13

I've been spending some time up north in the new year. My mom has a nice big piece of land with houses at each ends. I've been using the little blue house on the highway as my studio away from home.

Picasso's "Les Demoiselle d'Avignon"

"13"
48x48", oil on canvas
2010
For Sale


13 was made for my participation in this year's erotic group show at Usine 106u gallery. It took so much time throwing paint at the canvas to figure out what I wanted to paint in a "sexual" context. I couldn't think up anything decent... At the time I was reading "Picasso, Creator and Destroyer" and I decided it would be a fun idea to repaint "les demoiselles d'Avignon" but with a realism/lowbrow approach. In the process, I started seeing other women in the composition. They kept adding up until there was 13. Eve and the 12 apostles got mixed up in there, a halo popped up... you can interpret what you like.

This painting was a major achievement for me as it was painted straight from my head with absolutely no reference whatsoever. Only me and my mind, some paint (all blue apparently) and a big ass canvas in the woods up north.

I celebrated it's success to say the least:

Cedric Taillon - 13 from Ben Philippi on Vimeo.

Thanks a million to Ben Philippi who showed up to my opening, partied with me and whipped out his camera in my face by surprise and edited the whole thing on his own! Holy shit what a great and talented guy you are Ben. Be sure to check out his excellent films by hitting the Vimeo link below the vid.

Barbarians and Babes

A new cultural organization called l'Ouvre-Boite Culturel (louvreboiteculturel.blogspot.com) heard of me through the grapevine and had me paint live at their official opening night.

"The Barbarian Chief"
28x40, oil on canvas
2010
SOLD

So ya I made this with live models posing for me in ridiculous outfits with 200 people having fun at this art party. I started around 10pm and called it quits around 3:30am. The models were good man, cause we weren't starving ourselves of any of the party favors that night. We still produced a pretty cool painting, so cool the barbarian himself had to buy it for an empty wall in the cave. The girl at his knees, she's the same girl from the butt painting. Now you can associate a painted face to that painted butt.

There was quite the audience of young women circling around me that night. A lot of them were interested in musing it up and getting painted. I'm still working on some of these paintings... but I'm not gonna touch this little study cause I like it like fine the way it is.


"Emilie study"
16x20", oil on canvas
2010
For Sale

SNAP!

I was a contributor to SNAP! magazine a couple times during 08 and 09. Sometimes I contributed articles but mostly I offered my services as an illustrator. Here's some of the art I made for them. Swing by snapme.ca, the issues are online along with so much more great content..




"Rising stars"
SNAP! magazine, issue 7
24x24", oil on canvas (right) + digital painting
SOLD

Another homage to Frazetta here. I even used his planes. That's my roommate by the way, Francois Boulianne, talented comic, google him. And to the right is another good friend of mine, Jon Ng. After seeing the portrait I made for the article he offered to buy it on the spot. The drawings rotating around his head are taken straight from his animated films!

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"The Vagabond"
SNAP! magazine, issue 6
16x20" (one head), acrylic on canvas + digital painting
SOLD

The art director thought my red Dylan looked too aggressive, they printed the black & white version. I still like my Bob red.

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"Agent of Chaos"
SNAP! magazine, issue 4
digital painting

There's something in this piece that most people don't see...
Do you seeee?

Baie-Comeau Butt & the Crazy Horse

That's where I grew up, Baie-Comeau (Comeau bay). Up, waaaaay up..! In the cold ass north. Been away for 10 years now but I go back often and it's proven to be a nice comfy spot for me as an artist. Matter of fact, Baie-Comeau is host to the oldest and most prestigious Painter's Symposium in the Province, and as of summer 09, I am it's youngest invited painter.

The Symposium: 30 painters in a hockey arena in the summer painting live for the public for 6 days from 7am to 10 pm, all expenses paid for the invited painters! And I'm not talking about any foods, I'm saying we ate lobster and crab in the same dish with a mountain of shrimp in between! And all this surrounded by older cooler artists. What a trip.



