Andy Patton The Whole Light of the Sky

In the last three years I have been doing wall paintings in a variety of different architectural sites - an abandoned brick factory outside of Hamilton; a Catholic college in Windsor; an artist's apartment in Toronto; a circular concrete farm silo near Grand Valley, Ontario; two rooms of the guest-house in what once was a Trappist Monastery outside of Winnipeg; as well as in art galleries and museums. Some were done legally, others illegally by breaking into abandoned industrial properties. All of these wal paintings - which are really fake frescoes - are very simple modulations of blue. The darker areas are made up of twenty or thirty washes of very thin colour, the lightest just three or four. In this way the paint is broken down, so that the colour intensity can become very strong. At each site, the painting is tied to the architecture in some simple, visible way. At certain sites, the painting is related to the falling of natural light there.