SHAYNE DARK

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IRONWOOD MAN

GARY MICHAEL DAULT

Shayne Dark's On Fire

To Aug. 3 at the Edward Day Gallery, 952 Queen Street West. 416-921-6540.

Artist Shayne Dark figures he leads a pretty nice life, and it'd be hard to disagree. He gets up in the morning, he says, and goes out walking in the woods near his home at Fourteen Island Lake, near Sydenham, north of Kingston, looking for ironwood trees. When he finds them, he brings them back to his studio to turn them into sculpture. "It's such a pleasure," he tells me. "I'm very blessed."

Dark is talking on the phone from the Edward Day Gallery, where he's installing his exhibition, Here and Gone. It's made up of three large works, each consisting of some inventive arrangement of his beloved ironwood trees. Blizzard is a dazzling piece involving what appear to be hundreds of white branches bursting out in all directions from a common socket-like centre-point high on the gallery wall. "I got the idea for it while driving in a snowstorm," Dark says. "You know how the show seems to be coming right at you?"

Descent is a spectacular deep-blue waterfall made of 150-year-old rural fencing. The third piece, On Fire (at right), is a gathering of ironwood branches 16 feet high, painted deep red and lashed together around the belt-line by what Dark calls a "conduit," a wrapped metal wire used in industrial lighting.

I suppose I shouldn't be referring to these tree parts as branches. Dark says he uses doesn't use branches. Nor limbs. Only what he refers to as "the heart of the tree." The ironwood, he says, is a "first-growth scrub tree" -- its trunk never gets much thicker than six to eight inches in diameter. "And most of the wood I use is already dead," Dark says, so he doesn't cut much. He gathers, rather.

Also, it's misleading to talk about his "painting" the trees. He does paint them, though only after he peels them, ages them and sands them ("the idea comes in a flash," he says, "and the rest is sanding"). But they don't look painted. Rather, his surfaces end up coloured with a dry, matte finish that is so optically intense, so deep and saturated, that it actually looks as if he has somehow rolled the wood in a coloured powder of some kind. Regardless of the image each work may call to mind -- Blizzard is a horizontal snowstorm, Descent is waterfall-like, and On Fire can be seen as flames of a fire leaping upwards (being both free-standing and wrapped, it also suggests a rudimentary, tepee-like shelter) -- much of the meaning of Dark's three works in Here and Gone is derived from their astonishing colour.

I ask about the strange, saturated hues he produces. It's the kind of colour I've seen only a couple of times before, in certain sculptures by international art-star Anish Kapoor, for example, and as International Klein Blue, an eye-searing, powdery blue favoured by (and indeed copyrighted by) the late French bad-boy artist Yves Klein.

"I use theatre paint," Dark says. It turns out he has worked as a set designer in New York and Los Angeles, and has even laboured in the realms of hi-definition TV research, involving himself in experiments in blue-screen and green-screen techniques and all that arcana. "Theatre paint," Dark explains, "absorbs light instead of reflecting it. It's like blotting paper. There's no sheen to reflect back to the audience. It's colour as flat as you can make it."