Preston Pavlis: The Look of Truth
Preston Pavlis and I have made a habit of meeting on cold days. The first was a frigid Friday in May, back in 2021. By then, Preston was already a gifted and successful artist. He’d completed two years of school at MacEwan University (prior to the launch of their BFA program), and was planning a move to Halifax to finish his degree at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I reached out to him for a simple reason: I wanted to get to know him and his work.
The coffee shop where we’d planned to meet turned out to be closed, so we spent an hour or so walking around the University of Alberta campus talking about art. It turned out we had similar tastes and were drawn to similar kinds of work. We made loose plans for another chat, but we both got busy; before long, Preston had moved to Halifax.
I kept track of him and his work through the internet, as one does these days. Then in 2025, when I learned of You There, his exhibition at Contemporary Calgary, I reached out to congratulate him.
“Next time you are in Edmonton we should grab coffee,” I said. As timing would have it, we met three weeks later. Again, there was a chill in the air. We sat briefly on a patio at a Strathcona cafe until a table freed up inside.
We talked again about the art that was inspiring us—Preston had fallen hard for Peter Hujar’s photographs, which I also love. At the end of our conversation, I asked if he’d be open to being interviewed for COI. I wanted to talk more about his practice, about having success at a young age, and about working full time as an artist. He kindly said yes.
We met on January 2, 2026. By now, it should be obvious: the day was cold. But the conversation, thanks largely to Preston’s openness, was casual and expansive. I’m glad to get to share it with you here.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Zachary Ayotte [ZA]: When did you start painting?
Preston Pavlis [PP]: I started painting pretty much when I came to Edmonton—I’d never really done it when I was a kid. I used to draw, but I never imagined that I would be a visual artist. I was doing music at the time.
ZA: What made you switch or what made you pick up painting?
PP: I guess it was moving to Edmonton. I still had one more year of high school to do, and I moved right at the beginning of the summer, so I didn’t have any friends at that point, and I was in a new place, so I just started drawing again. And those early drawings, they were commercial stuff; I wanted to be a graphic designer. I had my little brand. It was this black rectangle that I would put on the edge of all of my designs. So that’s what I started with. I was doing pen and ink drawings. But eventually I just sort of discovered painting. I was like: I can mix absolutely any color. I can make anything out of it. That’s something I’d never really even thought of. Drawing, in some ways, was limited—in the sense of what you could do using markers. You’re using colors that already exist. Or doing charcoal or graphite, it’s just, like, monochrome. So painting was something I never even really considered doing, and it was totally crazy.
ZA: So it was the potential of colour or materials more than content?
PP: Yeah, at the beginning I would say.
ZA: Did you paint in high school when you were finishing or not until university?
PP: I took one art course in high school, which was nice.
ZA: What high school did you go to?
PP: J. Percy Page. And my high school art teacher, Mrs. Bate, was really nice. She just set me up in a corner, and was like: You just do whatever you want to do, which is pretty cool.
ZA: That’s the dream.
PP: It was interesting, because normally when you’re doing art programs you have to do all the intro classes and eventually you work toward being able to make your own work.
ZA: And so what did you do? Do you remember?
PP: I worked on one painting for the entire semester. It was of this nude woman with a skull for a head—which is totally weird. But some of my works later on kind of have similar, weird combinations of things. I was looking at a lot of references at the very beginning. From the very beginning, I was always doing combinations of different reference photos to make a seamless image in a way. A lot of them had collage elements.
ZA: I was just gonna say, given your interest in collage, that seems like a through line in your work. So then, what made you choose to go to MacEwan University and to keep going with painting?
PP: I don’t think I wanted to do anything else, really. I can’t even imagine what I would have gone into other than art.
ZA: And how did your relationship to your practice change once you were doing it in an academic setting?
PP: I don’t really know. I have always had an independent mind when it comes to my work. Even when I went to MacEwan, I was doing the assignments and stuff that they would give you early on, but I was also still doing my own work at home.
ZA: Was the work you were doing on your own stylistically different from the stuff you were doing in class?
