b. 1986     Father, lawyer; mother, journalist; grandparents farming and mining.

1986-2003 Brought up in Nova Scotia. Good student; often truant, youth is spent
             sailing off the coast of Nova Scotia. Graduates as valedictorian; intends to study law.

2004     Leaves Nova Scotia for the first time; ends up in Sri Lanka. Tsunami arrives in December.

2005      Tsunami alters life-course. Eventually able to leave Sri Lanka, the work-program assigns a position in Cuba, teaching French and English in a pre-universidad.
             Observation. Decides to study drawing. Receives scholarship to study painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design.     

2008     Receives scholarship to study painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
            Returns to Halifax when father is lost at sea.

2009     Takes a studio near the Halifax Harbour and discovers, in the room next door, a painter named Gerald Ferguson. Jerry becomes a friend before his death.

2010     Receives award through a French consulate and is able to visit Paris.

2011      With money from the Halifax Mayor's Prize, travels to Berlin and rents an empty room
on Koppenstraße. Spends several months painting flowers. Comes across a eulogy for Jerry at the Künstbibliothek, written by Lawrence Weiner who wonders
             why Jerry stayed in Halifax. Emigration process begins.

2012      While in Berlin..included in an exhibition at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, a small museum on Prince Edward Island. Intending to return only briefly, takes temporary studio in the Halifax Roy Building. The building is scheduled to be demolished. Work begins on what will eventually become "Five Studies." Demolition of The Roy building is postponed.

2013      Shortlisted for Canada's Painting Prize, begins to receive attention from institutions. Presents work at the National Art Gallery of Canada (ON); Owens Art Gallery (NB); PlugIn ICA (MB) and others. Gives lectures at Dalhousie Architecture School; York University Graduate Program in Art History; NSCAD Graduate Program in Visual Arts and others. Most work...anonymously...Khyber ICA (NS); Struts Gallery (NB); ... Demolition of the Roy Building is further postponed.

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Studio neighbours. Underground and official culture. Anonymous. "Submerging Culture." (language and symbolic meaning; social or political theatre) Questions in Cuba between actual and official culture.

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2014      Roy Building is demolished. Moves many times over the next two years; finally returning to Berlin with Sophia. (Anonymous) This begins a challenging period (solitude; anonymity; poverty); traditionally referred to as exile. Work is almost entirely interior. (First time noticing how solitude and anonymity begets a new sincerity) Futility (poetic tradition).

2015    With the film "Immortal Invisible" (produced with the National Filmboard of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts and edited at Künstlerhaus Bethanien; never shown) attention is moving toward theology.

2017     Sees cave paintings in the Périgord and medieval Frescos. Much longer-term vision; the scale of time available to painting.

2018     Visits the Book of Kells while seeing a friend in Dublin. The invention of vowels. New way to engage with language. Language develops like any other apparatus. (discovering the futility outlines a set of human conditions. Ascetics.) Summers on Cape Breton Island; living outside;
             Rebuilds truck and begins clearing land in Aspy Bay. With the painting "Yellow Bird," the paintings start to achieve a new sincerity.

2020     Pandemic. Second Summer clearing land; digs foundation.

2021     Cuts driveway through woods to clearing. First monochromes.

2022     Begins building summer studio on Cape Breton Island. First Frescos

2024     surfaces and values. Monochromes are sometimes paired with frescos and paintings. Constants.

2026     Marries Sophia. First summer in studio on Cape Breton Island.

AB. There's a lot of continuity in your work from 2005, when you're in Havana, until the painting 'Taste Test.' Then something changes. What made you go back to observation?

AW. The paintings started to seem like symbols. I was more interested in what's there.

So you get a job doing portraiture for a university of theologians. Did you paint from sittings?

Yes. The first portrait was for a Dean of Divinity and we talked, his work was accomplishments ...much younger, how to sum up a person's life in one picture. observation but you leave a lot out so there has to be a sense of how much is missing. Earl.

While you're doing these sittings, I guess privately you start making studies of evidence?

Yes.