"The prize"
24x30 oil on canvas
2009
SOLD


Artists each get booths to work out of. You set up in there and try to produce and sell some art. On my second or third day, I was painting my new make belief cowboy when this girl came at me, I saw her running across from the other side of the arena! She had seen the painting with the girl on the bed and wanted me to make something like it but using a picture of her butt as reference. So I did. And she bought her butt for a hefty sum!


Visit theGraveyart.blogspot.com to see the painting, top left...



"Old Rusty and Grey"
30x40" oil on canvas
2009-10
SOLD

I had a profound smoke break one morning during the symposium. I went and had some of that funky stuff out back and when I came back there was one of the painters painting a still life outside. That, off the bat, is pretty odd on it's own, but the real weird thing is that this dude was painting with his back to the still life arrangement! As I got closer I started to hear the Pink Floyd emanating from his headphones. He took them off and said a series of magical things to me. Things that inspired me to paint from my head. Because apparently, that's the only real art. So that's what I did. I splashed a whole bunch of paint and made it look like a lot of things that day... but at one point it made sense as a cowboy and people started getting interested. So I perfected my cowboy and sold it to them. All straight out of my head. Now that's fun stuff.

I had done some painting from imagination before, not many pieces made it out alive yet... Check out theGraveyart.blogspot.com for more craaazy stuff from my craaazy mind.

This little guy did get to the finish line, i think, and ironically, it's a horsey, a really pissed off little horsey.


"the little horse that could."
36x48" oil on board
2008
For Sale

live girls

It's so key, at least for me, to paint from life. This is a fact for many reasons. First of all, it's a motivating factor to have somebody else depend on your success with the painting. And, of course, the naked eye is always the best lens to look through to really see things. Great art is made by absorbing information and putting it back out there changed for the better, in a personal way. The less obstacles there are between what you take in and what you put out, the purer and more "you" the piece will become. I said it before, working from photo reference makes me feel like a photocopie machine... There's none of that when the girl is in front of you. What your eye sees is constantly changing so the mind must fill the "inbetweens" on it's own, it romanticizes things, and that's what people love to see!




"Miss Franche"
24x30", oil on canvas
2009
SOLD

First girl I was ever in love with... Painted her a decade later!
The process was very smooth. No real problems anywhere, the light sources were real nice and of different hues, it helped define my forms easily. The dress was kind of a pain but not really. Pretty funny how my model kept pouty lips for hours of pose... lol!

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"Sarah on Zebra"
12x16" oil on canvas
2009
Permanent collection of the City of Baie-comeau

Sarah is a good friend of mine who posed for me before she flew back to France last autumn. She was psyched to do it, which is awesome because I owed the city of Baie-Comeau a painting since the summer and needed a model to work with! Sarah fronts punk bands on 2 continents and is not a shy girl, and that's pretty sick because for a prestigious collection like the city of Baie-Comeau, I was pretty sure I wanted to paint boobs. It's now the second pair in there, next to Denis Jacques' painting from 1999 (check him out, he's sick, www.denisjacques.ca)

On the night before our first scheduled session on this painting, Sarah and I went to a shitty auction in a bar that our friends from Douteux.com were throwing as a fundraiser for the site. I got wasted and bought this weird Santa Claus costume for 15 bucks. We were all hanging outside and I was thinking next year i should paint something for their festival and the guys were like "whoa, dude, just do it tomorrow night!" So instead of painting boobies, I painted this odd portrait of Sarah in the suit live in the bar while bands were playing. The painting sold that same night and we drank all the money.



"Santa Sarah"
40x28" oil on old laminated poster
2008
SOLD

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"Kim study"
24x30" oil on board
2007
SOLD






"There's something in the air"
24x30, oil on board
2007-2009
For sale


First time painting a live model on my own! She was a friend of my roommate and I and she must've posed for something like 30 or 40 hours for this. It helped that she was crushing on him hard at the time and used modeling for me as an excuse to end up in his bed! That's probably why she looks a little pissed off in the painting, she'd rather be over in the other dude's bed already! She might also have been pissed off because she doesn't exactly look like how I painted her. That's why she insisted I paint an accurate portrait of her (up top).