PP: Yeah, a little bit different. In class you’d have to do certain assignments. But once we got into second year, I was able to start doing some of my own work, like big charcoal drawings on unstretched canvas. I actually don’t draw anymore. I just don’t do it. For a while I kept up a sketchbook and would draw out ideas for paintings first, but then I sort of moved into making these digital collages, which I just kept on my phone. Now I don’t even do that. I just paint from photos I take.
ZA: And so you’re painting from photographs you take now, but for a long time you were creating people who aren’t real. What changed?
PP: Partly, I think I kind of got bored of making those works. The change is actually very recent, only within the last year. So part of me still has an interest in some of the works that I was making earlier, and there’s part of me that still wants to work that way—working from imagination or invention or sort of like creating a scene or a person. But I think it’s becoming less and less of an interest for me now. I think it’s more challenging for me, more interesting, to try to paint from real life. Not painting directly from life, as in having people sit for me, although maybe eventually I’ll get to that.
ZA: It’s interesting to hear you say it that way. What’s the reason that you don’t paint directly from life?
PP: I think a lot of the stuff that I’m interested in painting now, a lot of it is landscape or objects, and my own relationship to painting is kind of weird in terms of scale. Like, if I’m painting a discarded mattress, I want it to be the size of what it is. So actually, I have this crazy idea—and I don’t even know how I would do it—of taking a giant canvas and just walking around the city until I find something. I’d go early in the morning and just find anything—an object, landscape, even a person—and do the painting on the spot there with this huge canvas. It’s totally impractical. But, a lot of my interest these days is coming from photographers. I don’t know. I just feel like they’re less caught up in stylistic things, which I feel like painting gets caught up in.
ZA: What kind of stylistic things?
PP: Painting is so much about flair and style.
ZA: It’s interesting, because the idea of going out into the city with a big canvas and approaching a person or a landscape is a very photographic technique; I’m thinking about a number of different street portrait photographers from over the decades. And it’s interesting to know that you are inspired by photography and adopting it as a technique or approach, as opposed to the aesthetic—like you’re not making photo-realistic images, right?
PP: Yeah. It’s almost like having a photographer’s sensibility as opposed to a painter’s sensibility. For me sometimes painting feels detached in a way. Maybe that’s sort of the way that I was making my older work. I was just creating stuff by imagining—kind of sequestered away inventing my own thing. Which I think is interesting, but part of me thinks it’s more of a challenge to put myself out there in another way—which I don’t even know if I’m fully there yet. I kind of dipped into it a little bit last year. I was in a show at Dalhousie Art Gallery, and I showed paintings of people that I had met on the street and asked if I could paint them. I don’t know about the success of that, but I was able to get a few done, which is really nice. I just took their pictures, and then went and painted them in my studio.
ZA: There’s such a vulnerability to do that, on both sides. I think there is a vulnerability to asking a stranger that question, and for somebody to say yes.
PP: Yeah, and I’m not entirely sure if it worked, or if I could even continue that way. It’s terrifying. I got rejected most of the time when I went out and spoke to people, which is totally fair and understandable, because I was just a stranger walking up to them. It is amazing that anybody said yes. Quite a few people did.
A lot of the works that I’ve been making since then—portraits of friends, family—feel a little bit more accessible, as opposed to painting total strangers.
ZA: It’s so interesting, I find that early in photographers’ careers, so much work is rooted in the familiar—friends, family, home—and then some people move away from it and some people don’t. Some people dig deeper into that community or that perspective.
PP: Yeah, and I don’t want to be stuck in a certain place because I’m afraid of something; I want to have the courage to break out a little bit.
ZA: I’ve talked to photographers who have asked to take portraits of strangers, and often the ones that have the most luck are people who have cameras that make them look legitimate—you know, like people who use a large-format camera or something. And it’s funny how much gear can become the thing that determines whether or not someone says yes, because these days, things like a huge camera or whatever are symbols that actually mean nothing about skill or intent.
