****New Memorial Intro**** Rerelease Gwen Tooth: Walk Them Around In My Head

Speaking with Toronto based Abstract Expressionist Artist Gwen Tooth we take a deep dive into her practice on how she assimilates her travels into techniques in her toolbox; how staying with teachers too long can change your creativity in ways you didn't expect, and how she never thought art school was for her - when ultimately she went later on to three different institutions. 

Join Carolyn Botelho as she discusses with Gwen where her influences in Art really came from, how textiles, printmaking, and even playing a variety of instruments played a part. When does she decide the painting is complete? How do memory and visualization work together? And what gave her the initial inspiration to take her down this artistic path?

Working backwards Tooth describes her early years with her mother and all that she learned from her, how sewing, and even copying calendar pictures, were part of the fabric that made her creativity what it has become today. Reflecting on all the tools she has gathered over the years from her Mother's hands, workshops, galleries, and classes, to fellow students, and friends. 

Gwen's wealth of knowledge she unfolds for us methodically in this discussion on her practice, her process, and what few rules she sticks to as she breaks the rest; while she holds thousands of landscape snapshots  in her psyche nearly ready to be revealed to the world in her next exhibition.

You can enjoy more of Gwen Tooth art here:  https://propellerartgallery.com/members/gwen-tooth/

Gwen Tooth Podcast Interview Credits
Audio Links from https://freemusicarchive.org/
Podcast by Carolyn Botelho

Transcript

(0:00 - 4:31)
 Hello everyone, this is sort of a re-release of a podcast interview that I did. It's been over a year now, and well, the Artist that I did this interview with just passed one week ago on April 20th. I believe she was suffering from cancer. 
 
 I wasn't aware of this, but she was a friend of mine, and well, it was quite tragic that this happened, and I'm just trying to hold it together, you know, and I was just thinking that it would be nice to do a re-release of this interview, because it was a really, it was a really special interview. She was, she was, she is a tremendous lady, and I will, I will just talk to you a bit about her. I don't want to make light of this, but I'm just, just trying to, trying to manage, you know, and trying to, trying to see the positive in everything, and, and just to celebrate her life. 
 
 Gwen Tooth was always number one on my list of people I wanted to talk to, to do a deep dive on what she found was her inspiration, what drove her creative practice, and everything else that would come up in our long conversations. I met Gwen Tooth early in 2000s. I don't remember exactly when, but it was when we were both participating in a Gallery 1313 art exhibition. 
 
 Both of us sort of fresh-faced on the Toronto art circuit. Gwen had more experience than myself, yet she was so generous with her spirit and her energy of abstracting the world around her. We lost touch for a number of years as we both made our ways creatively. 
 
 We met up a number of years later in Brampton, where we shared more group shows during the pandemic. I was reassessing my practice and my future goals. I was starting a new journey creating a podcast, not coming out right, I wrote all this the night I found out about it, so it's kind of messy, but I was starting a new journey creating a podcast where I interview artists. 
 
 This is where Gwen was my number one choice for artists. She had a piercing dedication to her practice. Her abstraction and her teaching and teaching her skills to others. 
 
 She took a chance on me being my second guest on my Creatively Thinking podcast. I wasn't paying her and there was no way of her even knowing if it would be any good. She believed in her talent, her skill, the creative journey she has taken, that this would be enough, that it would speak volumes, possibly for generations to come. 
 
 Because one thing I have learned since I have been recording these interviews, they begin with questions, but quickly unravel to tales and stories, forgotten memories, and intricate snapshots of detailed moments that make up the messy, fragile personas or characters we make ourselves to be. I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to know Gwen Tooth. Wishing now I had tended more closely to our friendship, that it could have grown and blossomed more than it did.
 
 (4:33 - 5:19)
 She was a wonderfully caring, inspiringly devoted abstract artist. My heart goes out to her family during this difficult time. I am so grateful for the chance she took on me with sharing her life and her work on my podcast. 
 
 I am so grateful for the chance she took on me with sharing her life and her work. And now for the re-release of the Gwen Tooth podcast called Walk Them Around In My Head. And thank you for joining me and please enjoy.
 
 (5:27 - 5:49)
 Hey everyone, welcome back to the Creatively Thinking Podcast. Join Carolyn Botelho as she uncovers the inspirations behind some incredibly creative minds that are orbiting our local communities. And today we have a guest with us and her name is Gwen Tooth.
 
 (5:50 - 6:17)
 She is a expressionist painter and we will just get started right now. So I'm so happy we were able to get our schedules lined up so we could have this chat. Your abstractions or should I say more accurately your expressionist paintings have intrigued me over the years as we have known each other since the early 2000s from Gallery 1313.
 
 (6:18 - 6:27)
 Or is it earlier than that? I'm not sure. Okay. I've been at quite a few different galleries and cooperatives.
 
 (6:29 - 7:19)
 Yeah. Yeah, just they kind of all blur together for a little bit. So can we start from your beginning? I know it may seem a weird place to start, but I always want to know what was an artist's initial inspiration to take them down this path? Was it working with your hands, being a visual thinker, or expressing yourself emotionally? Thank you for that great question. 
 
 From the very start I was a gift, an only child, a gift to my parents when they were in their late 30s. And both parents were school teachers and my mother wasn't able to teach once I was born. Those were the different days then.
 
 (7:19 - 7:41)
 She made a lot of things and we made dinner mids and cinnamon buns and we did embroidery, which was a lot of fun in those days. We did the seven days of the week on tea towels that she would order the linen and actually make the towels. Thank you.
 
