Greg Denton became an irrepressible portrait artist back in the late-80s, shortly after returning to art school after a five-year hiatus. He has painted hundreds, perhaps thousands of faces since then.
A row of his small-scale oil portraits is up now until the end of March at Sapphire Café and Lounge at 17 Macdonell Street. The café is a creative hub in the downtown, hosting DJs, live music, spoken word, and visual arts events.
Denton is well-known in art circles as a serial portraitist, having worked on various series that become art installations featuring dozens, even hundreds of faces.
His “Anyone Lived” series from 2001 feature 400 small portraits, each one of a Guelph person. The series was commissioned by the Art Gallery of Guelph, then known as the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre.
Last summer, Denton executed an exhaustive portrait series to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the war poem “In Flanders Field,” written by poet and physician John McCrae, a Guelph native.
For that “100 Portraits/100 Poppies” project Denton painted 100 portraits, people who were either war veterans or had special connections to veterans or the military. The series, part of the City of Guelph’s summer artist-in-residence program, was highly acclaimed.
“Precursors, Orphan, and Stragglers,” is the title of the Sapphire show, made up of portrait studies that were perhaps done in the lead up to a major series, or as one-offs. They are, in terms of Denton’s artistic activity quite literally precursory, orphaned, and straggling.
“I paint from life, so I’m always just painting people who are around me,” Denton said, while sitting in Sapphire this week. “These are all people I know.”
Denton is as much engaged in Guelph’s music scene as he is in the visual arts. A singer-songwriter, he plays guitar and banjo, and gigs frequently.
“The human face is a compelling thing,” he said. “I think I am a representational painter, and I’m a life painter. I think the portrait is an interesting thing, especially painting from life, because the person is there for one sitting, a limited amount of time. You have them and you have to make your decisions in the moment.”
His paintings are highly animated pieces, strong likenesses of the subjects, embedded with personality. But capturing the essence of a subject’s personality is not really what he is about as a painter.
His work is more about action painting – about reacting and being responsive to what he sees in the face, not what he interprets to be the subject’s fundamental nature.
“I’m usually painting portraits as part of a larger suite,” he said. “So these ones were done for practice, or they’re sort of research and development paintings, preliminary, trying to work out ideas and forms.”
He didn’t really expect to exhibit the work, but the Sapphire walls called out to him, café owner Dino Busato offered, and the works went up. There’s actually a portrait of Busato in the show – the first one in the row.
“I like the work a lot,” Busato said. “Except maybe for that first one.”
He said art brings the space to life, and changes it as the art changes. Denton’s portraits, he added, are especially enlivening.
“I realized I had a lot of paintings, and they didn’t belong to any series in particular but there were ones that I thought were good as paintings,” Denton said. “I thought this nice, straight wall would make a nice line of portraits.”
