Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Ontario

Note:

It was a balmy summer evening on Queen Street West. Two collectors and their young son had just stepped out of the heat into the cool oasis of Katharine Mulherin’s gallery, where a new exhibition of Mike Bayne’s work was underway. The Art Gallery of Ontario had recently acquired four of Bayne’s paintings and the National Gallery of Canada would soon follow suit with two of their own. It was then, and remains now, a rare treat to see the artist’s work assembled in one room.

“Wait,” the couple’s son exclaimed, “where are all the paintings?!” His eyes, still sun-dazzled, hadn’t registered the tiny, rectangular pictures punctuating the walls. “Look closer,” his parents said, “they’re there.”

Bayne’s paintings have always compelled us to look closer, both at them and at our environments. Their attention to the world is as exquisite as we would wish ours to be, jolting us into a higher state of consciousness with their unlikely array of snowdrifts, strip malls, and station wagons. This small, wonderful painting, first exhibited in New York City in 2011, is a fine example of Bayne’s dazzling deadpan. Entitled Sura, it makes an enigma of a modest Toronto garage, celebrating the found beauty of a structure hiding in plain sight.

Of the painting, Bayne recalls: “This was just off the Queen West strip, somewhere close to Katharine (Mulherin)’s gallery. Those are sumac trees on the left. I think there’s a bathtub standing upright somewhere there too.” It is typical of Bayne to note the vegetation. He operates a farm in rural Kingston that requires constant care - the land, like each painting, demanding patient cultivation. He works in a studio overlooking his fields, daubing gravel, shingles and sky into existence with size-000 brushes, each new painting a minor miracle.

The National Gallery of Canada recently included Bayne’s work in an exhibition entitled Perspectives on Urban Spaces, where it demonstrated, in the writer Chris Hampton’s words, how a utility pole can become “an object of sculptural dignity,” and a brick wall a “worthy work of Minimalism.” Bayne describes this particular painting’s “low-end building materials - crumbling cinder block, asphalt, aluminum siding” as “lots of fun to paint,” and his enjoyment in perfecting each detail is palpable. He not only humanizes this lowly edifice, but stirs in us a more general resolution never again to overlook.

Sura is from a particularly beloved period in Bayne’s catalogue, when pale, luminous skies predominated. It’s easy to see how his wan light and virtuosic paint handling have earned him comparisons to the Delft master, Johannes Vermeer; certainly, few painters of any era attain such dizzying technical or spiritually secular heights. This jewel-like painting, like its laneway monolith, risks being missed; once seen, its perfection is indelible.