Paul Fortin


















Throughout the past year I have participated in numerous visual art residencies that have taken me to different locations geographically. I have been lucky enough to call Banff, Vancouver, Japan, Ivvavik National Park, Toronto, Trinidad, Norway and Iceland my home. In an attempt to produce a coherent body of work I have found that images began to overlap and collage themselves upon my memory, certain regions became a blur and upon the early stages of travel burnout, the mind stopped registering altogether.

I am intrigued by this dropping away of details, of not fully absorbing our surroundings. An emptiness or void is created where images are not fully registering in our minds, giving us nothing. We seek answers but are only given more questions. I strive to develop my paintings in this way. They are brief glimpses into landscapes and moments that may or may not ever fully develop into what they truly are. I want the work to remain open and let the viewer fill in the blanks, to absorb and construct what they are seeing for themselves. Each image is open to interpretation by the viewer. While the paintings may represent a void or emptiness, the interpretations that the viewer brings to the work will be full of life and atmosphere.

Paul Fortin originally hails from Peterborough, in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario. His formal art training has taken him to the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine and to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Over the past ten years he has lived a somewhat nomadic lifestyle settling and moving throughout numerous regions of Canada. This has allowed for the collection of a vast database of visual imagery, both two and three dimensional, which has been used to create an eclectic and diverse body of paintings, sculptures and installations. His work is strongly influenced by societies connection and disconnection with environments (both natural and manmade) and draw upon the emotion of loneliness and feelings of emptiness. His move to Inuvik, Northwest Territories in 2004 along with the unique arctic geography, isolation and the study of Inuit graphics and prints has been a major influence in his work. Paul is the recipient of numerous grants and has been awarded artist in residence positions at the Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Canada Councils International Residency Program at CCA in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Kulturhuset USF in Bergen Norway and artist in residence at the Gil -Society in Akureyri, Iceland. Work from 1997 to the present can be found in public and private collections in Canada, the United States and Europe.

Paul is represented by Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Ottawa, Ontario.