Thick as a Brick
"Thick as a Brick" by Gary Michael Dault, Winter 2010, pp. 125-127
If Eric Cameron had actually begun with a brick—as opposed to the kind of objects he usually begins with, say, an apple, a shoe or a telephone directory, or a small alarm clock with a looped metal handle at the top—the piece would be as big as a house by now. Cameron’s art—at least the art that comprises his long series of Thick Paintings—is an art of accretion. His works develop with almost glacial slowness, or perhaps it might be more suggestive to say that they form like nacreous coats of proto-pearl in an irritated oyster, building up, layer after layer, over an unwanted grain of sand. Cameron commentators frequently employ this oyster image. In a smart catalogue essay for “Desire & Dread,” a Cameron exhibition held in the fall of 1998 at the Muttart Public Art Gallery in Calgary, Leslie Dawn extends and sharpens the metaphor, suggesting that Cameron’s pieces look “uncannily like outrageously oversized baroque pearls.”
But a moment’s musing on this initially helpful metaphor—the muffled, endessly buffered grain of sand lodged in an oyster—reveals it to be delicately misleading. Unlike the oyster’s pearlescent products, the “baroque pearls” that Cameron builds up with paint are not defences against intrusive objects. Rather, they are long procedural developments of those very objects, objects deliberately chosen by the artist as the seeds from which the work will grow, as inexorably burgeoning morphological comments on the materials. Because Cameron intends for his pieces always “to be continued,” the objects that result from his daily ministrations upon them—the “result” being a momentary inspection-station on the epic route to their continuing unfinishedness—seem to begin as paintings. They are indeed made of paint and the process of painting, and yet they inevitably evolve into something more like sculptures. Thick paintings.
Cameron began making what would eventually become these Thick Paintings on a sunny afternoon that, he recalls, “may have been in late April, or perhaps early May” of 1979. (For the fantastically orderly and almost excruciatingly precise Cameron, this worried indecision about the project’s inaugural month is, by the way, both characteristic and endearing.) In his essay “Oedipus and Sol LeWitt,” reprinted in the catalogue for the exhibition “Eric Cameron: Divine Comedy” at the National Gallery of Canada in 1990, Cameron recounts that it was in 1979 that he “began to apply coats of [acrylic] gesso to some objects that just happened to be available to me in my apartment.” He makes it sound pretty casual, much more casual than it was—and became. Little, in fact, in Cameron’s professional life seems to have been undertaken casually.
His life as a student, artist, teacher and writer has been a steady progression toward rich and increasingly purposeful reflection and concurrent analysis. An accumulated account of this evolution reads like a quintessential novel of ideas. Eric Cameron was born in Leicester, England, in 1935. He studied art at King’s College, University of Durham, working with three illustrious teachers: Lawrence Gowing, Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton—whose influence on him, for good or ill, Cameron faithfully and entertainingly recounts in his engaging exhibition-catalogue-cum-memoir-cum-intellectual-Bildungsroman, English Roots, published in 2001.
After a year of studying art history at London’s Courtauld Institute, Cameron began teaching at the University of Leeds in 1959. He remained there for a decade before journeying to Canada to assume the chairmanship of the Department of Fine Art at the University of Guelph. While at Guelph, he continued to produce his well-known Process Paintings, which had evolved from the Sellotape paintings he completed in England. (In his foreword to English Roots, Cameron’s former student and then-colleague, Jeffrey Spalding, cites the Process Paintings as “amongst the most visually and philosophically arresting works of the modernist period.”) The apartment Cameron refers to in the book as the site of his newly undertaken Thick Paintings was, however, in Halifax, where he went to teach in 1976 and where he remained until 1987, when he accepted a position as Head of the Department of Art at the University of Calgary.
In English Roots, Cameron notes that the Thick Paintings, once commenced, started to assume a life of their own, “growing in ways I could neither predict nor control, and demanding of me that I respond to the transformations of the strangely organic character they presented by repeatedly modifying my own way of addressing them.” These addresses involved everything from applying half-coats of gesso (to allow for drying time before turning the object over and re-gessoing it), to carefully, exquisitely attending to the direction of his brushwork, to considering the size of the brushes used. (“The residual deposit [of the gesso] might be no more than one thousandth part of an inch thick when I used a #6 brush,” he writes in the “Bent Axis Approach” exhibition catalogue, “and one five hundredth when I used a #12.”)
