The Dust of Life – Living With Art at McKinley Studios

Pablo Picasso famously said, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” This notion, that art can make life something more than the everyday, that it can stimulate, soothe, inspire and instigate, has always resonated with us at McKinley Studios. Lining the walls of our two studios with art to create an aspirational working environment has been one of the best investments into our team’s creative processes and wellbeing. Our collection is always growing and we wanted to share with you some of the pieces that we have added to the McKinley Collection over the years.

Mark Mullin

Mark Mullin (b. 1969) is a Canadian artist who investigates how abstract painting can perform as a type of playful narrative of contradiction and subversion. The dialogue of his paintings offer a visual vocabulary comprised of borrowed bits and parts – a convergence of “insistent debris” where the decorative and minimal negotiate with the brash and grotesque. What results are paintings that resonate like improvised abstract theatre.

James Carl

James Carl (b. 1960) is a Canadian artist known for his small and large-scale sculptures made from a wide variety of everyday materials, ranging from cardboard and marble to venetian blinds. According to Carl, “sculptures make the best drawings” which expanded him into making prints and drawings. The notions of craft and labour have been at the root of his studio practice and have set the conceptual framework for his work that ranges from powerful and ironic critiques of globalization and consumerism to celebrations of early and mid 20th century modern sculpture.

Ben Skinner

Ben Skinner (b. 1977) is a Canadian artist who explores the nature of language through the use of text and materiality. His works often combine mechanical production methods common in sign making with traditional materials and techniques, such as hand-applied gold leaf and silk marbling. The phrases within the works seamlessly weave together humor and pain to explore the incongruities of daily life.

Richard Halliday

Originally from Vancouver, Richard Halliday (1939 – 2011) made his life as both an artist and an educator, known for his expressionist paintings and for being the guiding light in making the Alberta College of Art and Design one of the most respected art schools in Canada. Halliday's Constellation Series paintings are about the measuring and mapping of space. In these paintings, the hand drawn line and the experience of automatic writing become Halliday's vehicle through which he negotiates and articulates his relationship with space.

Ryan Sluggett

Ryan Sluggett (b. 1981) is a Calgary-born painter who combines his characteristic gestural line with a mashup of painting techniques in oil, gouache and enamel on sheets of aluminum, both large and small. Narratively, his work plays on his observations of everyday life in a hectic city that is perilous, glamorous and glaringly materialistic. His latest works, based on his experiences in L.A., are cleverly crafted and mesmerizingly beautiful.

Donald Sultan

Donald K. Sultan (b. 1951) is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, particularly well-known for large-scale still life paintings and the use of industrial materials such as tar, enamel, spackle and vinyl tiles. He has been exhibiting internationally in prominent museums and galleries, and his works are included in important museum collections all over the globe.

Graham Gillmore

Graham Gillmore (b. 1963) is a Canadian artist whose text-based paintings and mixed-media pieces are idiosyncratic personal and cultural commentaries on the interaction of the visual and the linguistic. He uses fragments of text, elliptical sentences, logically imploding statements, and misspellings to dislocate or obscure understanding, and otherwise allows his painterly gestures to subsume both letters and meaning. “I think of these selected fragments as a kind of linguistic ‘road kill’, skeletons on which to hang the material of the painting,” he says. For Gillmore, the abstraction overrides the text in a way meant to reflect the power of the visual to overwhelm the linguistic in the outside world.

Gerard Yunker

Gerard Yunker is a professional photographer who pushes the medium to the extreme. His fascination with light, feeling, and emotion has culminated into an impressive body of work that allows him to capture images—whether assets, products or people—in a captivating and compelling way. Gerard’s strong attention to detail, technical aptitude, and relentless pursuit of the perfect shot consistently exceeds his clients’ expectations, and is part of why he is sought after by many leading brands in North America.

Anothony Redpath

Anthony Redpath is a Vancouver-based photographer whose artistic practice focuses on the exploration of the constant transformations of contemporary life in coastal communities. Redpath’s photographs play with themes of illusion and paradox to create images often laced with irony. With his strong sense of design and knowledge of technique, garnered from his work within the advertising world, Redpath expresses his interest in contemporary art, popular culture and social issues through beautifully composed, crisp and resonant imagery.

Chris Cran

Chris Cran is a Canadian artist who investigates perception and illusion, and the viewer’s role in how images are formed. His paintings exhibit a long-standing interest in the relationship between representation and abstraction, as well as photography and painting. Known for turning nothing into something and his signature pop style, Cran playfully draws the viewer into the role of dynamic interpreter.

Alexander Caldwell

Alexander Caldwell (b. 1961) is a Canadian sculptor who embraces curves and right angles, round volumes and flat planes where minimalism meets pop art. Each one of Caldwell’s sculpture is painted a single bright colour or coated with a meticulous metal finish. He employs colour to remove shape as far as possible from its origins in functional objects – pipe in various diameters, pipe elbows, metal hemispheres - and industrial materials – steel, stainless steel and aluminum.

Alex Katz

Alex Katz (b. 1927) is a New York painter who developed his highly stylized aesthetic in reaction to 1950s Abstract Expressionism, finding his own distinctive resolution between formalism and representation. His brightly colored figurative and landscape paintings are rendered in a flat style that takes cues from everyday visual culture like advertising and cinema, in many ways anticipating both the formal and conceptual concerns of Pop Art. Well known for his many portraits of his wife and muse, Ada, Katz has also dedicated himself to printmaking and freestanding sculptures of cut-out figures painted on wood or aluminum.

Fred Herzog

Fred Herzog (1930 –2019) devoted his artistic life to walking the streets of Vancouver as well as almost 40 countries with his Leica camera, photographing—primarily with colour slide film—his observations of the street life with all its complexities. Herzog ultimately became celebrated internationally for his pioneering street photography, his understanding of the medium combined with, as he put it, "how you see and how you think" created the right moment to take a picture.

The Dust of Life – Living With Art at McKinley Studios

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