Brian Grison

Home: Victoria BC
Title: Self-Portrait
Media: Graphite, gouache and ink and collage on paper
Dimensions: 45 x 35 cm

Artist Statement

Self portraiture is the most autobiographic and even psychoanalytic subject an artist can pursue. In this mixed-media drawing, Grison acknowledges the natural shift from objective concerns toward a more autobiographic reflection of physical and psychological aging.

There are many ways to depict one’s self. In Self-Portrait, Grison presents four of them. There is the physical self, the remembered self, the secret self that one dreams of and tries to emulate, and a kind of Platonic self. As the viewer of this drawing will discover, seeing all these aspects of Grison’s self-portrait at once is difficult.

Biography

Brian Grison grew up in a French-Canadian Catholic family in which creativity and art practice were pursued at the service of the Church and God. At age ten, he felt a calling to the priesthood, but by age seventeen, he was a confirmed agnostic. Perhaps because of this evolution, his art became conceptual and philosophic, though he has never considered himself a Conceptual artist. For him, the art object carries its own meanings separate from whatever artistic or philosophic idea the work of art is supposed to reflect.