Portraits by elbo | New Works by Laurie Marshall

<i>In partnership with the Heart of the City Festival</i>

One of western Canada’s premier outsider artists, Laurie Marshall, presents a series of his latest work in November 2005 at Gallery Gachet. Marshall’s work illustrates scenes of life which have a playful realism yet haunting undertones.

“The common thread among these portraits is that these people have had a lot of shit happen to them,” Marshall explains. He has a dual meaning. His subjects are the down-and-out people he sees on his daily walks through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which has one of the highest concentrations of addiction and prostitution in North America. He refers also to his artistic method: the portraits have been scraped and hacked with a knife and had paint dumped on and scraped off numerous times. Even the bases of his paintings – plywood and other material salvaged from the alley behind his Gallery Gachet studio – have been discarded as trash. Despite all this, his subjects come off with a sparkle in their eyes and a sense of humor. They are not young or beautiful or handsome anymore, but they have more stories in their faces.

“I have been drawing since I was a teenager. This first things I started drawing were faces; I especially enjoyed drawing the lined and wrinkled faces of native people that I found in books,” he explains. “Now, after many years of drawing and learning to paint, I am back to doing portraits again, and again of people who look like they’ve been bashed around some during their lives.”