 (7:42 - 8:42)
 And then get the designs that you ordered from somewhere and put them on with an iron and it would embroider them. So that was my first taste with sewing. And we used to make clothes and she always had a lot of paintings and quilts around, which she'd done before I came along, because she and her husband lived in a country house and he went out across the fields to teach in the morning and light the stove and everything, as I say different times. 
 
 So my mother and I had a lot of time together and in fact when she passed away and I was with her, I wrote a poem called Her Hands and it was all about all the different things she taught me with her hands, which included playing piano and I was given the chance to try her other instruments. She had a Hawaiian guitar and she used to paint from calendars at the time. That's what they did.
 
 (8:42 - 9:05)
 They had lovely pictures. I have a painting of her still of Anne Hathaway's house that she did from a calendar. And that's my early impressions. 
 
 Many artists inspired me later on. Would you like to know some of those or will we hold up? Sure, yeah. For many, many years I was very enticed by Matisse.
 
 (9:05 - 11:04)
 I could see that. I went to OCAD before it was OCAD U and when it was and one of my favourite teachers was Graham Coughtry and he got sick periodically and had to have surgery, so his friends came in and so I was fortunate to have as teachers Gordon Rayner and a brief session with Paul Sloggett. One day when Gordon came in, he looked at my work and he said, you know, Matisse's cutouts are not the way they look in books. 
 
 It's not just one cutout. If you go up close, there are layers and layers of painted paper put on until he gets the right effect. And he said, you know, there's a show on in New York right now and it would be lovely if you could go to see it. 
 
 So, I was working at the time and I couldn't really afford to stay over and I got the day off. I pre-booked my ticket. I flew down, got a cab to the show, saw the show, went back to the airport and it really made a difference in my life to see them and they were huge paintings and you could see the many layers. 
 
 So, that was a real adventure. At other points in my art life, I studied with Brian Smith who was a portrait and figure painter and he said to me, you know, your drawings are very strong. They remind me of Katz Kollwitz and there are many ways to say her name, but a German artist who worked during both wars. 
 
 So, I thought, well, I tend to research everything. So, I went out and got all the Catalans. I couldn't read them and saw everything I could about her and then I did a show in 2011 of black, white and grey drawings of just figures inspired by her work.
 
 (11:06 - 11:52)
 The other reason, yes, I've always been interested in Expressionism because I've loved the German Expressionists from way back and I used to study Munch and also there's a museum I went to some years later in New York City called the Galerie Neue. It's New Gallery in English, but it's about half a block from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and it's a beautiful building with paintings of all the famous paintings, including the one the movie was made about, a Klimt painting. So, all of these little things build up layers in my sort of knowledge and intuitive toolbox within me, I think.
 
 (11:53 - 15:31)
 Yeah, it's your consciousness. Yeah, and I also followed greatly and went to exhibits where possible of the Abstract Expressionists. I did a series a few years back called Niagara Falls in Winter and I had some really large paintings, but I started with some small sketches in different media and then one night after dinner I took one of my pen and inks, which I'd had enlarged to about four feet in width at Staples, and I put a grid on it, which I don't often use, and transferred it to a large canvas with a black paint on a brush. 
 
 My intention was to do a black painting and then let it dry and then do glazes of color to replicate the illumination of the falls at night. But once I had done this painting, I said, it's finished. I remembered that I'd been to the ABAC show at the Art Gallery of Ontario and I took my granddaughters when they were quite young to that as well, and one of them said to me, Grandma, I listened to the video on Jackson Pollock, did not do sketches first, he just started painting. 
 
 And the other thing that influenced me with this Niagara Falls in Winter black and white painting was the fact that I had seen a large painting of his in the show, and there was a note at the side saying, Jackson saying, I have taken to drawing with paint. So, I thought, well, connections like that to history I find usually long after I've done the work. I don't think of these things at the time, they just come intuitively straight out of me, which is the reason I don't really use music in my work either. 
 
 I want to hear what's going on inside me, and music distracts me, and I know it affects what I paint, because I'm very sensitive to everything. One other group I also followed very regularly was Les Automatistes, a group from Quebec who painted very automatically, and one of the works in my most recent show is quite reminiscent of a Bourgeois painting that I've seen at the art gallery many times, a black and white one, but this one was in gold and red and different colors. And I generally paint from my shoulder. 
 
 I put gloves on, I put my hands into the paint, and then I do the gesture across the canvas. To protect your hands with those gloves. Yeah, well, what protection you can use, ago it's been suggested if you're doing drawing in charcoal, definitely protect yourself. 
 
 And there's a barrier cream you can use too, which I used to use when I was drawing. My hands became my brushes. Yeah, that's great. 
 
 I think that's a good start for inspiration. Yeah. There are many stories which would take many podcasts. 
 
 Yeah, that's incredible, all the influences you've had. This one will be fun. I do recall Cath Colwitz, and how she really touched me too when I started, when I was at OCAD. 
 
 Sorry, OCAD U now. Yeah, I don't remember it was OCA when I started, but it took me 17 years part-time to get my primary diploma. And then 10 years later, I went back and graduated with a BFA because I was given the opportunity to do that.
 
 (15:32 - 16:28)
 At that point, my mother was ill and was in my house with me, and I had caregivers in the house. I just sat at the kitchen table and let them take care of her, and I did essays for a year and a half to get my BFA. That made a huge difference because I started teaching and showing my work after that. 
 
 It just seemed to open the door that I needed. Well, however long it takes, right? Exactly. It's a lifelong process and journey. 
 
 I'm just on the journey now. I can at any point see a path and go left, right, or straight ahead. One of the things I've found with being an artist is don't be afraid to take a risk. 
 
 If it doesn't work out, you can always do another painting or another work of art. I keep mulling things around. I'm always mulling things around in my head.
 
