Charles Bierk
Home: Toronto, Ontario
Title: Daniella
Media: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 101 x 91 cm
Website: charlesbierk.com
Instagram: @charliebierk
ARTIST STATEMENT
For the past fourteen years, I’ve been immersed in the language of portraiture. Working in large-scale black-and-white oil paintings, I paint people close to me as a way of considering presence, memory and time. The practice grew out of losing both of my parents at a young age, and an impulse to place people prominently in time, to preserve their presence and search for a kind of simulated permanence on canvas.
Daniella comes from my exhibition Where Were We?, a body of work that marked my return to portraiture after the pandemic interrupted the face-to-face encounters my practice depends on. The title is, in many ways, a genuine question about continuity and picking up where we left off. Over the years it took to make the work, I became a father twice, moved homes, weathered periods of uncertainty, celebrated milestones, and went grey. None of these experiences are rendered directly in Daniella, but they are embedded in the painting itself: in its pacing, its attention to detail, and the accumulation of years held within it. The painting is also a quiet reflection on time, on how long it takes to make a painting, to live a life, and to find an ever-evolving normal.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Charles Bierk (b. 1987, Peterborough, Ontario) is a Toronto-based painter known for large-scale, black-and-white oil portraits. He received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University in 2011. His work has been exhibited in Canada and the United States and is held in public and corporate collections.