Cameron’s patience, fueled by a kind of benign obsessiveness, leads him to observe and record the fact that “after a whole week’s work, when I might have applied 50 or more coats of paint to a particular piece, it would usually be difficult to detect any change in its form.” He also notes minute difficulties pertaining to wanted and unwanted surface textures (“a tendency for little bumps to begin to appear on the surface”) and outlaw ridges of paint where only smoothness was desired. Cameron’s hair-raising account, in the “Divine Comedy” catalogue, of his thick-painting of a lettuce is positively Rabelaisian (or at least Nabokovian) in its description of his race against time, the lettuce’s inevitable disintegration always seeming fearfully imminent: “By this time, there was no longer a sound of sloshing liquid when I turned the work over…. As of July 30, 1985, Lettuce has acquired 4,036 half-coats of paint, still more than 900 ahead of any other piece,” he writes.
“Eventually,” Cameron reports in Divine Comedy, “I settled on a working schedule of 10,000 half-coats per year applied to some 27 objects; that total number of objects was reached by October 1981 and no additions have been made since. This means an average of 370 half-coats applied to each piece, which turned out to mean a rate of growth over smooth areas (where no special conditions applied) of perhaps a third of an inch per year.”
Cameron’s painstaking, tenacious, relentlessly self-conscious creation of his slow but paradoxically mercurial art is remarkably of a piece with his writing and his teaching. Given that his writings reveal, as Spalding notes in his foreword to English Roots, “a lifelong proclivity toward justification and meticulous, courteous explication,” there is scarcely an artist anywhere whose practices and procedures (and ruminations on them) are so fully explored and engagingly transparent. Anyone doubting this really ought to peruse Cameron’s record of work (Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, 2008)—a brilliant and exhausting hymn to the minutiae of documentation and recordkeeping that makes On Kawara and Hanne Darboven look inattentive.
In essay after essay, paper after paper, Cameron wrestles so lucidly with what he is doing and why that it is hardly ever possible to misunderstand him. This heady openness is, I think, a rather overlooked aspect of the modernist mode of being—and Eric Cameron is a great, classic modernist. Elucidation is a byproduct of great generosity. Today, by contrast, we obfuscate, if at all possible. We obfuscate, therefore we are not.
And careful elucidation is the essence, surely, of great teaching. Cameron has taught as enthusiastically, as intensely, as he was taught himself. His education is all recounted and acknowledged in English Roots—which, in addition to its value as a memoir and as the reconstruction of an intellectual trajectory, is a great book about pedagogy.
Cameron seems to remember everything his teachers ever said: he recounts Gowing, for instance, describing Cameron’s work as “epitomizing the meaning all over.” And Cameron seems to remember everything his students ever made—whether under his supervision or not. 38 years later and 1,700 miles away, he fondly recalls the work of a young Noel Harding. He gives careful credit to the inventions and accomplishments of other “layer painters,” whether students or colleagues (at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design)—Jeff Spalding, Garry Neill Kennedy, Paul Hess, Mary Scott, Bruce Campbell and John Murchie among them. “Jeff Spalding was the first of the NSCAD layer-painters,” Cameron writes with record-setting generosity.
Spalding himself recounts the atmosphere at the newly founded University of Guelph when Cameron arrived in 1967—and the differences he made: “He was a whirlwind of energy: personable, knowledgeable and ever attentive,” Spalding recalls in the foreword to English Roots. “Cameron was always informed of up-to-the-minute current thought and practice in the arts internationally. A one-man emancipation proclamation, seemingly oblivious to his geographic dislocation, by sheer force of his will and personality he marshalled an outstanding array of visiting artists and faculty that would transform the art experience of this regional, provincial town. Under his guidance, the 19th Century came to a close.”
I wish I’d been able to study with him. In addition to great, sweeping applications of creative will, in both his practice and his teaching, Cameron possesses a wry and often acerbic wit. And humour is one of the armatures on which great teaching is built.
For a collection of other works by Eric Cameron, go to canadianart.ca/cameron
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