During his forty-year career as a visual artist, Art remained motivated by a childhood epiphany experienced during summers spent on his grandparents’ farm near Dundalk, Ontario. In his own words, he recalled, “I spent a lot of time in the barn; building forts in the hay, hunting cats, and reading. The barn was illuminated by shafts of light that squeezed through the knotholes and cracks in the wood siding. These shafts of light would be animated by the dust in the air from the hay and could be followed from the source on the far wall of the barn to the target that was the multiple crosshairs of the hay were I sat. And it was moving. This was the apple falling on my head moment.”
Art’s fascination with the passage of time and the movement of light led him to pursue scholarly and artistic paths in order to continue his life’s work in visual art. Following architectural studies at the University of Toronto from 1969 to 1972, he attended Dennis Burton’s New School of Art where he was influenced by the Abstract Expressionist movement through the work of contemporary artists including David Bolduc, Gordon Rayner, Graham Coughtry, and Gary Bowden.
During the four decades following, in addition to creating and exhibiting paintings in galleries in Vancouver and Toronto, Art’s passion for capturing the time-light phenomena in his artwork led to the creation of the Sunbow. This 20-foot sundial and celestial clock, installed at the Vancouver Children’s Hospital in 1981, invited viewers to walk into its dome and be enveloped by the rays of the sun casting colours through stained glass inserts. Inspired by the work of nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard James Muybridge who used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, Art began building kinoptic machines. These animated sculptures combine a series of images onto a single panel distributed across vertical bands. When the bands move horizontally, the illusion of movement is created.
Prior to his untimely passing at the age of 67, Art continued to explore his fascination with time and light by focusing upon the mediums of photography and film. Using digital technology, he combined hundreds to thousands of photographs taken daily from the same location, or frames extracted from time-lapse videos. The superimposition of these images, one over the other, allowed him to “paint” a layered record of time and light. The resulting generative art was an encapsulation of multiple views, with an end result that he described as “a slow surprise…that evokes a dreamlike memory and spirit of the landscape it depicts.”
