Value: $650
Artist Bios:
Leslie Putnam earned her BFA from Concordia University in Quebec, with a Major in Studio Art, and BEd from Western University in Ontario. Putnam’s CV includes exhibitions in France, Portugal and Luxembourg where she lived and worked from her studio at the publicly supported Schleiffmillen. In Ontario, she works as both visual arts educator and artist. Her multi-disciplinary practice ranges from explorations using sound within sculptural pieces, public artwork, and miniature to large installation works made mostly from found and natural materials.
Nate Gervais, not his real name, has studied sculpture, fine art, film and video, architecture and history at Western, at Fanshawe College and at Academy of Art in San Francisco. CA. He has worked as a picture framer and as a house framer. His talent for drawing and painting was evident from an early age, and schooled by his grandfather who taught him to paint with acrylics and palette knife on a canvas larger than the seven-year-old himself. After long absence from the resource that provided for his emancipation from childhood abuse, he took up painting again after having been homeless for a while. With his characteristic embrace of the absurd, Nate recalls the contempt he felt while watching the Unity Project’s Tent City protest unfold in 2001, and the disregard he had for folks experiencing homelessness, never thinking that experience would soon be his own. Gervais paints figures, mostly. He is focused on anatomy in abstracted form, exploiting creative mistakes of light as opportunity.
Artist Statements:
“I very much enjoyed the easy rapport, the inspiration of Nate’s energetic approach to painting and the stories he shared as they worked in the studio. Discussing ideas at the Unity Project dining room table, or in studio at an Old East Village art lab space, we created a work that blends Nate’s encaustic and acrylic painted work with my layered text.”
“I love working collaboratively in both life and art. I love the things that develop out of the feedback between mimicry and creativity. Leslie and I were mentally on the same page in terms of problem solving around this process for making the art and reconciling our radically different styles to make our two mediums meet in Conversation. The resulting work demonstrates our individual strengths and expresses an open attempt for understanding. It’s like an honest question – not sure it is answered – but it got asked.”
Nate Gervais paints figures, mostly. He is focused on anatomy in abstracted form, exploiting creative mistakes of light as opportunity.
“I love working collaboratively in both life and art. I love the things that develop out of the feedback between mimicry and creativity. Leslie and I were mentally on the same page in terms of problem solving around this process for making the art and reconciling our radically different styles to make our two mediums meet in Conversation. The resulting work demonstrates our individual strengths and expresses an open attempt for understanding. It’s like an honest question – not sure it is answered – but it got asked.”