| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Trained primarily at the Alberta College of Art + Design (ACAD) and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), Curtis Cutshaw is best known for his digitally-modulated “dowsing” drawings created during prairie walkabouts.
The Calgary native grew his skills through a summer residency in painting at Red Deer College (1986), time at NSCAD and the New York Loft Program (1988), a Diploma in Painting with Distinction at ACAD (1989), and a prestigious summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (1989). A stay at the International Artist Workshop in Emma Lake, Saskatchewan (2001) furthered his development.
While for much of his early career Cutshaw was known as a painter, it’s through drawing that he achieved some of his greatest notoriety, partly due to a work ethic bordering on obsessive. In one two-year period of many eight-hour days, he produced 15,000 renderings using his dowsing rod method, which he adapted from his father’s and grandfather’s use of L-shaped brass rods as antennae alleged to locate underground water. Cutshaw says that to dowse his drawings, he walks his father’s land north of Edmonton while holding one rod with pens tied angling from it above sheets of paper in his other hand. His every step shakes each hand to produce marks. He compares his tools to a seismograph, saying he trusts “the brain in my wrist to guide my hand and allow myself the freedom and looseness to find the form.” After drafting, he scans, colour-inverts, and prints his dowsings to produce warbly, DNA-like patterns of intense colour. While possessing some Canadian Plasticien or Russian Constructivist elements, Cutshaw’s work continues its unique development through birch wood tile paintings scratched, rubbed, and distressed into broken images.
Cutshaw’s commendations include the Laura Mae Stillings Award (1989) and the Alberta Award (1990). Various collections such as Cenovus Energy, Encana Corporation, and Mount Royal University house Cutshaw’s work, and his exhibitions have met audiences in Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Brooklyn, and Wiiden, Switzerland among other cities.
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