Hugh Kearney | Big Boy and his Adventures at the Circus

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Hugh Kearney, “ Big Top,” no date

mixed media on paper on canvas, 58"x78" (courtesy of the artist)

Over the course of the 20th Century, art movements such as Surrealism, Cubism, De Stijl and Colour Field, have put forward their interpretations of abstraction. Contemporary artists working with Abstraction today largely derive their styles and techniques from these and other historical movements. Over the last 100-plus years, abstraction has proven to be one of the most durable, adaptable, and powerful forms of contemporary art.

Hugh Kearney’s new body of work is influenced by a combination of historical abstraction, West Coast modernism, the urban landscape, and his Maliseet heritage. The strong graphic forms in the work are most closely tied to the organic abstract works of Miro and Calder, combined with the curvaceous forms of Coastal BC indigenous art, with the pill-shaped, cross-hatched elements referencing the Maliseet art of weaving.

Big Boy and his Adventures at the Circus is a thematic nod to Calder, who was fascinated by the circus, producing paintings, sculptures and works on paper related to the theme from the early 1920’s to 1976, the year he passed away. Kearny’s references to the circus are more oblique than Calders’; rather than a literal rendering of the circus, these paintings suggest the experience of the circus, achieved primarily through the interaction of texture, shape and colour, resulting in a sense of playful movement within the works.

Kearney builds up his mixed-media paintings by first cutting out rectangular pieces of plant-fibre paper and gluing them onto the stretched canvas underneath. He then creates a painted surface across the full canvas, bringing in other elements of abstract art such as splatter and drip - as per Pollock - and colour-field painting styles exemplified by artists such as Clyfford Still and Jules Olitski. The rectangular shapes of the collaged paper serve as a unifying structure for the work, which Kearney uses as ‘frames’ for laying down a series of connected forms of vibrant colour.

Although these works are undeniably abstract, many combine identifiable figurative elements – Big Boy, with the various shapes creating a profile of a human face, also contains references to art-historical objects such as a pipe (Magritte, Picasso) as well as flower and vine forms connected to the Maliseet tradition of bead work. Lionel presents an image of a Lion’s face, identifiable in the black forms of the eyes and mouth. Nodn and Clown contain shapes that suggest bowls, containers and plants.

But Kearney’s works are more than the sum of their parts. The techniques he uses produce paintings of visual complexity and interest, with form, rhythm, colour and line creating dynamic abstract paintings that connect with the viewer on an emotional level. In this collection of work he has created art that is singular and of its’ time, built on a foundation that incorporates both the history of abstraction, and his own personal history and heritage.