Craig Love

Craig Love’s nine oil paintings, completed in the last three years, are gregarious, complex works that beckon engagement. Exhibited at Winnipeg’s newest pop-up gallery space, known simply by its address, 226 Main, the bold paintings are visually active and densely packed with imagery. These purposely ambiguous paintings draw viewers in and invite extended looking in order to access their meaning.

Immediately striking is the large-scale verticality of the works, ranging between six and eight feet in height. Common to all the paintings is the organization of space into distinct segments by a lesser or more destabilized grid structure. The number and size of the segments vary from work to work, such that the piece Daruma Hume Camus has six relatively equal segments, whereas TMI Rainbow is comprised of over 50 small segments. The flattened pictorial space sets up a structure where meaning is formed through association. Love’s paintings communicate even if the parts are unnamed and the structure is scrambled. As in Gestalt theory, every segment is a necessary part and their coexistence, at various times comfortable or dissonant, is part of the whole.

A nod to art historical periods is apparent in Love’s work. An affinity with cubism and structuralism is evident in the artist’s fragmentation of the picture plane. His use of curvilinear lines is reminiscent of Frank Stella’s S-curve paintings. Theoretically, the coexistence of fragmented space in Love’s work aligns with feminist critique of identity as being stable and cohesive. Abstract expressionism is also perceivable as an influence in Love’s use of gesture and scale.

His intuitive image development draws from wide-ranging interests in language, poetry, philosophy, culture and art history, thinking in words as well as images. Pieces of urban detritus are frequently employed as stencils, as well as textured objects used to create patterns. Love is a highly inventive and process-oriented painter, and his studio houses a large collection of discarded, defunct found objects. Care in not being overly bound by precision, and chance and imperfection are guiding principles in the artist’s practice.

In Crazy Cloud (pennies from heaven) and Jungle Djinn, shapes traced from pieces of wood are used to create meandering, curving lines. Circles and dots are repeated motifs with larger circles in the painting Half-Hearted Start, suggesting such diverse things as dinner plates and moons. Small black dots occur in many of the paintings and function as devices that encourage the eye to focus. Numbers and letters figure prominently in Love’s paintings, such as in Half-Hearted Start (a view from the woodshed), where upper-case letters become design elements with the diagonal of the letters N and Z figuring prominently. Letters are often depicted as reversed or upside down, with E repeated several times, both forward and backward. A narrative seems easier to form in this work than in others, although this impulse is thwarted by a circle containing a landscape with a goat-like face and perhaps a fish—creating yet another openended, dialogic work.

Passages in Wintering Elephants/ ambivalent resolution, the largest work at 91 x 68 inches, are divided into quadrants and then subdivided. The dark top right quadrant of the painting functions as a mesmerizing abyss. Glitter is strewn over this area and manipulated to create texture that is nostalgic but not sentimental. This work stands out for its bold use of gesture, contrasting dark and light palette, and a series of shapes resembling the multitude of windows in a skyscraper, appearing highly realistic. This uncanny realism has been created by dragging paint through a stencil fashioned from an artist’s brush washer. A grey and yellow form in the lower left quadrant is lightly painted and drawn, suggesting drooping elephant flesh, possibly a reference to the title of the work. On the top left, two more curious shapes occur, including what may be a green dog’s head and a flaccid orange and white form—perhaps an elephant’s trunk?

Algonquin Silver Birch (1–9) is divided into five main sections by strips referencing flat, colourfully painted pieces of wood. A vertical blue column makes up the left third of the painting, upon which the numbers 1 through 9 proceed in order, from top to bottom, whimsically cascading, accompanied by shapes and colours and intriguing applications of blue paint. A large rectangle containing a central image dominates the right two-thirds of the painting. The image is drawn in perspective and is seemingly propped open, revealing a deep inner space. Painted in techniques ranging from washes to dry brushwork, and containing floating abstracted shapes, a tent-like structure is evident. Along with two target images just outside of this, an open-ended narrative begins to take shape. This foray into perspectival space is engaging but short-lived, as the eye reaches the bottom of the painting where two non-illusory squares break the cohesion of the narrative.

Many of the subdivided areas are compositions that could very well stand alone and may be temporarily enjoyed as such; however, the presence of adjacent imagery requires us to consider each part in relation to the entirety of the painting. Viewers have agency regarding the direction and pace in which they view the paintings. Love’s work is reciprocal and dialogic, allowing for meaning to form in response to a viewer’s associations. These are challenging pieces, and time spent with them results in rewarding discoveries physically, intellectually and emotionally. ❚

“Craig Love: Persevering Peek-aboo/ Recent Paintings” was exhibited at 226 Main, Winnipeg, from August 15, 2024, to August 30, 2024.

Leesa Streifler is an artist based in Winnipeg, on Treaty 1 Territory. She is a Professor Emerita in Visual Arts, University of Regina. Her recent exhibition “She is Present” was shown at the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, June 29, 2024, to September 11, 2024. A touring retrospective, “Leesa Streifler: The Performance of Being,” opened September 27, 2024, at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery and runs until December 8, 2024.