Relics of Prester John

Brian Grison

February 19 to March 20, 2010

Grison's drawings are exhibited in an apparent condition of incompletion to emphasize two conditions of art that are always present: its conceptual transience and its ephemeral existence. While recalling memories of the artist's life, the drawings imagine relics of the mythic ruler of a medieval kingdom.

Brian Grison is a graduate of the Art Department of Central Technical High School. He has undergraduate degrees in Art History and Visual Art from the University of Victoria and a Masters in Art History from Carleton University. After living in Mexico from 1967 to 1969, Grison taught at Central Technical High School for seven years, as well as at York University in 1975. Since then he has taught at universities, art colleges and community colleges in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. Since his first exhibition in 1969, he has participated in solo and group exhibitions at public and artist-run galleries in Ontario, British Columbia, New York, Paris and Belgrade. Grison's drawings are in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Surrey Art Gallery, Art Bank and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Since 2004, he has published articles in various Canadian and American art periodicals.

Relics of Prester John; An Introduction

Prester John is the threatening anti-hero “other” in the boys’ adventure novel, Prester John, written by the English author, John Buchan, in 1910. I read the book when I was about twelve years old. Until the mid 1970s I did not know that Prester John is/was an historic, albeit fictional, twelfth-century person, the ruler of a lost Christian kingdom, and that until the nineteenth century he had been sought by explorers, missionaries, diplomats and mercenaries in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia. In fact, an Italian traveler in the Middle East invented Prester John in a letter he wrote to friends back home. Perhaps to reverse the joke, the friends published the letter, and the several hundred-year old legend of Prester John and his lost kingdom was born.

In the background of these drawings Prester John (or Priest John), as a personae standing in for the artist, is the facilitator of an endless imaginary world of polished, open-ended and apparently meaningless doodles. The drawings are either real or false biographic or cultural relics, depending on how one relates to the meaning of the real in art, memory and the imagination. The frightening charismatic “other” created by John Buchan is a metaphor of the rich and sometimes dangerous interplay between the real and false that both disrupts and liberates the psyche of the young artist. This condition of cultural insecurity is the most appropriate condition of the serious contemporary artist.

Because my discovery of history, religion, science and fiction was mostly though books, these drawings resemble illustrations that have been leafed through by generations of doodlers of marginalia. The marginalia represents the constant shift between the mundane and imaginary that distracts the viewer/reader, as well as the artist, from the concentration required for observation, perception, insight and production. In this sense the drawings are not complete, and can never be complete.

I am still intrigued by the unique attributes of the many different drawing media. For this reason, in Relics of Prester John each medium functions distinctly from the others, except graphically. Like the different base materials and elements of alchemy, the distinct areas or passages of graphite, ink, gouache, etc. represent the impossibility of finding the correct compound or the perfect meaning. There are no personal truths beyond those we briefly compose into temporary existence.

– Brian Grison