I was recently invited to put together a show for the School of Creative Arts, University of Windsor, for the new educational school year. While not a fully curated show due to budget constraints, I have put together a selection of almost 60 works from my private collection. Works from many of the artists I have had the pleasure of working with over my 35 years as a gallerist in Toronto, as well as works by artists of interest from other commercial galleries, artist-run centres and auction houses.

The exhibition is more about starting conversations with students as to the extreme possibilities of a contemporary painting practice. The possibilities of small gestures versus large statements. An educational dive into the multitude of styles available over the last century. Asking the question, is any one style or scale more valuable than another. Where does importance lie; the artists’ interests or the audience? Is art auto-biographical or fictional, personal or universal?

The exhibition begins with three historical works from mid-twentieth century Canadian painting, as no work exists in a vacuum and we cannot know where we are going without knowing from where we came. And, for personal context, I have included a work I executed in third year art school, Art and Art History program, University of Toronto/Sheridan College, where I was once told that “although I can paint, I just didn’t know what to paint”.

You see, looking back, and unconscious as to the changes occurring in my life’s course, this was a pivotal few years. This same period saw Will Gorlitz, whose works I had seen at the famous Sable-Castelli Gallery in Yorkville, showing regularly; beautiful lush paintings of interpretations of Freud’s thoughts on art and sexuality. Gorlitz’s rich, thickly painted imagery eventually led me to question why continue to paint when I could never be that good?! Maybe a naively premature conclusion… one will never know.

Gorlitz’s Psychopathic Characters on the Stage, 1987, oil on canvas, 30” x 40”, now a centrepiece of my collection, was painted the same year as my included diptych, and the impetus for the show I have quickly put together.

A title borrowed from Sigmund Freud’s (1905-1906) essay of the same name, posthumously published in 1942, thus begins the conversation of agreement or counterpoint as to the relationship between an artist and their audience for the ensuing 80 years. Freud surmises why audiences enjoy watching mentally troubled or neurotic characters in drama and how the theatrical experience allows viewers to safely release repressed inner conflicts, and this assumption can also be applied to the origin/outcome of painting. Freud suggests that symbolic representation through art could serve as a bridge between the unconscious and conscious mind.

Carl Jung, however, though never formally critiquing Freud’s text directly, reframes the dramatic stage (for our purposes the painted subject) as an externalized battlefield of the collective unconscious, where unstable characters are not just suffering from repressed impulses, but are possessed by archetypal forces engaged through creative means like painting.

Freud and Jung differed in their interpretation of symbols. Freud viewed symbols as disguised representations of repressed desires, while Jung saw them as archetypal expressions – universal images that emerge from the collective unconscious and reflect fundamental human experiences.

Whatever your stance, and it may possibly a combination of the two, we have a good beginning on which to contextualize an overview of the art world, as seen through painting practices, albeit from my humble, often unconscious, collection.  Food for thought for the aspiring students for the upcoming year. 

Artists include (in order of appearance): Marion Dale Scott (1906-1993), Ronald York Wilson (1907 – 1984), Will Gorlitz, Martin Pearce, Chanel DesRoches, David Kramer, Jay Soule, Victor Romao, Kelly Mark (1967 – 2025), Martin Golland, Charles Goldman,  Howard Lonn, Evan Penny, James Lahey, Andrew McPhail, Denyse Thomasos (1964 – 2012), Alejandro Tamayo, Jason Deary, Edward Pien, Catherine Heard, Shirley Wiitasalo, Patrick Howlett, Nicole Collins, Carlo Cesta, Balint Zsako, Matthew Varey, Euan Macdonald, Gary Michael Dault, Greg Angus,  Peter Smith, Janet Werner, Natasha Verbecke, Ben Walmsley, Jaan Poldaas (1948 - 2018), Jill Henderson, Sheila Lawson, Richard Storms, Chantal Khoury.