It was supposed to be my roommate sitting, back towards us, in there but he didn't want to pose for it when he saw how long it took with the girl! In the end he took a picture me and I used myself as a model to finish off my scene. There was a problem tho... The camera did'nt pick up on the colors my eyes had seen with my live model. It saw the scene in tones of blue instead of my yellows... I had to go over what I had painted so that the 2 characters looked like they were in the same universe. A pain, but you learn after that, moreso you anticipate your results and you lubricate your process.
Lube it up bitch!

This painting was painted sporadically over 3 years time, and in many different places too. I started it in my apartment in Montreal, painted some in Vermont, some in Maine, then in my new studio in Montreal and I finished the thing up north in Baie-Comeau city. That's where I got inspired to finally figure out what exactly was "in the air".

Below is me in an improvised studio in the basement of a house by the sea in Phippsburg, Maine.

t-t-t-Tia!

My first muse! I woke up in the first days of 2007 and I was tired. Tired of painting old people with glasses from shitty photo reference. So I had the bright idea to do a search by distance on myspace to find myself some models. I creeped profiles and looked at photos to figure out if i'd want to paint any of these girls lol... I got to Tia's pictures and I was so intrigued by her, she mesmerized me... I had to find out what she was about! I messaged her and sent her my 5 paintings to prove my legitimacy and we met for coffee then we went out for beers after that, and the next morning she was knocking on my door with quiche and a bottle of white wine ready to pose for a piece! Super! That first painting remains unfinished to date, you can see it in theGraveyart.blogspot.com, but these two came out nice I think...




"Money Honey"
16x20", oil on canvas
2008
For sale


This was initially made for an article about the burlesque scene by Tia for FutureClaw magazine, I later added the "money" up top in marker where the title was in the magazine. Money is definitely the best word to have up there for so many reasons. Email me for prices.

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"Snake & Boobs"
24"x24" oil and paint markers on canvas
2008
For sale


Boooooobs! Fantastic ones too..
I painted this for the erotic group show at Usine 106u. I saw this pic that was taken of Tia and I and it looked like my arm was squeezing her but she was all smiles. I had drawn and painted snakes for an Alfa Romeo art car project and figured I would replace the arm with a mean looking snake from a dictionary illustration. I improvised the rest of the snake's body a la Frazetta. It's kind of a weird little hommage to the man. He will remain the greatest that ever was.

not so portrait please.

The following paintings were contributions to my very first group show at the gallery "Usine 106u" in March of 2008. They were worked on sporadically through 2007 and they constitute my first foray into the creative process of making art. Of course, a portrait is a form of art, but for me it's a bit like being a photocopier... You just paint what you see the best you can and that's that. In these paintings I was trying to use the skill I had developed painting simple portraits and make it more interesting for the viewer and certainly less of a bore for me to paint!

''Doodle Dreams''

36x60'', oil and markers on canvas

2008

SOLD

Doodle Dreams was commissioned by an old friend of mine. She became a doctor and bought a condo with her architect boyfriend and got me this huge canvas and asked how much it would cost for me to paint something that big, i told her around 2 grand and she said ''ok!''. She told me to paint whatever I wanted and that she trusted my talent! That delighted me at first, but I found out in the process that it's not so easy to paint what you want when you know it will end up on a particular person's wall. I couldn't get up in the morning and paint vaginas all day if you get my drift... The pictures that are on here are only documenting the last and final stage of the piece, but it was so many things before it became what it is! I painted over so much, so many concepts didn't make the cut, so much that at one point I actually had to flip the canvas to start anew... My friend was pregnant with her second child at the time, and in the end that's what launched the final concept in my mind and on canvas.

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"Damn Kids"
30x40", acrylic, latex and oil paints, oil pastels and markers on canvas
2008
SOLD

This piece was started in my friend Youri's apt in Oakville Ont... on mushrooms. I think we were reminiscing about the gangster brat kids that used to live in our apt building a couple years back and I guess I wanted to portray that vibe somehow..? I dunno.. I started browsing pics of kids being rude. Type "kid giving finger" and "kid smoking" into google images, I thought they could be buddies.

