The following article originally ran in the Woodstock Times' September 6, 2001 issue.



Chris Metze talks a lot about process. It’s key to his work, to the quiet changes his paintings revel in. Metze has been living in Woodstock for a couple of years now, watching the Millstream pass by the Broadview Road studio he’s created in his home. He says he likes the sense of art that permeates the town even though he’s not met many of the town’s artists.
He is happy to have his first solo show in the area at Kingston’s Coffey Gallery because he loves the look of the place, its long white walls. It has allowed him to show the changes in his work over time, the subtle riffles and eddies that mark its growth.
Metze is unlike most contemporary Woodstock painters in that he wasn’t drawn to town by either its reputation or its art schools. He’s never been a representational painter.
Born and raised in Montreal, Metze grew up in a family of painters, surrounded by other artists all struggling to make and raise families on the meager livings their career choices had left them. He went to art school in Vancouver and stayed on afterwards, rising in that vibrant Pacific Rim city’s vibrantly rising art scene.
He started to pick up his own style along the way, finding ways to parallel the works of the artists he admired, be they Richard Diebenkorn or Mark Rothko. He learned his own discipline, his own ways with acrylics, inks and pencil markings, his own way around the blankness of a new canvas. Finally, he decided he needed to find a new hometown that was further away from what he had come to know of his alma mater, Vancouver. So he moved to his girlfriend’s hometown – Woodstock.
“My paintings are inspired by the landscape,” Metze writes in his artist’s statement. “I strive to bring into balance the common abstract nature that allows all things to relate to each other, on a stage that is removed from specific meanings. Each painting is an opening for the viewer to peer into, a moment in time to be witnessed.”
In literal terms, they’re dominated by horizon lines that are further dominated by great bodies of paint. Yet whatever tensions the artist works with are presented calmly.
Metze says that the style of painting he’s found for himself, a contemporary abstract expressionism, as it were, has found him talking to painting peers in their forties and fifties and no one else his age, 28. Ditto the people buying his works, which are priced in the $1,000 to $4,000 range.
“The process of creating these works involves building a complex series of marks and then eliminating what is not important,” he continues in that statement, describing his methodology. “I work toward a state of clarification. At the same time, I am always searching for a new language to facilitate the viewer to enter the painting and to come away with a new awareness.”
Outside of the statement, which goes on to talk about the subject matter of painting that so many abstract expressionists have spent time speaking about, Metze discusses his working regime. He’ll go on a tear of several months, working on large numbers of paintings all in a series. Then he feels himself receding, repeating himself, reworking what he’s already worked. So he takes several weeks off, puts the brushes down. Goes away from the studio.
What accounts for the maturity of the painting? For one, Metze’s been working the same terrain now for years, putting thousands of hours into perfecting his methodology, his beloved process. He stops himself whenever he feels himself struggling to control the dialogue his works address. He tries to keep conflict and struggle out of the painting. He lets it flow.
“I have that sense that this is just a stepping stone to New York,” he notes, listing the steps he’s been taking to find better galleries in the markets that most to those dedicating themselves to art lives. “Everyone’s been very supportive...and yet I have so much more work to do.”
He remarks about what he terms the ‘classic cliche’... that modern artist need to be good business people as well as good painters and sculptors or what-have-yous.
What has he pulled from Woodstock, if not a fully-bloomed career?
One whole body of work is entitled Broadview. There’s a sense of mountain skies in the pieces. They burble as the Millstream does. They have a seasonal understanding, as we all tend to get here, that within the lush heat of summer lies a premonition of winter, that in the final rounds, it’s the browns and yellows of spring and autumn that predominate in our landscape and climate.
“This is a real good place to make work,” Metze says of his adopted hometown. “I want to continue painting here.”

Metze’s paintings at the Coffey Gallery, located at 330 Wall Street in Uptown Kingston, will run from September 1 to September 29. The gallery is open 11 to 5 p.m. daily, closed on Sunday and Monday. Call (845)339-6105.

© 2001 Paul Smart