PP: And I’m resolutely not a photographer; like, I don’t know anything about it other than having an appreciation for it. So when I’m painting from an image, the camera is an intermediary step that I am not comfortable with. When you’re saying, “photographers who’ve done it,” and have been successful, and they come out with these huge cameras, and then the photographs that they make—that’s the work. Whereas for me, it’s this intermediary step. I almost wish it didn’t exist, which maybe goes back to the idea of taking out a huge canvas and painting from life.
ZA: Before we started recording, you said you don’t like the idea of being watched while working, and working on a big canvas out in public is the ultimate opportunity to be observed while creating work. How do you feel about that?
PP: I think there’s something about performance there that I would be okay with, if I can figure out the logistics of doing it, which would be incredibly difficult at first. But if I could do that, and then sort of get over myself working in public, there is a performance, a spectacle to it that I think is actually inviting. Whereas, painting in a studio for me is very private, and because it feels private, the idea of somebody watching or being there doesn’t make sense.
ZA: Do you think it would change the way the work developed, or what it turned out to be?
PP: I think it would, but that’s part of it. It would have to be quicker. Even if I’m not painting a person, am I coming back the next day to work on the same piece? Maybe it’s a certain kind of thing where I go and start it in public, and then take it back to the studio and finish it.
“I don’t want to be stuck in a certain place because I’m afraid of something; I want to have the courage to break out a little bit.”
ZA: Where did the interest in photography come from? Or when did it come from?
PP: It’s been a few years now. It’s just from seeing certain photographers work.
ZA: What kind of work are you drawn to?
PP: Peter Hujar, Judith Joy Ross, Baldwin Lee, Sally Mann.
ZA: Very portrait heavy, though not exclusively. There’s also an aspect of the quotidian to all of their work. I think all of them have a sense of daily life in their work, even if the works are quite composed, which I think is common in your work too.
In a previous interview, you mentioned an interest in intimacy. And I think in many ways, the daily or the everyday is so intimate. And sometimes intimacy comes from this combination of the personal and the mundane. I get that from your work.
PP: I’m trying to think if intimacy is the thing that I’m going for now. I don’t really know. Part of me wants objectivity, if that’s the right word.
ZA: Can you expand on that? What do you mean when you say objectivity?
PP: I think my interest in painting is kind of in the idea of verisimilitude. I’m interested in the idea that you look at a painting of something, and then you have to double take—like it sort of becomes a different thing. It’s that illusion. A painting I had in my recent show in Calgary of my roommate and friend Jenny, lying on the floor—I wanted it to feel like Jenny, look like Jenny, so that you sort of feel her, or see her, even though it’s a painting. For me, it’s about trying to capture whatever the subject is exactly as it is, and then any kind of imaginative thing is on the viewer’s side. It’s not on my side. I don’t want to impose that. I just want to show something that’s interesting to me, whatever it is. And then whatever the viewer makes of it is their own.
ZA: One of the things that I noted in what you just said are the words “feel” and “see or look.” They aren’t always the same thing. I’m interested in the space between the two of them, because I think so much of your work does sort of feel like it’s finding the gap between feeling and seeing, and sometimes somethinglooks real because it feels real. I’m thinking about this Wolfgang Tillman’s photo, Astro Crusto, A; he talks about how when you look at it, he wants you to be able to smell it, to know what it smells like. It feels a bit like what you are talking about.
PP: Yeah, and that’s sort of the difference between photography and painting. For me, a photograph is a record of something in the world. And, of course, there are certain things you can do to manipulate the image, like the way you crop it or scale it. Or with Wolfgang Tillmans’s work, taking a small moment and then making it extra large. But with painting, because it’s so free, you’re totally free to manipulate colour, scale, and you can do anything with it.
ZA: Even how you play with the flatness of a surface. Like, you have some works where you are playing with the two dimensionality of a painting, and allowing some things to have depth and some things to feel as if they have been flattened in a way that I think is really interesting.
PP: Yeah, I’m almost more interested in being restrictive about it.
