Q: When did you first paint?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: In 1952, when I was twelve. My friend, Robert Nunn and I walked to the edge of the St. Lawrence river (we lived in Kingston) and despoiled a canvas board each. His despoiling was better than mine; his painting was bolder, louder and more decisive than mine. He was a barely pubescent Vlaminck or Derain. My painting was timid, abashed. It was a timidity, a diffidence, I then set about to outgrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: When did you first exhibit?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: In lots of momentary, glancing-blow places, but my first SERIOUS exhibition was in 1983, at the Jane Corkin Gallery in Toronto. It was a big show of works on Paper. I was forty-three and in the throes of teaching and writing about art\u2014other peoples\u2019 art. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: Let\u2019s jump ahead about 40 years.\u00a0How did your summer-long exhibition at the Periphery come about?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: Entirely through the kindness and courtliness\u2014the agency\u2014of architect, artist and musician Dimitri Papatheodorou, for whom the Periphery is both a country home and a six-acre estate-wide workshop near the pastoral, pixilated village of Warkworth, Ontario. Papatheodorou describes the Periphery as a landscape containing visual art, music, performance and architecture, seeing it as a \u201ctime-based project\u201d where he pursues his painting (in the exquisite new studio he has recently designed and had built) and, in a spacious gallery next to it, mounts summer-long exhibitions of some artist whose work he likes (last summer\u2019s exhibition was of paintings by Toronto-based artist Greg Angus).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: What makes up your Periphery exhibition?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: It\u2019s in two parts. The first is a small retrospective, a mounting of a dozen works on paper from 2005 to 2015. The second part, titled Passatempi, Painting in the Meantime,<\/em> is a wall-sized array of about 75 recent small paintings (acrylic with collage) on rough hunks of raw cardboard, some of them (my favourites) only a few inches wide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: What are they like?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: They\u2019re muscular and messy, wildly gestural, impatient, ecstatic, frenetic and as far as I\u2019m concerned, almost unbearably beautiful. They make my chest tight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: They are, as you say, awfully small.\u00a0 Why?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: Because they are painted on very small pieces of throwaway cardboard\u2014distaff, disreputable, ignoble shardsof cardboard, a lot of which come to me as the wrappings around books I\u2019ve ordered or the boxes some foodstuffs like pasta come in. I save them all for painting. I love cardboard. I like its used look. It has a history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: When do you paint?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: Between writing poems. Which is to say, all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: How long do you spend on a painting?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: About 2-3 minutes. 5 minutes tops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: What\u2019s the rush?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: I\u2019m getting old. I\u2019m eighty-five now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: That\u2019s the reason?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: Nah. In fact, I\u2019ve always<\/em> worked that way. Back in 2010, when I was exhibiting my 1 Minute Cereal Box <\/em>Landscape<\/em>s everywhere, each one of them took me only a minute apiece. I\u2019d make a whole exhibition in an hour. Labouring over a painting is okay, I guess, if you\u2019re Magritte or somebody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: What do you like about these rapid-fire cardboards?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: Their hecticity, the rush of them, the meaning (sometimes august, symbolic and even mythic) that always\u2014always<\/em>\u2014emerges from them. Not one of them is ever non-representational. And yet not one of them knows where it\u2019s going when it starts out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: What if you make a mistake?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: I can\u2019t. If a painting begins not to work\u2014to bore me, for example\u2014I subject it to some cleansing, cataclysmic event, like a sluicing of white paint\u2014and then I start in to fix it. I haven\u2019t lost one yet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Q:\u00a0 How did you decide on their installation?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: Dimitri did that. He\u2019s an architect. He has a perfect sense of form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gary Michael Dault<\/p>\n\n\n\n July 16, 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201c\u2026but it is extremely difficult to watch oneself working\u2026.\u201d –Xavier deMaistre, Voyage Around My Room, 1794. Q: When did you first paint? A: In 1952, when I was twelve. My friend, Robert Nunn and I walked to the edge of the St. Lawrence river (we lived in Kingston) and despoiled a canvas board each. His … <\/p>\n![\"Writer](\"https:\/\/www.dartmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/DAULT-AT-CORKIN.jpg\")