 (16:28 - 17:28)
 I think that takes longer than creating a series, actually. Yeah. The toughest part is just, or the worst part is when you're just standing still, right? And you're not moving creatively at all, right? Yeah. 
 
 I never have a block. I never have artist block because I have tended to work in series, although I know that that's not the contemporary way anymore. When you go to the art schools, people are, the consensus is more that you do each piece with whatever medium it requires to tell what you want to say, and I totally agree with that concept. 
 
 Everything's becoming more multimedia and blurred. But in my case, the series helped keep me on track. Out of one series, about halfway through, I would do what's called a transition piece, and that would give me the clue for what the next series was going to be. 
 
 It just happened. I didn't plan it. You went with it.
 
 (17:28 - 18:22)
 My very first, the very first solo show I ever had, I was playing with seascapes, with horizons at different levels. And eventually, about maybe five or six paintings into it, the horizon disappeared, and it's never come back in my work since. I just started focusing on the light and the play of sunsets and sunrises on the surface of the water. 
 
 So, at that point, the focal point of each painting became not arbitrary little spots around the painting, but the whole painting became the focal point, and that is the direction of some abstract painting. It's a difficult concept for some people to grasp, but when you see the work, everybody always loves the work. Yeah, exactly.
 
 (18:22 - 18:29)
 So, that's what counts, and I love it. I only do what I do. My main goal is to stay authentic.
 
 (18:30 - 21:20)
 So, from here, you realized school was your best way to accomplish becoming a visual artist. What gave you this impetus? Were you already aware of certain teachers and the knowledge you could gain from them? I was aware of a couple of teachers. I started out going, when my kids were babies, actually, to Humber College, to night school classes. 
 
 And so, I got a basic fine art certificate. It included all the things I did later at OCADU as well, 3D design, 2D design. I studied watercolor and caustics, and prior to that, I had studied fiber arts. 
 
 My very first course I took was in batik, and then I took a series of weaving classes and had various looms that I'm not using anymore, but still have around. And once I hit watercolor, I said, oh my gosh, this is much faster than the textile. Now, I love all media, but I love textiles. 
 
 I'm thinking of going back to incorporating some embroidery into prints, but the main thing is I learned a lot from watercolor, which does have its rules, but also there are a hundred different ways, at least, to approach watercolor, and I liked it when we got big and bold, and I saw teachers pouring the watercolor onto huge pieces of papers. Oh, wow. I've always liked to work large, and as large as I can reach in both directions and larger. 
 
 And also, they have in watercolor a thing called the happy accident. So, if you make a blob or spill the water in the wrong place, turn it into something else. So, that's a principle I've used in all of my paintings ever since. 
 
 I did do some oil paintings for a couple years in art school, but I found it really wasn't that good for my health. I tend to have had chronic bronchitis and sinusitis all my life, and when we used to paint the models on Saturday, and Graham Cotter was there, and Les Maz Davis on the radio, it was a fun time, but when I'd go out across the street for coffee, I'd realized how full of fumes that room was, even with the windows wide open. So, after a couple of years, I decided to experiment myself into how to get same and similar effects with acrylics, and I think the trick with comparing acrylics and oils is don't, because each medium has its own little tricks and tools.
 
 (21:21 - 24:16)
 One big thing I've learned in painting is that the materials will sometimes tell you what they want to do, so you end up having a conversation with them and with your canvas or your cradled board or whatever you're using at the time, and you may have an idea of what you want to paint, but if the paint wants to do something else, then you have to be able to take that happy accident and move with it. So, one of the big advantages I found about going to art school was meeting friends and teachers with common interests, and I really wanted to get inside their psyche. And back to your question, was there any teachers I wanted to study with? I wasn't really sure if I wanted to go to art school. 
 
 I was taking courses with some fabulous teachers at a place called the Etobicoke Art Group, and Dennis Cliff and John Leonard and lots of people came there, and Meredith Berry came to do some calligraphy printmaking, and her son Jay came, and Robert Achtemichuck, who's now in Waterloo, I believe. So, I met many famous artists before I ever went to art school, but I decided to make a start. So, the first course I took was printmaking, and I met a woman named Elizabeth Forrest and Olga Phillips working in the class at the same time, and she later became one of my teachers as well. 
 
 But the teachers whose work I knew of before I went were Graham Cautry, Gordon Rayner, and there were a group of them, but I saw their work at the, I think it was the Isaacs Gallery that used to be on Yonge Street until it moved into Yorkville, and I saw Graham's work and how he was dripping and doing the figures and said, I want to paint like that guy. I want to meet this guy. I want to get inside his head and see how he feels and thinks. 
 
 So, to me, like, learning the skills of painting, you can learn them. These days, you can learn a lot on YouTube videos, but in the old days, they used to have a set of paperback books called the Walter Foster series. It's like how to paint a tree, how to paint a portrait. 
 
 I used to have a bunch of them. I think I tossed them and gave them away somewhere in my process, but I have met a couple of friends that were artists that have become lifelong friends from my early days of life drawing in Graham Coughtry's classes. One of them encouraged me to start teaching because I had such a nice way, she thought, of explaining things to people, and then I finally realized it took me years to figure out if I wanted to teach and what and how.
 
 (24:17 - 28:15)
 So, I eventually did. It was when I joined a cooperative in Brampton that I was on a committee that designed workshops and invited artists to teach, and one of the founding members of Beaux-Arts Brampton, Paulette Murphy, said to me, well, that sounds like a good idea, Gwen. Why don't you teach it. So, that's when I started teaching, and my parents were both teachers, so it just kind of seemed to come naturally to me. 
 
 Yeah, it just kind of fit. Yeah, so that was, I designed my own course curriculum, and it's simple. People can get all frightened and scared of abstraction, but it's really very easy. 
 
