Karin French

All through my childhood, I thought that I was going to be a marine biologist, a veterinarian, or if those fell through, She-ra, Princess of Power. I would never have predicted myself pursuing the arts. But, I guess there’s no way to really know where life will lead us. Either you can fight fate or you can jump on the roller coaster, throw up your hands, and enjoy the ride.
I was born in Moosejaw Sask. in 1978 and then proceeded to move all over the country before finally settling in Calgary in 1990. My father was a pilot and was away a lot, so in order to keep me occupied and out from under foot, my mother presented me with a never ending stream of crafts and art projects. I ate them up, and by the time I reached high school, it was my full-fledged hobby. But, as everyone knows, you can’t make a living from a hobby, so it never even occurred to me to pursue it farther. That is, until it became vastly apparent that my plan to go into science had a little flaw; my mathematic and science skills leave something to be desired.
Try as I might, I began failing the core courses that were necessary for my career choice. It got to the point where my high school student councilor, Barry Mudry, pulled me into the office and gently suggested that I chose another career path. Well, I had no idea what that could be, whatsoever. I had never even thought about it, but apparently he had. I had done some doodles in one of my math textbooks (which I consequently had to replace for the school, but I digress…) and he had gotten a hold of it. He asked me if I liked to draw and I said “Of course, but it’s just a hobby”. He didn’t think so.
He suggested to me that maybe I should pull out of the math and science courses that I was failing miserably and replace them with art courses. I was skeptical and I knew my parents wouldn’t be happy, but he continued on to suggest that I should consider going to Art College and eventually pursue a career in art. To my self I was thinking “An art career? That’s like saying ‘jumbo shrimp’ or ‘Canadian military’”. But I really couldn’t think of anything better to do so I figured what the hell.
It turned out to be the best and most logical decision I ever made. I excelled in my classes and ended up being the teacher’s aid in my grade twelve year (and my parents were in full support of my decision, by the way). And sure enough, I went to art school.
Unfortunately, when I did this I was seventeen and couldn’t find my ass with both hands. I wasn’t prepared for the sheer workload involved with Art College and ended up failing quite miserably. I ended up dropping out after three-quarters of my first year amidst a slew of Ds and Fs. Once again I had to reinvent myself. After three months of aesthetician school, I realized that I couldn’t feasibly live or work in a world without art. At that time I was friends with an artist who had also dropped out of college and was pursuing his own art career; in tattooing. The light bulb went on in my head and my passion was aroused. I immediately began to pursue an apprenticeship. I got it and began my career as a tattoo artist.
During this period I spent a great deal of my time designing and modifying custom work for customers. I was constantly drawing and working to meet the demands of my clientele. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on my own art practice during this time, but when I did, I began to notice the influence of tattooing. My exposure to such artists as Sailor Jerry Swallow, Tats Tommy, Tom Renshaw and Fillip Lieu, had pushed me to refine the technical side of my work using the tattoo design method. I still use this method today and probably will for the rest of my life.
This process involves taking an idea, roughing it out, and then doing a simple line sketch of the design. After photocopying the simple line work (for the purposes of making a stencil for the tattoo), I fill out the line work until it implies the shapes and forms I want it to. I then fill in the line work with grey shading and make a copy of that as well. This grey shading is often used in tattooing to create an illusion of deep shadow. In both the design and the tattoo, colour is applied over the grey shading, giving a deeper, richer implication of form.
One of my favorite artists and influences, Todd Schorr (an illustrator turned painter from Connecticut) uses this technique in his own elaborate and photorealistic paintings. He initially tones his canvas in wash of raw sienna and then transfers his images onto it. He then works up a “…detailed monochromatic painting using raw umber” (Schorr 38: 1998). After he is finished this, he uses washes of colour to create a wonderfully rich and vibrant image.
This technique is one that has been used in tattooing since its sketchy beginnings in Western culture and is one that I myself have used in my drawing for years.
After almost three years of tattooing, I found myself in the position of having to reinvent my self again. I had developed problems with my hands that made tattooing impossible and put me in a position where I had to give it up. This wasn’t as entirely tragic as it could have been, though. I had for some time, been feeling the driving need to go back to school. I craved the artistic stimulation of that environment. The tattoo world was very focused on meeting the demands of the clientele and didn’t allow much room for artistic exploration beyond those boundaries. Consequently, my decision to go back to school wasn’t a difficult one, and proved to be a very positive move.
There are many self-taught artists in the world who neither want or require academic guidance. I, as it turns out, am not one of them. School allowed me to educate myself not only in art academics, but in my own practice. I spent two years trying to make up for the mistakes I had made in my first year, re-doing courses and focusing on my liberal studies, social sciences and art histories. During this time, I had many teachers trying to urge me to go into graphic design as a result of the technical ability that I had gained in my brief career as a tattoo artist. I went against the suggestions of my teachers to go in to graphic design and chose painting as my major.
It was a struggle at first. I had only ever worked with acrylics and my imagery was limited to what that medium would allow. I had always loved the soft, realistic qualities of the old masters (such as Caravaggio, and Divinci), and the surrealistic imagery of Salvador Dali, but I could never make acrylic paint work in this way. I was introduced to oil paint during the first year of my major and it was love at first brushstroke. Here was a medium I could work with!
