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SketchPad Mania is an organized presentation of the thousands of thoughts, musings, critiques and considerations which daily fly in, through and out of my addled brain. With little free time to meditate on each as they strike, (I do paint for a living!) and fearing the loss of them, I write those thoughts and observations down quickly. And for the past forty years, the vari-shaped scraps have been housed in a rather over-stuffed cardboard box. . .
Through the SketchPad Mania I am endeavouring to gradually add them all to the various listed categories for your perusal and comments. Thank you for your patience.
As a child (which I still am), I was (and am) In awe of everything. I am enthralled and mesmerized by persons, things, behaviors, activities and concepts - whether I agree with them or not. These mental and emotional acrobatics keep me balanced (!), connected and sympathetic to the world I paint. Though not always politically correct, these right-brain left-brain connections are like chess games played with my "self" as the opponent. Once in awhile, I pick up a scrap of an idea and study its contents. The very act of discovering and reading and wondering and questioning keeps me from becoming smug, complacent or too self-serving - or simply submissive. In our age, it has become so easy to "do" little and to simply "be" - whatever! or so it goes. . . So I am rebelliously fighting (according to "moi") the internal virus of the century - apathy. If I am going to affect the world in any small way shape or form I would hope it would be positively.
If logicality is a quality of linear thinking and illogicality on par with divergent meanderings, SketchPad Mania is an opportunity to put order in my own disorder. It is like a brush put to canvas after wandering through and playing in various splotches of paint on my palette. I am always amused at how those blends are more reassuring than the "purity" of a single thought.
Enjoy and or criticize.
Bernard Poulin
Contemporary abstract painting or thought resemble more cultural symbolism and structures of theocracy and social-organizations-past than it does anything new or improved. There is nothing we conceivably convey today which was not thought of, expressed, shared or imposed before we came along.
SketchPad Mania, therefore, does not pretend to be a wise exploration of newly minted mind patterns. Rather, it is a venue where long ago musings, masticated by greater brains than mine, find new expression within me. . .
If per chance I have actually, (all by my lonesome), expressed something considered of value by you dear reader, than so be it. I will accept your applause with as much humlility as I can muster. But if per chance there are authors of great thought in the great beyond, from whom I may have inadvertently stolen a modicum of fraudulent notoriety, I do promise that, in retribution, I will whip myself silly with the roughest hog bristle brush I can find in my arsenal of same. (Is that sentence long enough for you or what!)
In my humblest bellow I do therefore vow that all enclosed is without prejudice and has as its only goal the stirring of and communication with other life-loving souls.
- Bernard Poulin
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