Christopher Stott is a Canadian painter living and working in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. For the past three years, Stott has been self-represented. In the “About the Artist” section of his site he makes a point about the dedication and work this entails.

Stott’s paintings could be considered either still lifes or interiors, usually focusing on objects like chairs, of which he has done a series, books, suitcases, and smaller objects like clocks or shoes.

At first I was tempted to describe his work as reserved, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I think that was a result of the initial impression I had of his paintings of chairs; which, in some odd way, feel like formal portraits.

On closer inspection, his work reveals a controlled but painterly approach, focusing on the play of light across and around the objects and the surfaces on which they rest. The result is a sort of contemplative quiet within which there is a drama in the patterns of light, and suggestion of the advance of time. The kind of oblique lighting in these views is always fleeting, and a viewer of the real scene would find the composition dramatically different within the space of an hour.

Stott’s color palette tends to be muted. The dark wood of his chairs, the warm grays and neutral cover colors of his stacks of books and the soft grays of his backgrounds all lend to the feeling of settled equanimity, making it clear that the patterns of light are the key players in the compositions. (Stott’s fascination with the way light falls across objects in rooms brings to mind the work of two painters I’ve featured previously, Neil Hollingsworth and Karen Hollinsgworth.)

Stott has recently started a blog on which he features recent paintings and talks a bit about the choice of subject and process.

He offers his available work through an eBay store, and, if you’re willing to put up with the usual horrendous eBay interface (you’d think a company with those resources would have a better one by now), you can see come of his work reproduced larger, though unfortunately watermarked.

Stott’s gallery section promises that more will be added soon, and I’m looking forward to seeing a broader range of his work.

Addendum: Stott has, in fact, added significantly to his gallery since I put up the original post. If you viewed it at that point, check back for a number of additional paintings, including many paintings of small objects, of which I particularly enjoy several that feature clocks.

You may occasionally hear me refer to 3-D in the sense of 3-D CGI, the creation of two dimensional images based on three dimensional computer models; but there’s another aspect of 3-D in relation to art, the perception of images in 3-D.

Holography has been used in gallery art for a number of years; and, as technologies advance, the three-dimensional perception of images is coming to the fore in other ways. The new Disney animated feature, Meet the Robinsons, is being shown in certain theaters using a new, sophisticated screen and projection technology for 3-D (a 3-D CGi movie being shown in 3-D); and the word is that DreamWorks Animation SKG may start releasing only 3-D movies as of 2009.

It is a natural part of the way we perceive the world and, if you think about it, the real appeal of sculpture is in the three dimensional perception of its form, photographs of sculpture always feel flat to me.

That being said, here’s an artist walking an interesting line (puns are popping up everywhere in this post) between drawing and sculpture. Xia Xiaowan creates objects that could be considered either.

Drawing with a “special pencil” (the gallery’s description) on tinted glass, Xiaowan constructs images that feel three dimensional by the arrangement of a sequence of images (usually 14) stacked in a spatial arrangement that allows them to act almost like an analog hologram (above).

My comment about sculpture holds true here, though, in that I would really enjoy seeing these in a sequence of photographs taken from different angles or, even better, an animation or video. Short of that, you can view individual pieces that have been photographed from different angles and get an idea of the dimensionality of the works.

There is another artist named Mariléne Oliver who is working in a related fashion, producing inkjet-rendered drawings on pieces of clear material that are stacked, usually vertically, displaying, in effect, a three-dimensional drawing within them, like her 3-D deconstruction of the famous anatomical drawing by Leonardo that has come to be called “The Great Lady” (left), shown here in process on the Royal College of Art site.

Stray thought: The arrangement of a series of images like these, in which the sequence is spatial, prompts thoughts of an intriguing relationship to comics, a two-dimensional art form involving multiple images in which the sequence is temporal.

Link via Kottke.org