ZA: What do you mean? That’s so interesting. Part of the reason I’m asking is because your work also brings paintings off the wall and incorporates fabric, making people think about both sides of a work. And so there is something expansive about the way you’re thinking about the medium too. And so I’m curious about that division.
PP: I feel like maybe one part has to be restrictive so that the other can be more open.
ZA: That’s fascinating, because traditionally, it is the reverse, right? One side is hidden and bound and the other side is the one that’s meant to be seen.
PP: Yeah, and maybe that goes into my decision to hand sew everything. It’s like there needs to be some punishment, or some kind of rigorous action.
ZA: One of the things that I was struck by about the collage side of your works is that there’s also an aspect of deconstruction to them—because a lot of your fabrics are things that have been taken apart. I read that you love seam pulling?
PP: Seam ripping.
ZA: Right, thank you—which seems to also reference this double-sidedness of material. I was thinking about how in the act of exposing the things that are hidden—giving both equal attention and equal space in a gallery—there is this way that you’re kind of undoing a dynamic that exists across everything, where one thing thrives because another thing suffers or is hidden. And it’s beautiful to see that explored through the form of the work.
PP: I don’t know if I’ve really reached an equilibrium between both sides yet. Sometimes I do feel like they’re pretty disparate in certain ways. I guess that’s still what I’m trying to work on—having both sides be equal, which I don’t know if they are at this point. But yeah, they are very separate. They do overlap a little bit in certain works—like some of them will have a border—but yeah, they are separate but still part of the same object. I’m trying to figure out how to make that work.
ZA: I’m excited to see where it goes. Can we talk about the quilted side and the collaged fabric? When did that start to make its way into your work?
PP: Pretty early on. I guess some of my first resolved works were on unstretched canvas. Some of those had embroidered elements sewn into them. So that was very early on. And then one day I just sort of thought: What if I did a quilt on the back. And in some of those early works, the quilts are pretty rudimentary—I wasn’t really thinking about composition too much. Some of them were just a single fabric over the entire back. But the more I did it, I guess I just started to think more about it being its own thing.
ZA: It’s interesting that both sides are drawing on photography or photographic practices—and not that collage has to be photo-based, but it often is—and how that’s influencing both sides of the work.
PP: In one of the works in my show in Calgary, there was a whole dress that I wouldn’t cut up. I’d sew the entire dress on it. So I don’t really know how I think about them. If I think about them as abstract or material.
ZA: How often are the fabrics you use pieces of clothing?
PP: I would say, like, 80 percent.
ZA: That was the feeling that I got. And there is something about how hollow clothing being stitched together on the other side of figurative work can feel—it’s almost haunting.
PP: Yeah, that’s interesting. Everything is second-hand pretty much, some of the clothing is mine or my friends’, but the majority is just stuff that I find.
ZA: When you say find, do you mean like thrifted?
PP: Yeah. And it’s interesting to me that some of the things have had their own life before, which I don’t know about. It’s also interesting to see the craft of how certain things are made. So, when looking at a quilt that I’ve done, you have to sort out the stitches that I’ve put in versus stitches that are already there.
ZA: To some degree, work that deals with the everyday or the mundane has traditionally been gendered—as women’s work. And there is this way that sewing and stitching and working with fabric can have the same quality. I’m curious about the way that queerness works into the way you’re thinking about that work—if you are thinking about expanding that space.
PP: Yeah, I don’t think it’s something that I really think about. I think those things oftentimes are best when they just sort of exist on their own. I don’t think that’s something that I can dictate or try to force through the work or even really think about without tripping over myself in a way. If those things appear in the work, it’s just because it’s coming from me. But it’s not something I really think about.
ZA: That’s great. To be honest, I didn’t want to ask that question, and I don’t really care about it in an explicit way, but it came up in another interview you gave, and so I was like, I wonder if this is something he wants to talk about? And one of the things that I find so interesting about your work is that it clearly is grounded in identity, in the sense that you’re interested in human identity, but I don’t think it’s explicitly about “capital I” identity or identity-based issues. I think your work feels more drawn from life in a way that just manages to incorporate or contain those subjects, and is just grounded in what you’re interested in.
