The Aradia Ensemble. That’s where it all began! As founder, violinist, Marketing Director and creator of posters, tickets and attractive media for the latest (perhaps the greatest) source of baroque CD’s on the planet (see the 2007 NAXOS catalogue!), the experience of launching this remarkable musical entity virtually kick-started my career as a visual artist and print-maker.

Baroque violin in hand, the God/s do indeed work in strange and mysterious ways …

And yet … my attraction to the visual arts -- after a lifetime of literary and classical music studies -- is not at all surprising given that painting was my art of choice back in the ‘good ol’ days’ of 1970’s era Saint John N.B. At that time, envisioning a career for oneself as a visual artist, let alone a baroque violinist, was tantamount to committing ritual suicide, and I’m not sure things have changed much since then.

Anyone who’s ever looked at an orchestral score will find points of connection -- even in the most abstract of my designs – between experience and musical form. They are the result -- inscribed at the level of DNA I’m now convinced – of deep and careful looking at such phenomena as measured pattern: (ie. notes on a staff), key signatures, time signatures, editorial bowings and lines of phrase, caesurae, passing notes and ‘accidentals,’ tone colours, trills and other forms of ornamentation, variations in tempi, fugal form, melodic freedom, classical poise and intent and – by default – the barbaric ‘sturm and drang’ of post-structuralist discourse. Not to be mistaken for mere translations of musical ideas into visual form a la such obvious progenitors as Paul Klee, they are compositions in their own right, which partake, at a certain basic level, of musical nomenclature.

‘Careful looking’ (an idea I borrow from both e.e. cummings and Angela Carter) is another point of entry into my work. I am – without shame – a ‘gallery rat,’ and have contrived to visit the great galleries of London, Paris, Tokyo, Rome, Florence, Venice, Berlin, New York and San Francisco to study art in its most raw and unpretentious form/s. A true child of our post-Warholian age, and like any good ‘factory kid,’ (ie. no gallery too small … no artistic endeavor too insignificant to attract my crow-like gaze), I would attend the opening of a toilet if I found it expedient to my art.

Unlike the majority of my contemporaries, I eschew ‘discourse’ (which belies the fact that my Ph.D thesis on the ‘femme fatale’ was written in the hot-house climate of ‘discourse,’ circa 1991), and prefer to think of my work as a highly personalized index of where I stand in relation to the much deeper, artistically-motivated and communicative world of fashion. For me, the connection between art and discourse has grown so abstruse and ludicrous in its concerns (recalling a certain childhood Emperor and his invisible new clothes) that – except as an amusing form of self-parody – it no longer matters.

I am a multi-media artist, formally trained in three discreet yet interactive disciplines: literature, music, and fine-art. To understand my work requires only a willingness to stare deeply at the naked fact … the blushing cheek (bravely proffered) of the work itself.

Enjoy!

BB

Chris