“Experimentation, not technical skill, is at the core of creativit y,” says Jeff Molloy, adamantly. “In the art of creation, thought is the enemy. Artists should be explorers, and the world they live in should be a place without rules or boundaries.” We are perched on a stack of cardboard in Molloy’s rustic studio in the woods on Gabriola Island. Part gallery, part workshop, it is stuffed with canvasses, old blankets, wooden relics, tools, paint cans, and a collection of the artist’s Canadiana-inspired paintings and sculptures, all executed in his instantly recognizable style. Molloy is an encaustic artist: he uses an ancient technique of mixing hot beeswax into pigments and fixing them on the canvas, like an inlay, with heat. It’s cool out, and Molloy is wearing his trademark paint-splattered red plaid shirt and warm woollen pants. His long, narrow face is topped by another of his trademarks, a jaunty beret. His habitual broad smile is, however, temporarily absent as he expounds on his theme, absentmindedly tapping a rapid drumbeat on his work table with his left hand. “When you work as an artist,” he concludes emphatically, “you have to completely let go of intention or expectation.”
Molloy repeats this mantra daily in what has become a highly successful art career since graduating from the Victoria College of Art in 1999. His evocative pieces hang in galleries and homes across the country. Awards have started piling up. CBC Radio host Shelagh Rogers, an art aficionado and collector of Molloy’s works, describes him as “one of the most original artists at work in Canada today.” CULTURAL ICONS EVOKE EMOTION Molloy is fascinated with Canadian culture and history, seeing cultural artifacts like flags and canoes as powerful vehicles for evoking emotional responses. “Taking a well-known symbol and recreating it as art, making people re-examine it — that really intrigues me,” he says. Employing Canadian cultural emblems — canoes and paddles, moose and bison, old barns and farm gates, hockey sweaters and Hudson’s Bay Company blankets — Molloy tells stories of the country’s history in rugged, threedimensional imagery. Worn blankets become outsized canvasses draped in folds from worn antique yokes or paddles, then repainted with HBC colours. Old hockey sweaters also become
Left: Canadian artist Jeff Molloy in his Gabriola studio. Above, left to right: The Blanket, 38 x 86 inches. Mixed Media/Encaustic on Panel. Metis Spirit, 38 x 86 inches. Mixed Media/Encaustic Assemblage. Vanishing Buffalo, 48 x 60 inches. Mixed Media/Encaustic Assemblage.
57