David Blackwood

Faraway Thoughts. 2007

Created during a period when Blackwood was increasingly using watercolours as a "respite" from the intense physical demands of printmaking, "Faraway Thoughts" focuses on the domestic interior rather than the violent seas.

• His work typically depicts a solitary figure (often a woman) or a series of personal objects arranged near a window. The "thoughts" of the title refer to the mental distance between the safety of the outport home and the dangerous ocean where the men of the community labored.
• A common element in this specific 2007 series is the use of a window as a framing device. It acts as a threshold between the interior world (warmth, stillness, and tradition) and the exterior world (the "black ice" and the cold Atlantic).

Unlike the deep, heavy blacks of his famous etchings like Fire Down on the Labrador, this painting utilizes the luminous, translucent qualities of watercolour. You will see softer blues, grays, and whites, reflecting the natural light of a coastal afternoon.

STEPHEN ANDREWS

From "The Quick and the Dead" series (2004), which explores the mediation of the Iraq War through digital and print technologies.

This piece is a meticulously rendered drawing based on a harrowing photograph originally published in the New York Times (and later widely circulated online). The image depicts a group of Iraqi men who were detained by U.S. forces, forced to strip naked, and made to walk through a public park in Baghdad. This event was part of a punitive measure reported on by journalists like Tom W. Christiansen (often associated with the coverage of the early Iraq occupation).

• Andrews uses a unique "homemade" four-color separation process. He rubs crayons over a window screen onto frosted Mylar to mimic the CMYK dot matrix of mass-reproduced newspaper or digital photos.
• The artist deliberately uses a soft, pastel palette—reminiscent of children's book illustrations—to depict a scene of profound humiliation and state violence. This creates a jarring tension between the "candy-coated" aesthetic and the "gruesome lesson" of the subject matter.
• By hand-drawing the pixelation, Andrews forces the viewer to slow down and confront images that are usually consumed and discarded instantly in the digital age. He aims to "dignify" the victims of these disposable news clips by giving them the permanence of art.