PP: I would say so, yeah. I feel like the work of artists I like the most, or find most interesting, can deal with certain aspects of life, but they do it almost without thinking about it. It’s just part of the work because it’s part of life. Their work doesn’t feel on-the-nose about it, but really searching and grounded in reality.
ZA: It’s interesting, too, because it is a level of privilege, right? White male artists have been doing that for generations. And I think for anybody who doesn’t fall into that category, the expectation to make art specifically about one part of their identity, or issues related to one part of their identity, is so high and can dictate anything from who gets representation to who ends up getting funding.
PP: Yeah, I’ll say that I feel like there is a lot of pressure to do that. I feel like I maybe succumbed to that a little bit earlier on. But nowadays I just kind of don’t even think about it, just to protect myself in a way.
ZA: Can you talk about that—about the pressure to do it and about succumbing to it early on?
PP: Maybe that just comes from going to art school. A lot of those things just come up naturally in classes and art history critiques. I mean, that’s certainly not something that I was aware of before I went to art school, just making art in my bedroom. I wasn’t thinking about any of that.
ZA: It’s funny, a number of people tried to impose a queerness label on my work for so long, and I was just like, I just don’t relate to this. I know where this is coming from, but I don’t care about it. To the point that it made me stop wanting to make work. Basically, I was like: If this is the vein that I’m being shoved into, then it just isn’t interesting to me. So I find that I relate to what you’re talking about, I guess is what I’m trying to say.
I’m curious about what drew you to everyday life as a subject.
PP: I don’t really know. I have to admit, seeing the work of other artists and seeing how they can work from everyday life, that sort of made me wonder if I could do it, if my life was interesting enough—which I don’t really know that it is. But that’s kind of the challenge, to focus in on stuff that I ordinarily wouldn’t even pay attention to. But then seeing if I can make art out of it.
ZA: It’s beautiful. Do you know Moyra Davey? I think about her work and her capacity to focus on the most simple details from within her house and find ways to turn them into work. I just find it so remarkable.
One of the other things I’m interested in is the materiality of your work and about the way that work changes over time. You’ve talked in the past about how you don’t think work has to exist forever, and how the passage of time and the way that materials are impacted by time and by an environment change it. I wonder if you could talk about that.
PP: Yeah, I feel like that’s something that I don’t have any control over. Maybe I do to some degree; there are certain paintings that I’ve made using certain substrates that, looking back, I’m like: I should not have done that. So there are certain things that I can do to make the work more sturdy, but the passage of time, you don’t have control over it.
ZA: But it is one of those things that in the arts, and especially in museum spaces, people work so hard to not let works age. And I’m curious—especially because you’re focusing on parts of the world around you that will also inherently change with time—if you are thinking about the aging of a work as a part of it?
PP: I guess maybe I wonder what they will look like in time.
ZA: Part of the reason I’m asking is because if change over time is part of a work, then it’s never finished, right? If your intention is for a work to respond to sunlight, to air, to whatever, then it will always be in a state of flux, and it does have more of a life in that way.
PP: I almost feel like I have a responsibility to my work when I’m working on it, but once it’s away from me, I kind of relinquish responsibility. My works are often pretty big, and I sometimes wonder who would even take on the responsibility of owning one. Even when I have the works in my possession and I’m working on them, I’m really not super precious in certain ways. But once a work goes to a show or something, I kind of just take it out of my head.
ZA: It’s interesting; one of the differences between painting and photography is that, with photography, you usually retain that negative, so you can linger on images for too long. Whereas the painting: if it’s gone, it’s gone.
PP: Yeah.
ZA: Can we talk a bit about scale? I’m wondering what draws you working at a large scale?
PP: It’s honestly something that I’ve done from very early on. I feel like the relationship that I have with making art is just with my body. I guess a larger scale just comes easier to me. I’ve done a few smaller scale—like very small—works. I find mid-scale the hardest. It feels the most abstract in some way. Large scale, you’re kind of like in it, and you have a relationship to it.
ZA: It has this presence, right?
