Speakers: Francisco-Fernando Granados in conversation with Lesley Finlayson and Gordon Trick
Topic: observation/mark-making/composition: Dialogues in Printmaking and Drawing
Date: Thursday, July 6, 2023
Time: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm ET via Zoom
Structure: Online 45min talk, 15min Q&A
In this Print Speak session, artists Francisco-Fernando Granados, Lesley Finlayson, and Gordon Trick will discuss their work through connections and intersections between printmaking and drawing. Throughout their individual practices, these connections involve different questions of embodied translation of experiences of space. Granados traces his foundational understanding of both of these key mediums in his practice to his education in Trick and Finlayson’s classrooms at the Langara College Fine Arts Program during the mid-2000’s. His exhibition with a difference, resulting from his recent yearlong residency at Open Studio, is showing in the OS Main Gallery from June 9-July 22, 2023.
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Francisco-Fernando Granados was born in Guatemala and lives in Toronto, Dish With One Spoon Territory. Since 2005, his practice has traced his movement from convention refugee to critical citizen, using abstraction performatively, site-specifically, and relationally to create projects that challenge the stability of practices of recognition. His work has developed from the intersection of visual arts training, working in performance through artist-run spaces, studies in queer and feminist theory, and early activism as a peer support worker with immigrant and refugee communities. This layering of experiences has trained his intuitions to seek site-responsive approaches, alternative forms of distribution, and the weaving of lyrical and critical propositions. His exhibition project ‘who claims abstraction?’ is currently on view at Simon Fraser University Galleries in Vancouver. An accompanying book created with SFU and Publication Studio Vancouver, titled ‘who claims abstraction (with a difference)?’ will be released in July 2023.
Gordon Trick was born and raised on the prairies during the 1950’s and ‘60’s, when W.O. Mitchell’s classic novel ‘Who Has Seen the Wind?’ was still new to Canadian literature, and the future artist illustrator of the 1975 edition, William Kurelek, lived a few miles down the road from his family’s farm. After being dissuaded from pursuing a career in art as he finished high school, Gordon blundered about in Earth Sciences at the University of Manitoba for two years, before doing what many Canadian youth did at the time – dropping out and hitting ‘The Road’ to see Canada. In 1973 he began taking figure drawing classes at night in Edmonton with the delightfully eccentric artist Peter Lewis, followed by a move to Calgary in 1975.
His serious pursuit of studies in art at the University of Calgary began, finally, culminating in a Master of Fine Arts degree with a double major in Printmaking and Drawing, during which time he met Lesley Finlayson in the MFA program. The two closely related media of drawing and printmaking combined with some of the concepts retained from his brief education in geology influenced his future processes and directions in art. Gordon taught Drawing and Printmaking courses at Langara College in Vancouver from 1989 until 2016, which is where he met Francisco-Fernando Granados. He is a double past-president of Malaspina Printmakers Society in Vancouver, and he has exhibited locally, nationally and internationally for over three decades.
Lesley Finlayson completed her BA (Honours) degree in Drawing and Painting at the Glasgow School of Art from 1978-82, followed by a post-grad year at the Cypress College of Art in Pathos. In 1987 she moved to Canada to complete an MFA in Drawing at the University of Calgary. She taught advanced drawing and painting classes at Langara College in Vancouver for 23 years. She resides in Victoria, BC and continues her studio practice there.