There was a can of left over latex paint on the porch that evening and we decided to pour it onto the canvas out of artsy fartsy curiosity. It came out looking pretty cool. In retrospect I wish I hadn't indulged in my shitty little font fantasy so much... it bothers me that the title is written twice on it like that.. but whatever man, the thing is done.

It was bought by my uncle oddly enough. The man's got an extensive art collection that consists of many great classical Flemish painters and then on the mantle there's this thing hahaha... weird, but cool.

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"Not Obama"
12x24", oil on canvas
2008
SOLD

Another piece started in the GTA, visit www.thegraveyart.blogspot.com for some more art that was started over there but never made it out alive..!

On Karl's porch on Denisson Ave in Toronto you see a lot of weird mofos walking by... plenty of attitude. I woke up on a hot hot summer day there (on the couch, on the porch) and felt like painting. I got inspired by a mixtape cover I saw in a torn up magazine on the floor. I finished it a couple months later when Obama was starting to get hot, that's when I gave it the name... cause it's not Obama..! It's my first piece sold off the walls of a gallery to a stranger. Apparently the dude that bought it is surprisingly a nerdy looking white guy!

From way shitty to rent money

"Mrs. Theberge"
20x30", oil on canvas
February 2007
SOLD


For my first year as a bonafide "artist", i paid rent with commission paintings. Mostly portraits. Portraits of old people with glasses... mostly. One dead guy too. I mean, he wasn't dead and green in front of me or in the painting... but the dude had just passed away which made it kinda weird because I had developed a habit of putting auras and halos in my portraits... Anywho, I made about a dozen portraits that year, one for each month's rent. Not all of the paintings are great, some were a struggle and some were a breeze to do. The harder ones were more of an exercise in patience. That's why, back then I decided to make this little video documenting how the painting looks horrible for a while before it turns into gold. It takes a lot of will power to work on an ugly-ass painting when you wake up in the morning...

Pappy

"Philippe Gilain"
20x30", oil on board
November 2006
SOLD


This is one of the family portraits I was commissioned that kick-started my career. It took close to 50 leisurely hours. I went about painting it in the same fashion as the Igor piece but over many sessions and the paint sometimes dried in between. I had browsed my grand-parents photo album for good shots of them. The picture I chose is from their 25th anniversary surprise celebration in the late 70s. I scanned the photo and worked next to my computer screen on an easel that once belonged to my step-mom's mother, she was a great abstract painter. The thing's got magical powers., no doubt about it.

Fire starter

"Eegs, devil on my shoulder"
24x30", oil on board
June 2006
SOLD


This was made a week after attending the Massive Black workshop. I had heard one of the dudes talking about painting with primary colors in the dark with only a candle as your light source or something? So that's what i did in the wee hours of the morning. I didn't have an easel so i painted on a mirror frame i had picked up on the street. As the daylight filled my bedroom, I saw what kind of crazy colors happened with the candle light trick and I finished the damn thing oh so smoothly. In 6 or 7 hours, I had painted a life-size portrait from a picture on which my friend Igor's head is as big as the tip of my pinky.

On the following Monday i gave my 2 weeks notice at the restaurant and declared myself a portrait painter!

I could! Because after showing "Eegs" to my family, I got 5 portrait commissions which would, with my accumulated 4% from work, cover my rent and living expenses for 6 months!

the first fluke

"St-Carley"
16x20", oil on board
June 2006
NFS


This is 45 minutes after my brand new brush dipped in student quality oils for the first time ever at the Massive black workshop in the Old Port here in Montreal.

My friend Carley came for a visit the same week-end and got body painted by Andrew "Android" Jones and posed for the traditional artists in the middle of this big old distillery building. With my best friend on stage and surrounded by a dozen of our generation's best (Shawn Barber, Dan Dos Santos, Michael Hussar) I bought a shitty paint kit and tried the feared medium... Holy discovery! Why didn't anyone push the stuff on me when i was 12...