Contents

Reflections

First, there is a sentence that keeps coming unbidden to my mind as I go through the readings, and examine my own works: I don’t want to teach, I want to ask.  I’m going to hold on to that, as it feels like the thinnest of glosses here; a mantra for later.

Second, I hate the performance of depth here in all the academic writing.  I’m constantly bumping up against the idea that the authors are writing for themselves and their ego.  Intentionally opaque, complexity as some form of honour badge.    

Don’t get me wrong, all fields have complexity, but in my very technical world, a failure to understand something falls on the teacher not on the student.  My job is to explain hyper technical things to people with zero background so they can make the right long term decisions.  

These readings feel like someone congratulating themselves for leaving people in the dust.  It immediately makes me shut the reading window, and go do other things.  Arcadian Gestures is a prime example of this. 

I’m going to have to figure out a path through this, or this unit will drown me.

Note to self when I get to writing my own self-indulgent papers: stick to one register, avoid stacking multiple frames of ornamentation, avoid performativity.  If my mother couldn’t understand the writing, then I’ve failed as a writer. 

Applied Reflection?

René Magritte (1929) The Treachery of Images. [Oil on canvas] 60.33 x 81.12cm.

As someone who considers themselves a ‘realist’ painter, I often find myself thinking about this particular work.  An icon of an item is not the item itself, and this work rather forcefully reminds us of that.  Its through this that I’m breaking myself from copying of the world around me.  I remind myself frequently “I am not a photographer” in the sense that I cannot capture the subject as it was, I can capture it only as it was in my mind.

The Podro reading parallels this, reminding the reader that a painter is not constructing a mirror.  Painted images make demands of the viewer, and require them to interpret what is presented.  

This interpretation can come from the prior reading on Icon/Index/Symbols.  If I take one of my paintings as example, a painting of a man on the subway. Others people in the same coloured shirt, are indistinct in the background.

Perhaps the dopplegangers indicate this isn’t a literal event, but maybe a moment in a repeating cycle? The man commutes on public transit, and on different days has different experiences. Today, the man in focus, is having a tough time. The arrangement of the dopplegangers, and the name of work, suggests he has turned his back on himself and refuses to see that he needs help. 

For a Torontonian, like myself, there are symbols here to read: The blue seats are for people requiring assistance. I suppose the layout of the subway car would be a Icon, telling you which subway line the man is riding – the bloor/danforth line. Would the poster behind the man, which reads “If you see something, say something” with a cropped version of his own legs, be an Index? Perhaps.

Martin Young (2025) With our backs to the house on fire. [Oil on panel] 50.8 x 76.2cm.
Martin Young (2025) Receipt of Goods. [Oil on canvas board] 30.5 x 30.5cm.

In reading Penfield, I’m asking myself if the “With our backs…” is tautological? I use words sparringly, and I don’t specifically state the thing in question, but everything points at it.  In the rest of my work, to date, I’ve used no words whatsoever.  For me, and my process, image is always primary and words aren’t even invited to the party.

In the reading of Podro, I was reminded of my painting Receipt of Goods.  How the hands are depicted suggest something of who the individuals are.  But that suggestion is informed not textual, but from the viewer themselves.  What is happening is determined by who is watching.  Which is my intent, here.  Even the greasy yellow light, behind, has elicited different responses from people I’ve placed this work in front of.

On the Topic of Worlding and Worldbuilding

Raising Spivak in the syllabus, brought to mind the project of one of my favourite Podcasts: Modern Art Notes podcast by Tyler Green.   Green has published on the topic of Bierstadt and the American Landscape tradition as a mechanism of colonial expansion directly in opposition to Native American presence.  If you can construct the perception that a people no longer exist, then you can form the understanding that American expansion is not even neutral, rather it becomes ethical and positive.

As I think about how my own community, the LGBTQ+ community, is often constructed as other, I’ve definitely experienced that resulting “understanding”.

