Maggee Day | Doorstep View 4
- Maggee Day
- Doorstep View 4
- 2019
- Oil on canvas
- 60 x 72 in. | 152 x 183 cm
Maggee Day is a visual artist working predominantly in the medium of oil paint. She studied at OCAD University in Toronto, ON where she received her BFA (2016), and completed her MFA at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC (2020). Day’s work challenges traditional conventions of representational painting by exploring new ways to utilize tools in our contemporary painting world. She combines traditional painting techniques, rendering approaches from the digital realm, and loose vandalizing brushstrokes to create complex paintings that oscillate between illusionism and autonomous abstraction. Day has exhibited across Canada and was awarded the 2018 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in painting. Day lives and works in Vancouver, on the unceded land of the Coast Salish peoples.
"In my paintings, I explore the various ways I can see the space in front of my apartment building, and by extension, the various ways this space can be represented through paint. The doorstep is the location where my exploration begins. By selecting this familiar location as the site of my study, I am able to observe a subject that is mundane and everyday through a lens of objectivity, while reevaluating how I construct a representational painting.
I employ an experimental process while producing these paintings, which includes a rule that every painting must change its order of procedures and materials. The purpose of this rule is to highlight the different choices that a painter can make when approaching a subject. For example, I have a choice to capture the visual information in a photograph, or to translate my perceived reality through plein air painting. This decision and others reveal infinite possibilities. In addition, I deliberately throw wrenches into my process in order to disrupt the illusion of painting. These wrenches include translating information from one medium to another, layering images wet-on-wet, and rotating the canvas.
This process of making decisions and inviting accidents opens up a margin of error between what I think and what I do— the application of paint follows an artist’s body and is influenced by their emotional state, critically, an artist is also led by the paint they apply and how it behaves. In my paintings, the doorstep view is pulled apart into abstracted colours and shapes, while retaining some semblance of three dimensional space and elements within it. However, these fragments are now open to be renegotiated because they do not form a recognizable landscape. These incongruities allow me to retrospectively learn more about the relationships between seeing and abstraction, perception and representation, as well as the material potential of paint." (Maggee Day)