 Take away all the riffraff and write it down to the essentials and boil it into some concepts, and then just use those as guidelines like anything else. The rules are just there to help guide you, and you can blur them and change them if you can figure out how to make it work. Exactly, yeah. 
 
 And we'll be right back. And so, you also must have had so much confidence at this time, and so that's good to share as well, right? Well, I was raising little children at home, and it started out, yes, I always wanted to do this, but it started out, it was my night out of the house once a week from screening babies. Oh, that's funny. 
 
 But those babies grew up to be adults and have children of their own, and they've all come to my shows, and particularly the ones that live close, in Toronto. They've been to almost every one of my shows since they've been little, and now they're grown-ups. So, yeah, it's been a fun journey, and I wouldn't have it any other way. 
 
 It's just, I find that doing art grounds me and helps me through all the crises of life. Have you noticed a trend with educators on how they were trying to guide your practice? Was there any common thread of where they wanted your creativity to go? Not too much. I know that some of them, they have certain rules. 
 
 They're teaching a certain subject, like I took courses in pastel and in watercolour, and I've belonged to societies for both of those media for a while, and I submitted work, and they have a lot of guidelines and rules on how to frame paintings and everything, and it works for those organizations, and if you have a society and jury shows, you have to have some guidelines. I tend to move away from those into groups where the jury criteria are a little freer. For instance, I belong to, it's called an artist run gallery, a propeller art gallery. 
 
 They have beautiful walls. I just had a show. I have another one planned for a couple of years down the road, and I have full curatorial freedom to do what I want, and there are certain rules for keeping the walls nice and trying not to smash them to pieces, and people are pretty good at that, but you can hang things from the ceiling now, or you can hang the line across, and I generally, when I know what gallery I'm assigned, I do usually a maximum of 29 paintings. 
 
 Sometimes they're quite large. Sometimes they're large and small in whatever shapes are available, especially during the pandemic. I painted on five long, narrow ones that were, I think, one foot wide by four foot deep, and that was something new for me.
 
 (28:16 - 31:15)
 I like in every series to try something absolutely new, and so what I do before I have the show is I kind of visualize how the show is going to look and where the paintings are going to go, and because there are different events in the gallery, I visit it many times, so when it's, when the paintings are done, I have a fairly small space to work in. I have to imagine them on a distant wall because I don't have a huge studio. When I get them there, I kind of know where I'm going to place them, and we start hanging, and then I say, no, that doesn't look right. 
 
 It doesn't look the way I thought it would, so then we start moving them around, so I'm more of making it an installation while I'm on site and creating the right feeling so that people can walk, stand in the middle of the room and turn around and experience the work as if they're immersed in it, so as far as teachers trying to influence me, it didn't work very well because the more work I got and the certain things you were supposed to do with a figure drawing or a portrait, I would use that as a starting board, so then I would eventually veer off in the wrong direction, so everything. At that point, I probably didn't really need to have any teachers anymore, but we artists are susceptible to wanting more and more information all the time, and the other benefit of having art friends is when they tell you you don't need to do any more of that. You need to start teaching. 
 
 You don't need to travel to any more museums. You need to just get down and get busy and work, and basically, I eventually did that. I traveled many places around the world after I had an early retirement from work and on painting trips, art-focused trips. 
 
 I first traveled with my mother on sort of the general grand European-type tours and saw a lot of Europe and Asia, but it wasn't really art-focused, but it introduced me to travel. My mother did believe, as a teacher, that travel was the greatest way of learning, and I agree with that, too. The things I've experienced are within me, and I can remember them all. 
 
 I just hope I keep my memory and can always remember those things, but it's somewhere it's in there intuitively within me. There was an Artist. I can't think his name right now, but he ended up with dementia and Alzheimer's, and he could still paint because he was working from a different part of his brain than what we recall in names and so on.
 
 (31:16 - 31:47)
 The right side, right? Yeah, the right-left brain thing. Yeah, yeah. So, can you expand on your thoughts about art schools, how some gallerists prefer artists who figure it out on their own outside of the rules in school? How do you see the rules in school? Are they helping or hindering your creativity? I think, as I mentioned before, I was afraid to go to art school in the beginning.
 
 (31:48 - 36:49)
 I had my own sense of colour, and I didn't want the colour theory to destroy that, but I managed to get through the colour theory course, and there are parts of it that I use to this day, and it's more along the side of the Fauvist tendency for bright colours, and there's a principle of inherent values, where if you could do a painting with a grayscale and then put those same values of colour on top of that, and there was a teacher who used to teach that way, not at art school, but John Cavan, he's passed away since, but I just work directly with the values of the colours straight out of the tube. I buy quite expensive, high-quality paints, and sometimes I just don't want to mix them. I want to use that colour, but if I'm doing a series where I want to blend, I'm perfectly capable of doing it and have done it, so it's a matter of pulling out the tools you need for the specific work. 
 
 I guess the main idea is to learn the rules, keep some of them, and only use a couple at a time, and figure out how to break them successfully. As I mentioned before, when you move to full abstraction and talking about the surface of the water, as many of my series have, it's about the light reflecting on the surface of the water and the energy on the top of the water, whether it's a calm day or a stormy day. And the horizon line disappears, it just becomes, the whole painting becomes the focal point, because you're looking at one spot, like you're zooming into that. 
 
 That's one of my sort of three main principles of abstraction. We're all so familiar with zooming in now with our portable cameras, portable phones. Yeah, if you take an object and you zoom in, for instance on a teapot, and you only end up with the spout and the part of the handle, and that's simple shapes, which can be turned into an abstract painting. 
 