Going back to the paintings, above, they are part of a body of work titled “Strange Intimacies”.   Here, I’m playing on perception, but I’m also engaged in Worldbuilding.   In my notes, I’ve created a fictional 1990s, with specific characters repeating through the works even if seen only through nailpolish, shirt colours, and tattoos.

Reading

  • Assigned
    • Michael Podro (1998) Depiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
    • Christopher Penfield (2016) Words and Images – In Focus | Tate. At: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/in-focus/parts-of-the-face-french-vocabulary-lesson-larry-rivers/words-and-images (Accessed 25/01/2026).
    • Cashion, D. T., Luttikhuizen, H. and West, A. D. (2017) The primacy of the image in northern European art, 1400-1700 : essays in honor of Larry Silver. Vol. 271. (1st edn) Leiden: Brill.
    • Charlotte Mullins (2008) Painting People: the state of the art. London: Thames & Hudson.
    • Johnson, C. D. (2021) ‘Arcadian Gestures in an Irreversible World: Stoppard, Serres, and Panofsky’ In: CR (East Lansing, Mich.) 21 (1) pp.101–131
  • Self Directed

Other Research Tasks

Triptych

Quite apart from the discussion of the symbolism with the Reins Triptych, in the reading Cashion, Luttikhuizen and West, and it discussion of the symbols of ladder, crown and ring of blood, I’m drawn to the idea of triptych itself.  I like the narrative structure that comes with this “painting with doors” format, allowing cover and contents to be told across a number of panels.  A strange form of comic book.

“the potential of the Reins Triptych to use scale and imagery to link its physical ability to “open up” with an emotional opening up to the viewer” (Cashion, Luttikhuizen, and West, p 14) is evocative to me, and makes me start thinking of how I might use this in Strange Intimacies.

Exercises

Exercise 1

I spent too much time staring at the blank page on this one.  Fighting with the “tell a story” but “keep it simple”

Eventually I ended up with oil sticks and paper.  I’m not entirely sure what the specific of the story is, other than building a cart to roll down a hill.  I’m not sure how the wheels attach, but I guess that isn’t necessary for me to know.  The second set was the same story done in liquid charcoal and gold watercolours.

Finally, I combined the mark-making into some sort of hillside chill session with a cup of cocoa.  Ignore the body horror that the chairs are made from the heads of people in story 1.

Exercise 2: World and Worlbuilding

I feel like using my King Corporate meta character here.  KC is a totemic entity representing, in some ways, my corporate life and is the “avatar” of upper management.

The story here would be three iterations of King Corporate — as each new elevated CEO becomes KC when they attain CEO-ness.   Something like a succession story set in the corporate boardroom.

The final panel has the background in disarray, and the current KC hulking and monstrous; breaking free of the panel.  Something to do succession isn’t always clean and easy.

This lead to the idea that maybe the this is a triptych that you could folder together.  In order to make sure the third panel fit into the shape, the whole would fold into the shape of an extracted tooth.  Silly? yes. Amusing? Also yes.

Exercise 3: Painting the Personal

What is “Bad” vs “Good” painting.  What does it mean to paint something “well”.  Good question, I don’t know.  So instead I gave myself rules:

For the items with personal connection, I chose items that have been with me for at least a decade.  A baseball I caught at a game, a replica bird skull, a chunk of amethyst I got as a kid, and one of a set of silver sherry glasses I got in my twenties (for reasons forgotten).   With these, the rules were: paint fast, no under drawing, one brush, no layering, use thick paint and each brushstroke is a single short motion.  I allowed myself to put some heavy black impasto in the background, to account for the black fabric backdrop.

For the items with no personal connections, I went with household cleaners and a bottle of aspirin.   Here, I allowed myself to carefully draw, to take time to mix and consider reflections.  I layered from thinned paint, to thicker (though no impasto).   I allowed my drawing to bend in places, allowing interesting perspective shifts.  I allowed myself some abstractions in the form of smeared colours — an echo of how bright light smears when squinting eyes.

 

Personal Practice

Beginning a new large painting.   Current working title is “Transformation takes endurance” but that will change later.   I’m enjoying just building up the base layers of paint.  

61×91.5cm, oil on linen.