemy that takes place in that engagement wherein the materials transcend themselves, and their arrangement becomes a vessel for meaning. Somehow this coloured stuff, when it’s applied and organized in certain ways, can make us feel and think things. It can take us out of ourselves.  The material world is a powerful place.

Constructed Recollection | Leslie Hossack

This work explores the premise that colour is autobiographical. These images present a colour-coded record of my childhood, as unique as my physical DNA. I learned about colours through concrete objects: crayons, clothes and so on. This series was inspired by early memories of the 1950s, an analogue world. By contrast, the creation of this collection was completely digital. The palette that I created for this collection of prints is deeply rooted in the colours of 1950s, colours that defined a decade and shaped a generation. For each “constructed recollection,” I mixed custom colours to which I assigned unique names. My personal palette consists of the 80 colours seen here. I recorded each individualized name and sRGB value, thus providing an indexed colour chart of my early years.