Max Wade

Max Wade’s canvases all begin from his sketchbook drawings. These impressions are rooted in reality, taken from scenes from his travels and day-to-day life. He is attracted to ‘overlooked’ or ‘mundane’ objects and scenes; dinner plates on a dresser, stacked pool chairs, waiting rooms. He absorbs this visual information and simplifies the view into marks on the page. Once in the studio, he uses these drawings, working from the books directly and translating the information he has gathered to large-scale canvases. Beginning with a charcoal sketch, he then applies paint quickly and expressively, drawing morphed shapes from the representational sketches into abstracted forms, often rotating the canvas as he goes. Negative space is reversed and becomes positive. Motifs begin to appear and repeat. Plates on a dresser become fins, or scales. Wade works on multiple canvases over many months, stacking and piling them against the studio wall, pulling them out to rework paintings with new scenes or colours from older paintings. The result is a heavily textured surface with thickly applied layers of paint.