Pierre Coupey | Echo's Bones

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Pierre Coupey, "Echo's Bones XI (for BF)"

oil on canvas, 60 x 50 inches. Courtesy of the Gallery.

Only the imagination is real.

–– William Carlos Williams

Three principles shape my practice and each emphasizes the open-ended process of making paintings and texts: development by transformation (Stanley William Hayter, Atelier 17, Paris); form is never more than an extension of content (Robert Creeley in Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”); the medium is the message (Marshall McLuhan).

A close reading of contemporary poetry and poetics, and of Canadian, American, European and Asian art, also informs my practice as a painter and printmaker. I work in serial runs of various lengths, clusters of work, each of which explores a particular nexus of emotional, conceptual, aesthetic and technical challenges. Sometimes the clusters break down into subsets of pairs, trios or quartets of paintings or prints, each subset exploring a tangent or angle suggested by the direction of the main group.

Sometimes I work in a diptych format or I’ll bisect a horizontal format with a vertical line to make a fictive diptych: both formats rime with the pages of an opened book. In addition, my preferred format in scale rimes with the standard 8 1⁄2” x 11” letter page, which further proposes a rime between a painting and a manuscript. In one sense, each painting is a page from a manuscript, a book in progress. For me, painting and writing –– mark making –– are one activity, the basic work of the hand.

In the studio the search is for discovery through proprioception (sensibility within the organism by movement of its own tissue), that is, the intelligence of the body. In my practice it isn’t reason over passion, or passion over reason, but reason with passion. Not depiction of “the real” but re- enactment of the real through the proprioception of rimed experience, language, landscape and art. My interest is not in representation, but in presentation.

Pierre Coupey was raised and educated in Montreal. He graduated from Lower Canada College, received his BA from McGill University, and studied drawing at the Académie Julian and printmaking at the Atelier 17 in Paris. He received his MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and a Certificate in Printmaking from the Art Institute, Capilano University.

He was a founding Co-editor of The Georgia Straight and the founding Editor of The Capilano Review. He currently serves on The Capilano Review Contemporary Arts Society Board. His work has received awards, grants and commissions, including grants from the Conseil des Arts du Québec, the Canada Council, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Audain Foundation for the Arts. In 2013 he received the Distinguished Artist Award from FANS. In 2017 he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

He has published several books of poetry, chapbooks and catalogues, and exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally. His work is represented in numerous private collections in Canada, the United States, Japan and Europe, and in numerous corporate, university and public collections across Canada. Significant public collections include the Burnaby Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Kelowna Art Gallery, Simon Fraser University Art Gallery, University of Guelph Collection, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the West Vancouver Museum.