The ghosts that haunt Audrey McKinnon are less ectoplasmic and more her own grey matter.
The local painter has been letting her inner demons come out to play, lately, which she finds hilarious and hopes the audience will as well. Each new painting in her latest exhibition is like a page in her anthology of Ghost Stories.
The spirit world is a scary place in the hands of writers like Stephen King or painters like Edvard Munch. While she confessed that her life has had its troubles and her mind sometimes mulls dark thoughts, her main shadows are more to do with irony and oddity than supernatural tortures. In fact, these demons of hers make her laugh. She even refers to them as "ghosties" and they peek out of her paintings as a touch of frivolity or comic relief.
"I started doing them when I was working on my art show at Omineca Art Centre (last October)," she said. "Now, I'll often look at a painting and think, no, it's not quite complete, and I'll do a ghostie. I want my art to be playful, and that's for me as well as whoever is seeing it. I'm amusing myself, for sure, but that's part of the creative motivation."
The complexity of human nature isn't always clean, convenient or even sensible. Those are the forces that darken most of our days. Not evil, not hate, but puzzlement and paradox. This exhibition lived that out through McKinnon's near lifelong disdain for acrylics as a painting medium, so of course that's one of her main tools in her latest work.
The other primary tool is one that has a poor reputation among artists, but she has developed a fascination for it - interior house paint.
It goes on. Since she and her family moved to Prince George she has no ventilation chamber or even a studio space. Obviously, then, it's a great time to build up an inventory for a solo show.
These all represent some form of self-imposed obstacle, but this exhibition is the reconciliation of all of those emblematic hurdles most people typically experience.
"I haven't been able to spray-paint (the medium she's most known for) very much since I had my spraying booth in Kelowna. My partner built me one when we lived there, but since we've been back in Prince George we have plans but haven't gotten around to it."
Out of utilitarianism and convenience, fast-drying and non-fume acrylics were her most practical choice.
"I hated them," she sneered. "I first used them in high school. It was all I knew at first, because high schools have to give students something that's cheap and really easy to use. Once I tried oils, I thought they were so amazing and never wanted to touch acrylics ever again. Then I got into spray-painting and in that roundabout way it led me right back to acrylics. With spray-painting, you have to really think ahead and plan everything out. Because of the way the spray works - the way it flows in a rush onto the surface, the length of time it takes to dry, the way different colours behave together, it forces you to make a decision and be decisive about it. You have to execute the plan, hard and fast. With acrylic, because the colours dry so fast, it changes what you can do. It's really forgiving, you can rethink and redo what you've done if it doesn't work, and I really appreciate that."
Interior house paint was a fluid discovery. "I was actually inspired to use that because of The Alphabet Project done by The Citizen (one of the newspaper's 100th anniversary initiatives that included McKinnon creating the letter H in the series). I tried it then and I loved the effect. It was exciting. I wanted more of that. I know other artists have looked down on house paint, something about how long it's supposed to last over time, but I don't know why more artists don't work with it. It causes some great effects. Jackson Pollock used it, so there, I feel justified."
Pollock was famous for his wild abstract art, and McKinnon considers herself "chaotic" when she gets into her creative process, but she gravitates towards more literal images. They might look surreal, stylized, even cartoonish at times, but always rooted to something recognizable.
"For me to be able to appreciate the images afterward, I need a focal point," she said.
So many of her works are studies in the human visage. She is a specialist in the face, with a master's pursuit of perfection on her version of the eyes, the lips, and in a conscious way the nose. She knows Corbin Matthews will be evaluating her faces with his preschooler's honesty. Her little family friend has expressed his appreciation for her proboscis lines, angles and shadows.
"Now when I do a painting I wonder 'what will Corbin think of the nose?' Will it be Corbin approved," she said.
Lisa Redpath is another to whom McKinnon looks for approval. Redpath is the one who positioned her into this exhibition - she being the program manager for the Community Arts Council and the curator of their Studio 2880 Feature Gallery. Redpath got McKinnon to paint live in person during last year's Studio Fair event, and in passing simply said "I think her exact words were: we should get you a show at Studio 2880... so yeah... that happened," McKinnon said. "She didn't even want to see what I was doing. She just gave me that freedom and trusted it."
Some of the paintings that came out of the Ghost Stories sessions were portraits, like the one of her son or the one of her CBC radio colleague Jordan Tucker.
She discovered, as she coaxed out the resemblance of her friend, that it wasn't Tucker staring back at her at all. It was herself, just in Tucker's image.
The act of painting something literal like a portrait or a landscape is, she realized, "just a lens that the artist uses that is really more about themselves than the subject. It's all just projections of ourselves."
In that way, the artist is brushing through veils of consciousness just like ghosts mythically move in the material world.
"We all have ghosts," McKinnon said, "things you've known, fights you've gotten through, but they still have a way of reemerging - like ghosts."
Ghost Stories opens with a public reception Thursday night starting at 5 p.m. McKinnon will give an artist's talk at 6:30. Everyone is welcome, and no charge to attend. This haunting will go on at Studio 2880 until Sept. 6.
