{"id":3947,"date":"2025-09-15T15:59:59","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T15:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/?p=3947"},"modified":"2025-09-18T13:52:54","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T13:52:54","slug":"alex-cameron-swashbuckler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/?p=3947","title":{"rendered":"Alex Cameron: Swashbuckler"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Gary Michael Dault<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the good things that can be said about a painter have been said about Alex Cameron. Which is not to say that they ought not be said again and again and again. Especially now, after his grievous and entirely unexpected death from a serious fall not far from his Toronto studio last June 17. He was seventy-eight years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much will rightly be said, now and in the future, about Cameron\u2019s pauseless exuberance, about his adventurousness: about his working as a studio assistant to the legendary Jack Bush, about his serving for over a decade as a mechanic for champion Formula 1 and 2 motorcycle racer, Miles Baldwin, about his intrepid voyaging into the wildernesses of Northern Canada and Western Canada, of India and Nepal. Fearless and dashing stuff. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Alex
Alex Cameron, Yellow<\/strong>, 2019, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy the Bau-Xi Gallery, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But while there is a lot to recount about Alex Cameron\u2019s searching, expansive life\u2014as an explorer in a tireless pursuit of colour and vista, form and transcendence\u2014I just can\u2019t bring myself to rehearse much of that bio-stuff here and now.  Others will supply all that.  For me, all I can think of right now is Alex Cameron and paint, Alex and the utter rapturousness of pigment. The Alex Cameron in my heart right now is the Alex Cameron who once explained to some interviewer that he saw his skies as “colour fields,” noting that he liked having skies in his paintings so that he could \u201cstick stuff in them.\u201d \u201cStuff\u201d being paint. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I once began a catalogue essay for a Cameron exhibition at Toronto\u2019s Moore Galley called (unhappily, I thought), \u201c2001\u2014A Paint Odyssey\u201d (the Kubrick film had just come out), with a paragraph that I hoped simultaneously introduced and also summarized the kind of painter I felt Cameron was (and was still becoming): \u201cAlex Cameron\u2019s paintings,\u201d I wrote, \u201care immensely, winningly genial. There is a painterly robustness about them that is remarkably infectious. And while this by no means denies them aesthetic ambition, it does mean that their seriousness lies behind and within the artist\u2019s love of painting for its own sake. To look at a Cameron, to open yourself to one, means there is a good deal of joy to be got through before you come to the core of it\u2014an onerous enough task in the generally repressed hedonism-wary times in which we live\u201d (clearly nothing much has changed over the past quarter century).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Alex
Alex Cameron, Purple, 2022<\/strong>, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Bau-Xi Gallery, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Cameron paintings I was writing about around this time (2000-2007) were usually large, airy, non-representational works which tended to be made up of painterly dots and swipes, flanges and rinds of colour, feathery sweeps of the brush over his gala surfaces, and a recourse to very hot, strident hues (plummy violets were big with Alex, I remember, and oxidized yellows and roasted tomato reds). Sometimes parts of the canvases were sprayed.  I remember being a bit discomfited, though, when The Globe & Mail<\/em> titled one of my full-tilt articles about Alex (April 21, 2007) \u201cFauvist Fandango\u201d (newspaper writers do not get to title their own pieces).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Alex
Alex Cameron, My Pinery<\/strong>, 2007, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In a discussion of a big oil painting called \u201cGabriell\u2019s Wings\u201d from 2001 that I wrote about for the Moore Gallery, I noted that Alex was \u201cA skilled landscape painter when he chose to be (his idea of a good tine is to be helicoptered into the wilderness and set down amongst the bears and beavers to paint the solitude).  Cameron,\u201d I continued, \u201cbuilds his abstractions on a firm footing of landscape-derived shapes\u2014a bright swatch of lake-like horizontality across the bottom of a painting, above which a cheeky, serpentine wobble of pigment, an echo of a far shore, softens you up for entry into the aerial ballet taking place up in the rest of the picture.\u201d I spoke of the \u201celectric agitation\u201d of his pictures. And I made admiring mention of the way Alex would smear paint onto his surfaces with his fingers or \u201clet fly with it so that the deep space of the paintings is galvanized by infinitely small threads and hot wires of pigment\u2014tiny, shrill utterances of hue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, inevitably, the Landscape-Idea shouldered its way decisively forward, informing the stream of vigorous, muscular landscape paintings that would now preoccupy him for the rest of his career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And remarkable landscapes they always were. Alex gloried in the untouched forest and, in painting after painting, became its scribe, anthologist and, to some degree, its archivist.  