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Local artist uses Maggiolly window to display work while awaiting Orangeville’s first art gallery

October 12, 2023   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

An artist with no training as an artist, “not even in high school,” he told the Citizen, “That gives me a huge advantage because I’m not taught to think like this or think like that. I’m free to go my own way. Having no training you can do things that others aren’t doing.”

MP, as he asked us to refer to him, is convinced that Orangeville needs a contemporary art gallery.

A visit to Tate Modern in London, U.K., was inspiring as one of the world’s largest museums of modern and contemporary art.

Artists have always been innovative, MP is sure, yearning to break barriers and lead us into the broad reaches of artistic freedom. For MP, the beginning of this ambition comes in his own recent foray into creating social commentary with mixed media pictures.

He finds items to glue onto the board, and then he paints.

Laughing, he said, “I was a dumpster guy to find stuff; in my brain I call them barnacles and then I arrange them. I’ve done a series on mental health.”

He added, “One I’m working on is about recent events, addiction, gender gentrification. I just started [doing this art] in the last couple of years.”

MP’s paintings are the other “pretty pictures,” of contemporary art – stretching the boundaries.

“Orangeville needs a contemporary art gallery,” he said. “Emilia [Perri, owner of Maggiolly] has given her window to gallery space. My paintings are tongue-in-cheek. That’s missing in our countryside. Sometimes you need the edge to make the goal.”

The Caledon resident wants to keep it fun and funny. He has just finished his studio, converting a chicken coup. The three people inspiring him are Jean-Michele Basquiat in New York, Philippe Gaston (political) and Rose Wylie in the UK.

MP was talking to the Citizen not “per-se” about his own art but more about the gallery space he believes contemporary art deserves. The Maggiolly window is a nice space but small. He finds Orangeville fabulous for all those beautiful red brick buildings and commented that Orangeville could use the red brick theme for new buildings.

Using glue to attach objects to boards makes him worry about the weight and how to keep things on. His paintings are not the pretty picture thing; they are more multimedia, always talking about conditions at the time.

“You can push the limits about your art.” he remarked. “I’m on the other side.”

It’s hard to have something new, he admitted and noted how modern architects Lloyd Wright pushed further, and Frank Gehry came from an artist community in California. He started doing “other stuff. Where he came from, he was very innovative.

“Gehry is doing a tower in Toronto,” MP mentioned.

He said, “Mostly artists you read about, everything is colliding and being meshed in together. This is not per-se about me. I’m just the delivery boy.”

Emilia Perri brought the story to the Citizen, and we spoke to her next to hear the rest of it.

Said Ms. Perri, “I got to know the type of art that [MP] was doing, repurposing all kinds of material that people throw out to make art. We just talked about art and contemporary art, and we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a place with really contemporary art? Let’s set up a gallery. Is it something more than something pretty, like what we see on our walls, or does it mean something more meaningful, something more original? Ninety-eight per cent of artists paint the usual landscapes,” was her meaning. “That doesn’t mean I don’t think those landscapes are beautiful. They are beautiful. 

“I want artists to venture in other directions too if they can and have the satisfaction of having tried something new to them.”

She explained that MP purchases birch panels from her art supply shop, which are wood boards like canvas but hard surfaces to glue all kinds of things.

She put the question in place: is it our job as artists to show people that there’s more than trees and rocks and water? How to make that question important?

MP’s work shows more commentary, Ms. Perri pointed out.

“Then I thought, I have my window,” she continued. “I have an art workshop on now with an abstract painter.”

She enjoys how MP takes an idea and breaks it down to talk about it, and she told us that

people are coming into the store to say how much they love the window.

People need artists to be artists and just paint what they feel without having to worry about selling them, she said, noting that Vincent van Gogh never sold a painting, and yet now his paintings are in demand. The inhibitions come from worrying about being accepted. 

“The whole idea of letting yourself go and play for a long time until something happens,” she urged.

Emilia Perri is selling her work. Recently, an interior designer came into the shop and saw her 65″ by 80″ painting titled “Falling Water.” The designer was doing a townhouse in Toronto, and she purchased a huge painting for her customer to put “in the big giant painting” on the broad white walls of the urban townhouse.

“It has been hard to sell paintings like that,” Ms. Perri said, thrilled that she has. “But I think people will buy something different from artists as well.”

To buy MP’s paintings, she opined, “It’s people who feel comfortable with who they are to buy a piece of abstract art. It’s so important that artists take around that world, things that are relevant, important to understand.”

Be sure to see the Maggiolly window, displaying the contemporary work of MP at 158 Broadway. There are interesting things to see inside, too, and a series of workshops that cover landscape painting and abstract.

Said Ms. Perri, “I think that we’re in a great area here to push the boundaries of art.”

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