Raised in cities including Calgary, Nairobi and Boston, Erik Olson is an artist and graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Erik’s painting “Tigers in the Night” is featured on the cover of The Cheaper Show Book.
What initiated your recent “Out of India” series?
With my work I look for something that intrigues me on a macro-
scale; I find that if I start with that initial interest and then go in for a closer look, the subject matter usually presents itself and surprises me. The “Out of India”, series came out of my curiosity about the massive economic and social changes sweeping across India but in order to make work about it, I knew I had to become personally connected with the subject matter. I decided to motorcycle throughout the country to look at the landscape from a closer perspective, or on a more idiosyncratic level. Creativity for me is a kind of assemblage, where I take my research, experiences and imagination and mash them together.
The brushwork and thickness of paint seems to play an integral part in your work. What draws you to this aspect of painting?
Although I’m working with images in a pictorial sense, I’m also interested in the physicality of the paint and the experience of interacting with a painted object. When I paint I combine the rendering of the picture with thick directional brushwork that sculpts the surface of the image. When the viewer walks by the painting, light bouncing off the brushwork guides them into seeing a three-dimensional form and perceiving the image in a spatial sense.
What is it about portraiture that attracts you?
I’ve always felt a longing for situations that offer a sense of wholeness and in a similar way a portrait painting is searching for a kind of whole or total view of the subject. With my portraits I try to present the experience of being in front of the subject itself. So for example, with the monkey portrait I wanted to paint what it feels like to look eye to eye with a monkey; its a bizarre sort of vagueness. It’s not a clear representation I’m interested in; instead I’m trying to share the whole yet uncertain experience of perception.
In your artist statement you said, “The greatest lesson I gleaned from India is that we are part of a continuum with the world constantly in a state of both disintegration and cohesion.” This idea comes across quite strongly in your paintings, as the image is constantly de and re-constructing itself.
Yeah, in my paintings I search for that ideal yet teetering moment of cohesiveness when diverse and multiple parts come together to form unity. One of the pieces that got me going as an artist was a multi-coloured shack that I painted a few years back. The shack was made out of these separate pieces of salvaged wood and was oddly beautiful in its diversity. I became obsessed with this image and started looking for the idea of the shack wherever I went: in landscapes, cityscapes and even in faces.
In India I learned a lot about the cyclical nature of creative and transformative processes. On the streets I encountered moments or places of great cohesiveness but they were often dangerously on the verge of falling apart into their constituent parts. This kind of structure is in almost all of my paintings, where the brushwork is boldly evident like planks nailed onto a shack. The viewer can see the decisions made in the construction of the painting but at the same time those bold brushstrokes also obliterate parts of the image and keep the eye moving over the surface of the canvas in a state of flux.
What are you working on now?
I’m going to be in Vancouver for the summer, working on smaller portrait drawings. Leaving the direct India imagery behind, and sort of taking the techniques and process I gained from the last series. In the fall I’m heading back to my studio in the Rockies along the BC-Alberta border to get back to painting on a large scale