PP: Yeah, small scale work is intimate in a certain way. I find a lot of small work is very intentional, like, intentionally small—which I don’t know if I relate to that impulse so much. Maybe the opposite is also true—a lot of large work is intentionally large. I don’t think that’s the same for me; it’s something I don’t really think about too much. I guess it goes back to my totally not-strict rule of: If something is a certain size, it has to be like that in the painting—even though, interestingly, most of my figures are usually larger than life.
ZA: They do have such a presence in a space at that scale, right? In the same way that you were talking about Tillmans blowing up an intimate image into something big, I think so many of your figurative paintings that are big are of small moments or quiet moments, and they are given a sort of loudness at that size.
PP: A lot of it really is unintentional. I think it goes back to the fact that I don’t draw so I’m trying to draw a person or whatever, I just can’t make them the right size. I mess it up, and they’re extremely tiny, or what usually happens is they end up being too big. So, the painting of my mom in the show in Calgary—I really tried super hard to get her fully in there, but her feet got cut off, which is annoying, because she’s wearing these sandals, and she has pink toenails, and that’s such an interesting aspect of her personality, which I just couldn’t get in the painting because I couldn’t fit it. In the past, I’ve sewn on extra canvas. But then it just becomes way too big.
ZA: That’s very photographic—having to cut things off at the edge of the frame. It comes back to this idea of restraint in a way, or constraint.
PP: That makes me think of Judith Roy Ross; when she frames an image she rarely has the full person there. Often knees up, or they’re very close profile. Her framing is very intentional. The compositions are totally unique to her.
ZA: And I think there’s something in her works where you really get a sense of how close she probably is to the subject. I mean physically in space—but also you get the sense that they’re strangers but that they’ve come to an agreement, they’ve come to an understanding. And I think, especially with your figurative paintings that are from life and that are of people in your life, I do think you get that intimate relationship, or that personal relationship, from both the scale and the framing or the cropping.
In a previous interview you talked about painting occupying two spaces at once, saying: “This is where collage enters the frame for me, serving as a bridge between the painted imagery and the real tactile world that the viewer inhabits.”
I get the sense, at least from what you said, that—and maybe this gets back to what you’re talking about with sight and feeling—the materiality of the work and the world that the viewer inhabits, that there is this space between the two of them, and that they kind of overlap, and the way that they overlap is where the work exists.
PP: I guess that’s the whole thing about art in general for me—the idea that it’s about reality, but it’s made up at the same time. It makes me think of the famous Velázquez painting, Portrait of Juan de Pareja, where, when people first saw that painting, they said: Everything else looks like painting but this looks like truth. Because the way that he painted it was so lifelike, it was so immediate, that you had to do that kind of double take—like, is this really him? So that’s maybe my goal. We’ll see if I get there.
ZA: I was just listening to an interview with Jesse Buckley about Hamnet, and she was talking about how, for her, the purpose of art is to try and find the edges of this kind of truth—even if we just trace the edge of this thing—this kind of truth that we never can fully comprehend. It feels like that’s a bit of what you’re saying.
I’m curious, especially since you’re going into the studio space after a bit of a break, what you’re thinking about now, or what you’re interested in working toward.
PP: For a while, after I opened my show in Calgary, I was walking around taking pictures. So I have a bunch of pictures of different things that I want to start painting. A lot of very disparate stuff—more pictures of friends, more landscape. Some architecture, more objects. I have a sort of thread in my head of how they’ll be connected. It’s just a matter of getting started.
ZA: How are you thinking about working beyond portraiture—with landscapes and architecture?
PP: The only thing I could really say is that having had the opportunity this winter to see Peter Hujar’s prints in person—I mean, he was the master of being able to take a photo of anything and for it to still be relevant to other images.
ZA: Can we talk about money?
PP: Money? Yeah.
ZA: You are just making a living from painting, correct?
PP: For now.
ZA: That feels like a big choice for a Canadian artist?
PP: This might be a tricky subject.
ZA: We don’t have to talk about it.
PP: I’m down to talk about it. I just don’t know if I’m gonna be able to have a good opinion on it.