 Now that's not a busy one, where you're using all your mustard and drips and everything. That's a more controlled painting, where you're focusing on patches of color, and you got to get the color just right. Sometimes just a tiny little bit of a complementary color or something, put in one little spot on the painting, and maybe a couple other somewhere else. 
 
 It just makes the painting, or finishes it, and that's kind of taking focal points to an extreme, or it's bringing in principles of design, where you might have a big object on one side of the painting, and a couple smaller ones on the other side. When you said it's a memory you carry with you, do you mean the visual memory of the ice hanging down the branches? Do you mean the experience with your husband getting to the falls in winter, or your mind storing the visualization of the ice branches, where you were doing the Niagara Falls? Niagara Falls in winter one? Yeah, the Niagara Falls in winter. Yeah, we love going to Niagara Falls. 
 
 We have photos of it in winter with icicles off the trees, and I've been in the fall and walked along the rapids, and I did a series before the winter series about whitewater rapids, and you walk along there, and you could just feel the power of that water. If you happen to drop over the edge, you're gone instantly. That's the end. 
 
 So, it's amazing power, but in the Winter, the falls don't always look pretty. I took videos, and I took pictures, and sometimes that ice at the bottom of the falls, the horseshoe falls I'm talking about, it's kind of dirty and rugged looking, and some of my paintings in this series, I kind of incorporated that into them, and I did use, after I did the sketch of the whole section of the falls for some of the abstract pieces I did later on, which were quite large, I zoomed in to a small portion of the falls and highlighted and started to focus on the way the light was reflecting against them. So, one of the paintings is got pinks and oranges in, which is kind of the lights of the fall, the autumn, and the blue and green ones are kind of more of the ice, and there's a different light shining on the falls in the winter. 
 
 It's not necessarily as happy a light. No, it's not as warm. It's not as strong, yeah.
 
 (36:50 - 38:16)
 And the other thing that's hard to capture, but I try to in the falls is, when you're there, we stayed overnight for a few nights at one point, and we sat outside our motel room, and this was blocks away from the falls, but you could feel the mist dropping on you from the falls. So, to capture that feel of that mist in the work is another thing that's, it's there but it's not, and I don't plan to do these things, but I kind of have an idea of how I want that to come out. It just comes through you, right? Yeah, it does. 
 
 It just, it happens. I have very few failures in my paintings because I walk them around in my head so long, and then I get my paints and my supplies ready, and when I actually execute, I do it quite quickly. That's good. 
 
 And I also have a room at home right now where I can put on one layer, and if I need to, I can let it dry for five days and cure naturally. I never use blow dryers or anything like that. Then I can come back, and I can look in for five minutes and say, looks good, or I can come back and say, oh, I'd better come back and visit that later tonight and put on a such and such, or it might be just a brushstroke, or it might be a whole glaze over a whole surface, or colored glaze over part of it.
 
 (38:17 - 38:41)
 Anything is possible. One thing I did one day is that if you're doing something that comes from a landscape or a seascape, go and visit it many times so that it becomes so familiar with you that it becomes ingrained in your spirit, and then the work will come out. That might take years.
 
 (38:41 - 41:38)
 It might percolate for a very long time. All of those things, yeah. Yeah, exactly, like you were just saying, that you just, you visit the landscapes or seascapes so many times that it just becomes so much part of your consciousness that it just then comes out of you much easier, yeah. 
 
 It's really all of those things. Seeing the actual image is only a trigger, but what is really important to me is that it's what's inside me that comes out intuitively. And all those snapshots you've taken, like you said, probably thousands of them, and then they're just snapshots in your psyche that just stay there until you're ready for them to come through you and come out of you into a painted form, right? Exactly. 
 
 And in the beginning, I used to, I figured out I had to take my own photographs of everything because there are always these copyright issues. Don't use anybody else's photographs. So, I've always used all my own things, and I've got thousands of photos, but I found I don't really use them. 
 
 Just taking the photo is the act. It sort of ingrains it in my internal psyche. It may not come out for years later. 
 
 So, I've been going to the for many years. It wasn't until one day I said, hey, I'm ready to paint about these. And that's years later. 
 
 So, it settles within you, or percolates, as they say, until it's ready to come out. Yeah. And what they are is a lot of artists now are showing their photographs. 
 
 I had never thought of that. It was just part of a process. Like, for me, it was a journal, because I've never journaled a lot. 
 
 I'm not one of those people that sits down in journals every day and does little sketches. I do them periodically and for certain series. And right now, I'm working on some printmaking, the small prints. 
 
 And printmaking has become easier in many ways. I love working on the traditional copper plates, but copper has become quite expensive. So, I now have access through Opal Studio to some very light aluminum plates, which I can literally draw on and have a plate ready in like five minutes. 
 
 I work very fast. But those ideas have been in me for a long time, because- Or it's time to just let it percolate. They were used in my last show, and I just took something from that and created some new work.
 
 (41:39 - 44:39)
 So, I have two plates ready for when the next time I go, I can just play around, different colors and try things. And I have an entirely new idea, which I haven't totally worked out yet for what I might show the next time, because I'm primarily an acrylic painter, but I also have worked in many different media. So, it's a matter of knowing when to bring those tools forward and use a different media to express something. 
 
 Yeah, it must be also part of how you were saying that you're painting with your shoulder. It's like a whole movement of painting is so large on these larger works, that that's most likely how the musicians can see the movement and the energy and just the spirit of the whole painting coming out of the paint. Yeah, I'm just going to play with it over the summer. 
 
 I have done a lot of sessions of outdoor painting, and I find that's very helpful. And I do a lot of sketches, but I don't often work up large paintings from those sketches. They just are what they are. 
 
 It's an exercise for you. Yeah, yeah. Keep the hand eye color process, available. 
 
 Practice. Like, I used to be a pianist when I was young. I had to practice those scales every week. 
 
 And it's a very complicated music. So, I don't listen to music when I paint, but I think people have told me it comes out in my work. I don't try to put it there. 
 
 It just is there sometimes. Yes, and a lot of artists I know are musicians, and they will come in, and they can definitely see and feel the rhythm in the works. Absolutely. 
 
 And I can remember when I was in art school, I used to get these canvases, three feet by four feet, for life drawing. And Graeme Cotter would come along and say, yeah, that's the right size for you. It's as far as you can reach in both directions. 
 
 But I always wanted to go larger than that, and I have since then. But I have a huge easel that I can put bigger ones on. But I can't go as big as some of the artists. 
 
 I'm more likely to have these giant studios and do five foot high by nine foot long paintings and more. And I would love to do that someday. But one has to know one's limitations and what will fit inside one's vehicle when getting them to a show, unless you're prepared to pay for shipping to get them to the show. 
 
 Yeah, exactly. We need to know our limits. Yeah, there's a few boundaries, but not too many.
 
 (44:39 - 45:06)
 Yes. There's just a few. When you described yourself as wanting to become more of a sculptor, do you see this as a reaction to your chosen medium or more as an expansion of your expressionistic style and 3D perspective? Well, I don't think I really meant I wanted to be a sculptor over being a painter.
 
 (45:07 - 45:41)
 I've always done some sculpture at art school and at Central Tech. I went and did some large figures and I did a smaller bust that I really love. The big figures, I just can't work that large, so I would need to work with someone on that. 
 
 But I do like the hands-on part of sculpting. And we'll be right back. I've always done a lot of printmaking in art school and later on.
 
 (45:42 - 46:37)
 Mm-hmm. My medium continues to evolve to include new practices. I see that's where the young artists are going, and so I try to learn new things. 
 
 Like, I took some courses at Trinity Square Video on installation and performance art, and I just feel I never know when I might want to use that. Mm-hmm. It's another tool for the toolbox, right? Yeah, yeah. 
 
 And I go to galleries, and Gathy Falk was at They Meet Michael recently, and she has done a lot of sculptural installations, plus she did piles of fruit and the shoes. She did shoes in cases. And knowing about someone is one thing, but seeing the work is what is the mind blowing.
 
 (46:38 - 49:55)
 And I can't see myself doing that, because I'm not a person who likes symmetry. I like asymmetry, and like, for instance, I have a pair of earrings where one earring is long and the other one's quite short, and they don't match at all. That's the kind of person I am. 
 
 But my emotional sensibilities, they come and become engaged in whatever I do, and it just goes on my library of things to do. And I veer off from time to time and say, let's try this. When I was talking about the things I made with my mother, I did a sketchbook for the sketchbook project a few years ago, and it was all about memories of tools that she and I had used together to make some dollhouse furniture. 
 
 That was the basic memory. And there were other tools. And from that, that offset me on some drawings of saws and hammers and things that were very non-traditional. 
 
 And I've seen traditional artists do beautiful drawings of tools, and I can do that too, but I choose not to. So, making art is a choice as to what you tackle, but knowing it all is good because you have a big toolbox out there that, basically, if we know it all, we can do anything if we put our minds to it and our spirits. Yeah, exactly. 
 
 When you're speaking about not staying too long with teachers because you don't want them to affect your thoughts and style, can you expand on this? Because that is what I thought teachers do. They teach us a new way of seeing. I guess the answer to that is it takes a long time to find the teachers that are right for you. 
 
 And I encourage young people that are starting to paint or draw or whatever, if they're not happy with what they're doing with one teacher, to, if not dropping that teacher, move on and try another and add someone else to their repertoire. Because, eventually, an artist and a teacher click and you find the ones that are right for you. It's the same as when you get to a different level and you want to show in a gallery, you need to be able to cooperate with the gallerist. 
 
 So, the artist and gallerist need to work together. So, with students, yes, I'm fiercely independent as far as an artist is concerned, and my main goal is to be authentic. I have not ventured into the world of fine art prints at this point. 
 
 Maybe someday I will when I can no longer work and do large works, but now I'm focused on doing original work. And each series I do, I try to include a couple new tools or techniques. For instance, in this last series, which was called Let Loose, I actually used an old, very simple kitchen knife as a palette knife that had a serrated end, and I was able to create stifling over certain areas of a pile of lemons I was painting.
 
 (49:55 - 51:31)
 And just increased awareness creatively on your side, right? Yeah. As far as staying too long with the teacher, yes, I've done some jurying of different shows, and I've looked at many, many shows in Toronto, in Ontario, in Canada, around the world. I spend a lot of time in Paris going to different museums on budget trips, and I know good art. 
 
 It's just ingrained in me now, and I appreciate what anyone does in whatever time they have available to do art, whether they're doing it for fun or for serious competition. But when I go to jury a show or look at a show, I don't want to have to say, oh, I can see who they studied with. I won't mention any names, but well, out of respect for the teachers, because the teachers are all just doing, giving what they can to people. 
 
 And it might be five or ten years before any of those concepts come out and the teacher understands it. I had one teacher that I did outdoor painting with, and we'd be sitting at the bank of a creek, and he'd say, do you see the purple and the yellow and the pink shimmering off the water? And this was many decades ago, and I couldn't see it back then, but I can now. So it just takes a lot of practice and a lot of trying.
 
 (51:32 - 51:54)
 You spoke of a teacher saying, if you think of putting on one more stroke, don't, just stop. How do you know where the, quote, hammer time is, or your moment when the collaboration with the canvas is complete? Yeah, yeah. You just, one day you see it, or one day you feel it.
 
 (51:56 - 52:50)
 Yeah, so I guess when I teach students, I tell them to, I may do a demo, it's usually fairly quick, but you kind of shock them into how easy it can be if you just let loose of your inhibitions and don't think too much. So I would say, do a work, don't do a work that looks like mine, but use the concept and make your own painting or creation from those ideas. In other words, I teach them how to paint creatively. 
 
 Learning to copy an image is a different thing, and I've done that, and it has its place, but you can't learn everything in one course. If you're focusing on freeing up and abstracting, it's kind of good to put that aside, put your other concepts aside. Mm-hmm.
 
 (52:51 - 54:55)
 Painting is a vast world, the art world. You could just spend every minute of every day on it, and I would if I could. Well, I just know now, but it took me many years to get to that point, but I know that less is more, especially when I am creating the essence and or the energy of a subject or an object, or if I'm painting non-objectively, which means no object or sound or music in mind, you're talking about dealing with colors and shapes and forms only, but it's very difficult to achieve that level. 
 
 I feel there's always some blurring between those concepts, and I don't like students or myself to get hung up on any of these. If I have trouble myself, which is not that often anymore, I go back and think about those things, but it just takes a lot of years of trying different things. I often look at things like I do have underlying structures in my work, but I don't intentionally put them there. 
 
 Maybe they come from the days when I took courses in how to paint a landscape or a seascape or where to put the horizon line or where about to put the focal points, and then there's always what light is the direction coming from. But if you're in the case of a painting of the surface of the water, the light is coming from above and is focusing down on the whole painting, so that really jars some of the traditional ways of art. You have to prepare to free your mind up to new concepts, and that's the hardest part. 
 
 When I teach a five-day course, it takes to the end of day three before I see break days. Most people don't loosen up right away. One or two get it the first day.
 
 (54:55 - 57:04)
 Others come and they just want to paint with the group, and I help them with what they're doing. But other than that, things like the golden mean or intersection of lines, they can be useful to know, and they used to say if you put your focal point or a special like lemon in the still life at the intersection of that red and something else of lesser value and on the other intersections, your eye will be led around the painting, and this is a very good principle. No, I was just thinking for a minute, thinking, trying not to think. 
 
 Thinking is very dangerous when you're talking about art and painting. So, composition is extremely important, but what can be even more powerful is taking that grid and putting something just a little off from those intersections, and then it really gets noticed because it's not so easy. It either has a willpower or you have to wander around. 
 
 In an abstract painting as well, there are lots of little details that you can look for, like layers. With a lot of my series, I put a mother colour underneath. This last one particularly, I coloured the whole canvas one colour. 
 
 Some of them were yellow, some of them were black, and then I built up layers on top, but that mother colour held everything together, so that's another tool. I don't think of those things when I'm painting, but I see them after. I love to, once I get a show home, just go to the gallery and just sit alone with the works and see what they can tell me, and they sometimes show me references to art history to other artists that I wasn't thinking about at all when I was painting. 
 
 So, it's all in there, but then I've been studying art and painting for about 50 years or more now. Yeah, the painting structure, it's part of your DNA. Interesting.
 
 (57:07 - 1:01:23)
 How did you get to this point of the conversation with the canvas? Was it from years of experiencing that precious moment between artist, paint, and canvas, where it becomes alive with its own energy as you move with the medium? That's a difficult question to answer, but I think it comes from just having many different teachers, not only in art school, but out of art school in later years. After I graduated from art school, I wanted to expand my horizons further, so I started looking at artists on the net and found artists that I was drawn to. So, I would read about them, then I'd order their DVDs, and if I liked what I heard, then I would pursue it further and find out where they were teaching workshops. 
 
 And in a couple of cases, this led me to courses in the U.S., one from the mountains of Colorado with Stephen Quiller, another one I went to Arizona to learn about finding my style from a guy called Skip Lawrence, and then I went to Hudson River Valley Art School to study with Robert Burrage, and he was a great painter on loosening up and doing basic paintings on the floor and pushing paint with brooms. Yeah, it's fun, and we have a very famous Canadian artist, Lionel Luna Serving, who is still alive and painting, and I took several courses from her and enjoyed them very much, and hers is what she calls pure abstraction. So, she has a place in her studio where she pours some paint for a few hours a day and then watches it dry or see what direction it goes, and they guide it. 
 
 And when I took from her, we did very basic exercises on first quarter pages of watercolor on just simple shapes, maybe four to five shapes in black, white, and gray. We worked in black and white for about three days, and then after that, we went to a half page, and then we went to full page, and then we moved into color near the end of the course. So, those are all exercises, but they're exercises that give you structure to loosen up and forget about them. 
 
 So, and I have great admiration for her. I studied four different times with her, but she used to joke and say, you know, you people don't need me. And maybe we did, and maybe we didn't, but we enjoyed working together and doing things together, and it gave us a focus. 
 
 So, I never like to get too tied down to anyone. So, I always, at some point, know that I want to learn something else to make my work unique. You can always say you studied with different people, and I must have 20 or 30 names listed on my detailed resume. 
 
 I have about nine or ten pages, and then I have a three-page first, is all they want when you apply for a lot of things. In some places, it's a one-page one, so you really have to edit it out. The main principle in the way I paint is put something down and then respond to it, and then repeat. 
 
 It's like a recipe. Just keep painting, and don't be, either be fast or don't be fast. I don't often go back and do corrections, I just, because then it becomes overworked. 
 
 You have to be daring and just put it down. In some cases, if you don't want the colours to blur and run, you've got to stop after one colour and let it dry for a few days, because I often use quite thick paint. So, I don't want to have a mess. 
 
 I want it to all go naturally. Wait a minute, don't you do glazing too, and so that creates multiple layers? I can do glazing. I do glazing on some.
 
 (1:01:23 - 1:02:00)
 That's a skill I learned from, originally, the first time was from Graham Cautry, because he went to Spain and Europe, and he looked at El Greco paintings, and he used a lot of glazes, and he taught us how to glaze just parts of the painting, and then come in with opaques, and then glaze other areas. So, I took it to my own extreme. I glazed the whole painting with sometimes a hint of colour, just to change it and then add other layers. 
 
 So, you take what other people show you, and then you try to make it your own. All the time, I do that. Or part of what they've shown you.
 
 (1:02:01 - 1:02:32)
 Yeah, but I like to pay recognition to these people, whom you don't always remember where everything came to, but it's important to try. So, the meditation with the canvas kicks in, and you just look at it, and your eye gets so attuned to colours. After working with colour for many years, you know what colour it wants. 
 
 Sometimes it may be a complement that it wants. Exactly. And then, of course, there's the realm of tertiaries, which is available for accents.
 
 (1:02:33 - 1:04:09)
 Tertiaries being, well, the primaries you mix to get secondaries, and then the secondaries you can mix to get tertiaries, and I may have that a little bit out of whack, but I have huge colour wheels that I carry in my classes and I have at home, that if I want the exact reference, I can go and check it. When you spoke of assimilation of your travels and your suitcase of tools to advance your art career in your Let Loose catalogue, what were the ones you chose to focus on currently? Did you notice if any experiences somehow fit easier and or better with certain techniques, or was it trial and error? I kind of knew, kind of, what I was going to be doing. I had the year before been working on just some sort of happy pandemic experiments, and I did smaller paintings of lemons and flowers and paper cutout dolls. 
 
 It's something I'd always wanted to have time to fool around with, so I cut out these paper dolls, and when you open them up, there's a strip of figures. So, I used those on some small canvases and did them in different colours. So, out of those came the figure series. 
 
 The first tool I used was a mother colour. So, burgundy was the colour that was underneath the figures, and I also experimented with metallics, and acacias iron oxide has some texture, and I had a gold paint. I had some silver as well.
 
 (1:04:11 - 1:06:10)
 I put down a mother colour of burgundy and made sure some of it shows throughout the painting, and then I used acacias iron oxide, which is a textured painting. It's kind of like a colour of pewter, and then I had some silver and some gold, and so I made these figures. I don't really consider they're from the dark side. 
 
 They're just kind of from an introspective side of me. So, I did about five or six of those, and those came out of my playings around a year ago, and a show I had related to, well, to call it many years ago. So, everything comes back and around, and this was the time it did, and the long narrow ones, I painted black because I had some little pictograms, and that's where the paper dolls came in. 
 
 My grandson looked at it and said, oh, those are stick figures, and they were kind of, but I used gold and silver, kept it to the essence. Other tools I used were the old kitchen knife that I mentioned. I used that as a palette knife near the surface. 
 
 I used my gloves and hands to draw red shapes outside the lemons. This was not going to be a traditional still life, although I love lemon still lifes. I found one recently in a new book about Lucy and Floyd called Love, Love Letters, I think, and it was letters that he wrote, and I found this beautiful lemon painting, which is removed from his figure work, but I, and I also knew Ross Mendez at OCAD showed us the work of Donald Salton, who did huge prints of lemons, mostly lemons, but other fruit as well.
 
 (1:06:11 - 1:06:14)
 Yeah. So, I've been incensed by lemons for many years. Their favorite fruit.
 
 (1:06:16 - 1:08:19)
 Yeah, yeah, I love lemon pies, lemon cakes. So, I used my hands as my brushes. When I put the gloves on, my hands become the brushes or the direct communication with the canvas, and the other thing I did on the final accent on that, the one of the peaches that's on the show cover, was I looked in my box of tubes. 
 
 I collect these different colors. When I see them, when I walk into an art supply store, it's like candy, and I say, yes, I've got to use that color in something. So, I had this one, it was kind of a pinky curl, so I used that for the final accident, and that was straight out of the tube, and I applied it, pretty sure with my fingers, yeah, for the accent. 
 
 I feel it was my best painting. It was the last one I did of the series, so it was number 21. Well, there you go. 
 
 That must have been it. Yep. That was the one to finish off the series. 
 
 Well, great speaking with you today, Gwen. Oh, my pleasure. It's really nice. 
 
 Yeah, really nice to hear your thoughts on your artwork, and what inspires you, and just, yeah, we should do this again, because I'm sure there's, like you said, there's so many different podcasts we could do about really everything. Well, yes, there is, and I have stories about many trips I've been on, and how they influenced me. I went to India four times after I retired from work, and out of that, it was many years before a series came out that I realized it was about India. 
 
 So, I had a series called Indian Variations, I think I called it. So, there's all kinds of things, and new things will happen. So, thank you very much, Carolyn, for this opportunity to share my work and feelings with other artists and listeners.
 
 (1:08:20 - 1:08:40)
 No problem. Yeah, no problem. So, yeah, that's it for our podcast with Gwen Tooth today, and thank you again for all that you were sharing with us today, and I look forward to talking to you again in the future.
 
 (1:08:40 - 1:08:45)
 Same here. It was a pleasure. All right. 
 
 Thanks so much, Gwen. Take care. You too.
 
 (1:08:45 - 1:08:47)
 Okay. Bye. Bye for now.
 
 (1:08:49 - 1:09:00)
 Join me next time as I go down another rabbit hole with another creative professional on their insights, their inspirations, and their ingenuity.