Gary Michael Dault
"Gary Michael Dault" by Gerald Ferguson, Summer 2007, p. 96
Gary Michael Dault may be better known as a writer, art critic and poet, but through his entire creative life he has also been a painter. Dault simultaneously makes art and writes poetry, essays and criticism. His visual art is an integral part of his writing, just as his writing informs his painting. If he is at a loss for a word or phrase, he just goes down the hall and makes a painting. When he returns to the page, the word is there.
His show of paintings at Gallery Page and Strange in Halifax is not what you might expect from the title of the exhibition: “An Hour’s Worth of Landscape Painting: Sixty 1-Minute Paintings on Cereal Boxes.” It’s true that the support for the paintings is cerealbox card stock, echoing the Group of Seven’s use of bookbinding card stock. And as in the Group’s works, bits of ground show through, enhancing the surface and colour. But in Dault’s work, it is not just that remnants of the cereal box show through; the design on the box also determines the composition. Again recalling the Group of Seven, these are luscious landscape paintings: a pile of Cheerios forms a hill, a blueberry becomes a moon and milk in a bowl is now water.
Yes, Dault limited himself to one minute to complete each painting, following the American Ashcan School painter Robert Henri’s dictum: “Do it all in one sitting if you can. In one minute if you can.” Dault turns Henri on his ear by doing an entire show in an hour! Someone asked Dault how paintings completed in just one minute could have any substance. His reply: “It took me 30 years to learn to paint them.”
The art-historical referencing does not stop there. The cereal-box paintings are also serial paintings. This is not just a clever homonym. Warhol used repeated or serialized images to make paintings, but Dault does Warhol one better by serializing an entire exhibition. The establishment of strict parameters (format and time) forces the artist to be inventive. Creativity only comes with limits; as Sartre said, we are otherwise “condemned to freedom.”
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