I spent my time focusing on my technique for those first two years. I did a lot of figurative work, trying to imitate the qualities of realism, chiaroscuro, and elements of surrealism (deliberately disproportionate features such as hands, eyes and feet). I also did a number of pieces that had the cartoon like quality of tattoo designs with black line work and bright colours. I began to become restless with my slightly schizophrenic subject matters, and began to push myself in the direction of a cohesive series. At the end of my first year in my major, I decided to do a portrait of my mother to whom I had recently become close with.
I based this portrait on a photograph that I had found of her which had been taken during her graduating year of high school. It had a soft, nostalgic quality to it, with an almost iconic, religious feel. I decided to expand on these feelings and make them a bit more apparent. I used soft tones of mint green and pink to emphasize the 1950s aesthetic of the photo. I brought out the religious/iconic feel by giving her a halo and the sacred heart of the Virgin Mary (which she was none-too-happy about when she later saw it).
It was the first painting that I had ever done that I felt mattered as much in subject matter as technique. I decided to pursue this further.
Family had been a recent obsession of mine and , like Frida Khalo, it seemed like a natural topic for a series for me to pursue. (*see Frida Khalo’s early portraits of her family (Kettenmen: 2000)).
I began looking at the similarities between the technique that I had used and that had been used in WWII portraiture. I enjoyed the stiff, sentimental quality of the paintings and decided to try and capture that in my own work.
I continued on to create a series based around that first painting of my mother. I subsequently did twelve paintings based on photographs of my friends and family in the pursuit of gaining the technical qualities that I was after. Some of these incorporated literal religious iconography such as sacred hearts and halos, while others (such as two portraits of my grandmothers) implied this by sheer size (they are 4’ x 5’). This series began to take on a kitsch-like quality to it with the nostalgic palette (based on that same mint green and baby pink) and the religious symbolism. I had recently read Clement Greenberg’s essay “Avant- Garde and Kitsch” and realized that I was doing what he described as “ low art” (Greenberg 31:1939). I felt (and feel) quite good about this categorization. After all, tattoo art had a long standing reputation as being one of the lowest of the low arts and managed to thrive in the world.
I’ve since decided to embrace this idea even more so, but let me get back to the point. I focused mainly on improving my technique during this series and made a great deal of progress from that first painting of my mother to the final piece which was a monochromatic photo-based picture of my father when he was a small child. This last painting had no religious connotations to it and I had realized at that point that I could either continue to push my context, or simply do portraiture for ever.
I decided to take a good hard look at what I was doing and decided if it could go further, and I came to the conclusion that it could. I decided that the aspects of my work that I enjoyed the most was the sense of humour that went with my use of religious connotation and my embracing of kitsch. I began to incorporate more personal symbolism into the paintings, even going so far as re-entering older paintings in the series and reworking them to show personal iconography as well as their religious aspects. For example, in the two large paintings of my grandmothers I incorporated small “windows”, each of which depicted my most prevalent memories of the grandmother in question. In “Grandma Shocker” the window shows a pink plastic hair curler, which she used to put in my hair when I visited her as a child. In “Grandma Twister” the window shows a split bird-berry tree and a box of Kraft Dinner, which describes a childhood incident which brought my grandmother and I closer together (and subsequently made Kraft Dinner my favorite food). With the final painting of the series, the portraiture aspect of the series became the smallest focus of the painting (“Handscape”) while the personal iconography is the dominant aspect.
While the automatism of the surrealist movement is now a large part of my work (both paintings and poster art), I’m still fascinated with the techniques involved in specific esthetics. I would like to further explore not only surrealist techniques and philosophies, but those of traditional tattoo art, the pin-up and lowbrow art of the forties and fifties, the esthetic of burlesque and cabaret, the dark eerie quality of victorian postmortem photographs, the technical prowess of illustration art, and the comedic aspect of the modern low-brow movement.
According to Andre Breton and the Surrealists, true art could be found in the “…omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought” (Hodge 13: 1994) My future aspirations for my practice is to push the boundaries of my symbolism to the point where I can draw imagery from my subconscious with a greater ease, although I’m not trying to embrace the Surrealist philosophy by doing this. As Frida Khalo so succinctly puts it, (speaking of the Surrealists) “You have no idea the kind of bitches those people are” (Kettenmann 51:2000).
While I’m sure the surrealists were in fact, very nice people, I have no desire to conform to any one philosophy or movement. I would like to achieve the “…accomplished air brush style” (Collins 1:1999) without using the airbrush, but I would like to apply this to a context which comes completely natural to me, whether it come from dreams, hopes, joys, memories, fears, likes, or dislikes, as long as I’m working honestly with myself. At the moment I’m pursuing a series of modern pin-ups, referencing such artist as Armstrong, Elvgren, and Vargas. I’m enjoying the hell out of it and I can see this branching more into a burlesque esthetic, but we’ll see where it goes. I will never achieve perfection in either my technique or my subject matter and God help me if I do, because that will mean that I can put down my paint brush and I never, ever want to do that.

- Illingworth Kerr Scholarship: Sept. 2003
- Heinz Jordan Memorial Award: Sept. 2003
- Maimeri/Davies International Prize: Oct. 2003
- Louise McKinney Scholarship: Nov. 2003