ZA: Oh, I’m not looking for an opinion. More than anything, I find that the business side, the economic side of art, is always so opaque, and I’m game to talk about it if other people are.
PP: I think, if anything, in my case, I’ve been extremely lucky early on, which is not the case for a lot of artists. I haven’t had a normal job in four years. So that’s pretty unusual, and I’d be foolish to think that it will last forever. So part of me wonders: If I have to get a job, what am I going to do? And I’m almost at that point right now.
There’s a whole other world of talking about being with a commercial gallery and even the idea of having a work be sold. I don’t know, it’s kind of oil and water. You have to think about both, but not at the same time.
ZA: Can you talk about the choice to be represented by a commercial gallery?
PP: It happened very early. I did not expect it at all. My gallery, Bradley Ertaskiran, saw my work at Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto when I won the BMO 1st Art Prize for Alberta in 2019. And then they reached out to me, just asking for pictures of more work. Eventually, they wanted to see work in person, so I sent them work in person, and they showed some of my work at a fair, and it kind of just went on from there. Eventually I had my first show with them, and then they asked to represent me. I said yes. I was terrified from the very beginning because I didn’t know anything about it. I have to say they’ve been very good, very supportive. I had a lot of fears going into it about going too fast. And there have been things, like dealing with money in certain ways, that I had no idea about—like, taxes, like nobody tells you about taxes doing art. I feel I have a decent handle on it now, but everything still feels precarious all the time.
ZA: Does it change the way you think about making work, or think about your relationship to being in the studio?
PP: I guess it does a little bit. I’m kind of at a point now where I’m like: How am I gonna get the materials now to make a whole new body of work if I don’t sell anything?. Because making art is very expensive, and I make pretty big work using a lot of different things. It’s the canvas, the gesso, the paint—also the fabric, all the sewing materials, metal bars that I put in my paintings. There’s a lot that goes into each one. So, yeah, that’s kind of where my head is at right now.
ZA: If you can’t afford those materials, does it change the work you make?
PP: I haven’t got there yet, so we’ll see.
ZA: Thank you for being so candid. I find the financial side of art endlessly fascinating, and especially in Canada, where there just is not a huge commercial market, it’s even more relevant.
I’m interested to see what work you make next, given that. It does seem like you’re in a sort of state of evolution—maybe that’s too strong a word—but it feels like you’re thinking about what comes next.
Can I ask how you keep the art world out of your head?
PP: It’s a daily battle.
ZA: You seem to be good at it, at least from the outside. It sounds like you’ve consistently resisted pushes to work in a certain way.
PP: Maybe that’s true. Yeah, I don’t really know if I can say that myself, but it is a difficult thing—or something that I have to be aware of, especially given the fact that I am working in a commercial setting some of the time. But yeah, the more I do it, the more I sort of realize the art world is just way too complicated or convoluted or just beside the point. It has nothing to do with art at all, really. So as an artist, I have to focus on the art. The art world, which is like a social environment a lot of the time, or an economic mess—it’s hard. I don’t know how other people have done it.
ZA: It seems like you have trust in your own creative impulses.
PP: I actually wonder how other artists deal with self doubt on a daily basis, because sometimes it’s very crippling for me.
ZA: Oh wow. In what way?
PP: Just like the physical act of making work. Painting is very difficult for some reason, and a lot of it is like a mental thing. It’s just me in my head trying to convince myself that I can do it. I just wonder what other artists experience, or how they experience that if they do at all. I feel like there are people who are a lot more trusting of their own abilities. I’m not yet, but I have hope that I will be.
Preston Pavlis (b. 1999, Loma Linda, United States) currently lives in Halifax, Canada. Pavlis received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), MOCA Toronto, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Stridge Gallery (Calgary), Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal), Half Gallery (New York), Guts Gallery (London), the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and Spurs Gallery (Beijing), and Contemporary Calgary. His work is in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), The Wedge Collection (Toronto), the X Museum (Beijing), and is held in private collections throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. He is represented by Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal)