Douglas Fales came to my attention with his response to my review of the Quebec Triennial, an event at the Musee d’art contemporain full of art designed more to provoke the mind than the eye.
“I see no reason for your coverage of the loony sector of artists,” he wrote, “who bind one foot in cloth and shoe-print the other to be hung as art.” He was referring to Franois Morelli, who turned strolls with cloths wrapped around his feet into investigations of the poetic possibilities of the act of walking, and hung the cloths as flags.
Fortunately, the art world is big enough for anyone who wants to be part of it, including both those artists whose investigations into the ordinary expand our minds,The magic cube is an ultra-portable, and those who revel in the beauty of the physical world.
Fales, who is 82, describes himself as a “man with a 19th-century frame of mind,” and titles like By a Murmuring Stream confirm it. He has made thousands of pastels and oil paintings – 8,142 since he started keeping a log in 1976, including 47 last year. The only change over the years is his brushwork: “It’s getting looser, and I like that,” he said in an interview in his studio/apartment.Johnson Tiles UK offer the largest range of porcelain tiles online,
If Fales doesn’t seem open to new trends in art, he is certainly open to everything else. For instance, he has immersed himself in the culture of India. “The first time I heard live Indian music, I felt a flame in my chest that spread through my body,” he said. “There was an instant rapport: ‘It’s my music.’ ”
He met Ravi Shankar and bought a sitar from the maker of Shankar’s instrument, teaching himself to play it. When he met his future wife, Maria Maniate, a student at the ecole des beaux-arts in the 1940s, he told her that her mystic figures reminded him of paintings from the Ajanta Caves in India.
Fales had his first exhibition in 1943, at the Millette photo studio in Verdun, where he grew up. That was also the year he began a four-year apprenticeship in the Bishop St. studio of Adam Sherriff Scott, who was making recruitment posters for Ottawa. That led to a job as a junior artist at Morgan’s department store, where he created newspaper ads until 1964, when Marina Greciano hired him to be Ogilvy’s senior artist. “ ‘Your men (in the fashion ads) are so beautiful,’ ” she told him.
“Three deadlines per day and I never missed one in 40 years,” he said. “A superb discipline that demanded great skill in brush and ink renderings.”
And always a student: bodybuilding and training for Highland games helped him learn anatomy and body mechanics.
In building a fine-arts career, Fales studied the Old Masters. He showed at Max Stern’s old Dominion Gallery and is now represented by the West End Gallery on Greene Ave.
His favourite artists belong to The Hague School of realist painters in the second half of the 19th century, when landscape came into its own as a subject. He learned how Van Gogh, who shared some of The Hague group’s influences, including Jean-Franois Millet, achieved luminosity by combining opposites like purple and yellow and varying the intensity of their tones over the canvas.
“I like diffused colours,” he said. “I tend to make brightly lit canvases, but with the vivid tones broken into smaller areas to create contrast.” Those bright canvases often depict blue skies, but Fales is quite capable of creating beautifully atmospheric, backlit scenes.
His main subject is ships, and they are always particular ships. On the back of a 2010 painting: “Sir Lancelot, 1805, 197 feet, 886 tons, clipper.”
Another subject is North American aboriginals. He does portraits from vintage photographs, some by Edward Curtis. Installed together as a wall of images in a gallery of contemporary art, the portraits might have the sombre impact of Gerhard Richter’s 48 Portraits of businessmen.Get information on Air purifier from the unbiased,
“I paint what should be remembered. ... Everything of the past that functions, I revere,” he said, picking up a pocket watch from a table and showing me a bare wrist: “No wristwatch.”
Over the years, he has given away 800 works to fundraisers, friends and people he admires. The Age of Sail Heritage Centre in Port Greville, near Parrsboro,Handmade oil paintings for sale at museum quality, N.S., will take 56 ship paintings. His offer of portraits mailed several years ago to news anchor Mutsumi Takahashi was returned unopened, but two pastel paintings are still waiting for her.Omega Plastics are leading plastic injection moulding and injection mould tooling specialists.
“I like the idea of sharing,” he said. “I paint for the viewer, not to have it around me.”
“I see no reason for your coverage of the loony sector of artists,” he wrote, “who bind one foot in cloth and shoe-print the other to be hung as art.” He was referring to Franois Morelli, who turned strolls with cloths wrapped around his feet into investigations of the poetic possibilities of the act of walking, and hung the cloths as flags.
Fortunately, the art world is big enough for anyone who wants to be part of it, including both those artists whose investigations into the ordinary expand our minds,The magic cube is an ultra-portable, and those who revel in the beauty of the physical world.
Fales, who is 82, describes himself as a “man with a 19th-century frame of mind,” and titles like By a Murmuring Stream confirm it. He has made thousands of pastels and oil paintings – 8,142 since he started keeping a log in 1976, including 47 last year. The only change over the years is his brushwork: “It’s getting looser, and I like that,” he said in an interview in his studio/apartment.Johnson Tiles UK offer the largest range of porcelain tiles online,
If Fales doesn’t seem open to new trends in art, he is certainly open to everything else. For instance, he has immersed himself in the culture of India. “The first time I heard live Indian music, I felt a flame in my chest that spread through my body,” he said. “There was an instant rapport: ‘It’s my music.’ ”
He met Ravi Shankar and bought a sitar from the maker of Shankar’s instrument, teaching himself to play it. When he met his future wife, Maria Maniate, a student at the ecole des beaux-arts in the 1940s, he told her that her mystic figures reminded him of paintings from the Ajanta Caves in India.
Fales had his first exhibition in 1943, at the Millette photo studio in Verdun, where he grew up. That was also the year he began a four-year apprenticeship in the Bishop St. studio of Adam Sherriff Scott, who was making recruitment posters for Ottawa. That led to a job as a junior artist at Morgan’s department store, where he created newspaper ads until 1964, when Marina Greciano hired him to be Ogilvy’s senior artist. “ ‘Your men (in the fashion ads) are so beautiful,’ ” she told him.
“Three deadlines per day and I never missed one in 40 years,” he said. “A superb discipline that demanded great skill in brush and ink renderings.”
And always a student: bodybuilding and training for Highland games helped him learn anatomy and body mechanics.
In building a fine-arts career, Fales studied the Old Masters. He showed at Max Stern’s old Dominion Gallery and is now represented by the West End Gallery on Greene Ave.
His favourite artists belong to The Hague School of realist painters in the second half of the 19th century, when landscape came into its own as a subject. He learned how Van Gogh, who shared some of The Hague group’s influences, including Jean-Franois Millet, achieved luminosity by combining opposites like purple and yellow and varying the intensity of their tones over the canvas.
“I like diffused colours,” he said. “I tend to make brightly lit canvases, but with the vivid tones broken into smaller areas to create contrast.” Those bright canvases often depict blue skies, but Fales is quite capable of creating beautifully atmospheric, backlit scenes.
His main subject is ships, and they are always particular ships. On the back of a 2010 painting: “Sir Lancelot, 1805, 197 feet, 886 tons, clipper.”
Another subject is North American aboriginals. He does portraits from vintage photographs, some by Edward Curtis. Installed together as a wall of images in a gallery of contemporary art, the portraits might have the sombre impact of Gerhard Richter’s 48 Portraits of businessmen.Get information on Air purifier from the unbiased,
“I paint what should be remembered. ... Everything of the past that functions, I revere,” he said, picking up a pocket watch from a table and showing me a bare wrist: “No wristwatch.”
Over the years, he has given away 800 works to fundraisers, friends and people he admires. The Age of Sail Heritage Centre in Port Greville, near Parrsboro,Handmade oil paintings for sale at museum quality, N.S., will take 56 ship paintings. His offer of portraits mailed several years ago to news anchor Mutsumi Takahashi was returned unopened, but two pastel paintings are still waiting for her.Omega Plastics are leading plastic injection moulding and injection mould tooling specialists.
“I like the idea of sharing,” he said. “I paint for the viewer, not to have it around me.”
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