Eventually you call these 'Proof Paintings.' From these studies you've got a chalk-line. The chalk-line is evidence of something, a missing body or, a subject missing from the center and you repeat this shape for years and refer to it as a constant, like a word or a number. All of these developments are happening in private. You know, when I first saw the painting "Yellow Bird"—

—you thought it was a joke.

Yes, it looks different to me now.

I know what you mean. It's the beginning of a commitment.

You also had monochromes with these incredible surfaces and it felt like there was a subject, but the subject in those was missing. How do you do think about your subject?

[long pause] Last week I was at the Gemäldegalerie and I noticed how people look at paintings, usually for about ten or fifteen seconds. Pretty fast. When a painting's on your own wall you see it in another way, maybe you look at the painting for two or three seconds in the morning or at night so that's thirty seconds in a week. Let's say about two minutes in a month. In a year, that's about thirty minutes. After three or four years you've seen the painting for an hour and a half or two hours but by now most of the topics have changed, subjects have come and gone. What's left on your wall is a surface and you either get the feeling it's empty, or the painting holds up.

Are you focusing on the surface?

I work on the surface, it's not the really the focus. I think you're asking what I’m painting?

Yes.

I'm working on frescos now, they're not really images.

What are they?

Stones are ground into pigments and then that’s mixed with limewater and then—

—I mean if they aren’t images, what are they?

The frescos are more like values.

This form you repeat, how did you commit to that shape?

I'm not sure. As you said, I was studying evidence and I had this chalkline and every morning I saw it in another way. At the time I was also looking at sacred paintings and I realized the form was like those, except this icon in the center kept changing. One morning I woke up thinking "if you're going to see something in another way, you have to be looking at the same thing."

And that's how the shape became a constant?

Yes.

Let's talk about writing. I remember visiting years ago and you mentioned a problem with images. Then I didn't see you for a few years and I heard you were writing, could you talk about that time?

What I saw was a visual problem, so I just got up every morning and tried to solve it visually, by hand but as I got further into it, I started to notice something more serious, and the scale [of the problem] kept growing. At some point I realized, I had to start over.

Was it a creative crisis?

I worked in private for about a decade.

...a crisis?

Maybe, but it wasn't personal. When artists talk about crisis, it often means they're blocked. My issue was the opposite. I couldn't keep up.

This is when you went to Cape Breton Island?

I went back to Aspy Bay because the colours are so strong, and I cleared land; worked on my truck, that sort of thing, and it helped.

How?

A few years earlier I had noticed what I called "programs." I was trying to figure that out and it was leading me toward theology. I was writing a lot and pretty much living outside and then somehow my grammar changed. I could write and draw but drawing or writing about things was like talking in third-person. For a few years nothing fit together for me, the world only made sense as poetry. Even the paintings were resolved poetically.

Were you publishing?

Sometimes. Mostly anonymously or for friends when they asked.

What do you mean the crisis wasn't personal?

I mean that the problems weren’t mine, I just didn't know how to deal with them. For example, when I came across Nelson Goodman's "Fact, Fiction and Forecast" I recognized his issue with induction immediately. It was the problem I saw in memory wire. Counter-factual conditionals and his "law-like statements," I had been calling them "programs." The next morning I walked to the Staatsbibliothek and found Frege, Kripke, Tarski, Carnap, Anselm, Quine. What they noticed in language I had been seeing in images.

The problem was formal.

You could say that.

I’m thinking of your paper “Invisibility and the Word,” the realization that you can paint a number or a word just as easily as a tulip, it doesn't seem like that would affect you personally.

I found it strange that I was able to keep painting, even after I had decided that images are arbitrary. It took a while for me to realize that paintings aren't images.

What are they?

Making an image by-hand is the invention of images. You're working on how you see, which you might say is very personal.

Are you looking through the form? Is it like a window? Of course "form" refers to a shape or a tradition--

--Yes, you're right, painting is the same as it was 30 or 40 thousand years ago. It's possible we see painting in a different way today but that's difficult to know. We're in the same condition. We wake up with the same body, the same apartment; the same husband or wife, we're commited, there's always this basic condition and you have to keep starting over.

The constant is a way to see the same thing as if it were new.

Yes. Every day is a new day.