Darren Claydon

Visiting any new city, I am quick to search out the local comic shops. Over forty years of pouring over comic book pages, scrutinizing every panel, helped develop in me a visual literacy- a way to both compose and construct the world around me. Moreover, masters of the form like Jack Kirby, Frank Miller, and Paul Pope instilled in me my initial interest in mark-making. Their black and white drawings, dripping with ink, taught me the use of line to convey energy and emotion. Later, I would learn from Van Gogh how to transition that same visceral quality from drawing to painting. I feel fortunate in this process to be connected to a lineage of landscape painters, particularly Canadian artists such as Tom Thomson, Rene Richard, John Hartman and more recently, Kim Dorland. These artists lay the creative process bare with their paint handling, and in doing so are able to transport the viewer to their environment, seemingly brush in hand, to see nature anew. As Thomson is said to have remarked of his efforts to capture nature, “Lift it up, bring it out.”

A friend of mine believed that artists, for the most part, are engaged in a conversation amongst themselves. To that end, I attempt in my painting to address the artists who have influenced me and keep me painting. Ideally I’d like my paintings to also be a part of the conversation - I just want to put in my two cents worth.
I was raised in Belcarra, British Columbia, a small community up the furthest reaches of the Burrard Inlet. Later, I moved to Vancouver to pursue my B.A. in Urban Geography and then pivoted to an apprenticeship at the Vancouver Academy of Art. For almost 10 years now I have made my home on Savary Island, a small, off-grid community at the mouth of Desolation Sound in the Salish Sea. Whether crossing oceans under sail or walking the sandy shores of Savary, I see through the eyes of the artists who have influenced me. Having spent a lifetime in, on and around the water, I still find myself asking, “What colour is the ocean and how will I paint it?”

Sometimes I think I paint because I’m not in a band. I have heard that all you need to write a country song is three chords and the truth. That resonates with me when I try to convey how I paint and why I do it. Celebrating the essence of my subject simply and directly is what I hope to achieve. I don’t want the painting to be a representation, but rather a feeling of the place. I strive to distill the scene before me down to a combination of tone, colour and gesture with a bold handling of paint.

As a plein-air painter, I am challenged by the changing light and movement of the world around me. This forces me to simplify my subject, injecting it spontaneously with whatever I’ve got in that moment. I want to transform something very visceral of the world around me into paint; the beat of the ocean, the chorus of the wind. The process is a performance but one intrinsically linked to the product. The nature of this process dictates working at a smaller scale to achieve the intimacy and immediacy I am after. My paintings may be small, but I like to think they punch above their weight class.