This latter tendency actually used to give me pause sometimes. The fact is, Alex painted trees so vividly and convincingly they were themselves\u2014or so I thought\u2014beginning to encroach, as an almost documentary subject, upon the progress of his painting qua<\/em> painting.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alex seemed to sense this himself.  And he gradually began throttling up the paintings so that the contretemps between his beloved subject (trees) and his handling of them (in daring acts of pigment) turned increasingly into a virtuoso tussle than a dutiful homage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is to say that just when the paintings were on the edge of becoming too nakedly arboreal, Alex began using the trees\u2014the forest skyline\u2014as his armature upon which to drape and generally festoon his increasingly writhing and tumultuous attacks of pigment.  The artist\u2019s forest increasingly became trees, not as they could be taxonomically described, but as they were felt\u2014as purely visual objects in a scintillating visual field, as gloriously life-enhancing vectors thrusting up into the painterly light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Alex
Alex Cameron, The Crashing Plane<\/strong>, 2020-2022, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Bau-Xi Gallery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It strikes me that these descriptions of Alex\u2019s excitingly lush and scrappy production of big sinewy wilderness paintings might position him, in the minds of people who didn\u2019t know him, as a big, brawny, rather Paul Bunyan-esque figure, bestriding the waiting landscape like a colossus.  The truth is, Alex was a slight, tensile, quick and rather elfin man\u2014with a boyish grin so infectious it was almost impossible not to see something leprechaunish in him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While this enjoyable, mercurial joie-de-vivre<\/em> was a sort of admirable constant in Alex\u2019s life, he endured a number of distressing medical events which might well have stilled and silenced a less perpetually resilient man. I remember an afternoon in which painter David Bolduc\u2014Alex\u2019s best friend and mine too\u2014and I were chatting at a Toronto coffee shop we liked called Il Gatto Nero (it was maybe 2007 or 2008) when Alex came to join us. I remember how, during one gregarious moment, he causally mentioned that he had just suffered a slight stroke which had left him with a strange floating rectangle of pure white blocking his eye\u2014I think it was his right eye.  David and I were distressed, but Alex gave us the impression that he would simply soldier cheerfully on, seeing the world around <\/em>this intrusive white spot. I can\u2019t recall his ever mentioning it again. Then, in 2012, he suffered a much more serious stroke <\/strong>which left him entirely unable to use his right arm. Anyone else might have given up painting in despair. Alex being Alex, however, he simply set about learning how to paint with his left arm alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only did this would-be deprivation not appear to alter or diminish Alex\u2019s progress as a painter, the paintings he would make from 2012 until his death this year would be the most brawny, restless, opulent and downright ecstatic of his career. His trees and lakes commingled exuberantly with his clouds and skies until each of his canvases shuddered and heaved with convulsive, painterly life. These later canvases grabbed you by the lapel and shook you until your sensibility rattled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Look at a painting like My Dad\u2019s Forest<\/em> (2015) or the exquisite Colours<\/em> (also from 2015).\u00a0 Pictures like these offer\u2014just as a technical feat\u2014the best, most virtuoso paint-handling I\u2019ve seen in Canadian painting for decades.\u00a0Look hard at them and your eyes will never be the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The late Camerons are not so much landscapes as paintscapes<\/em>. If the wilderness is in peril (and when is it not?), then Alex Cameron would try to brush it back to life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 He loved to paint. And now his paintings will live for him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Gary Michael Dault All the good things that can be said about a painter have been said about Alex Cameron. Which is not to say that they ought not be said again and again and again. Especially now, after his grievous and entirely unexpected death from a serious fall not far from his Toronto studio last … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Alex Cameron: Swashbuckler”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3947"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3985,"href":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3947\/revisions\/3985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}