In discussion with Victor Bennett Forbes, publisher of Fine Art Magazine, Sun Storm Press, New York, January 2007. Fine Art Magazine

VF: What are your early influences, both in childhood and artistically?

DGC: I’m thinking of Picasso, Van Gogh, Rodin, that captured me early on, but so many other great, fascinating artists of vision have caught me in their webs of ideas through the years, usually through books. Books, the words and images they held were the main influence on me. To turn a page and discover a word, or an image, was everything. Museums and galleries were a discovery of later years. Why these three artists? Picasso’s example made the shy artist in me seek to be brave and explore my own ego, my humanity, Van Gogh whispered from the past that art is best produced in earnest, from one’s heart, and that absolutely anything, even an old worn shoe, could be made beautiful, and Rodin put before my inexperienced eyes the proof that artists, that people, can be Gods, giving life to any material, even stone. How could I not desire to learn more about all of that? Other well known artists that have had meaning for me are from varying fields. They are: Frank Lloyd Wright, Sergio Leone, Hemingway, Stanley Kubrick, Beethoven, William Turner, John Huston, T.S. Eliot, Jim Morrison, Hugh MacLennan, H.G. Wells, Steve McQueen, Tom Thomson and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I was lucky enough to meet one of them. Hugh MacLennan occasionally stumbled upon me at his office door in the Concordia University catacombs. It appeared as though no one knew where to find him, so he had time to talk. Though an old man by then, in the 80’s, he was very sharp. His knowledge of people was so great, he certainly knew more about me than I did, decoding my entire ancestral background and purpose in life from my haircut and shoes. He inspired me to think about people and of the people that came before them, and of those before them. Also, he told me that a creative life was very hard work, as it had been for him.

Photography was important to me young and I did a great deal of it. It began with an old flip-top camera I found in a basement storage space, in my grandfather’s World War II ammunition boxes including some old gas masks. There began my love for black and white images. Photography led me to the shores of the St. Lawrence River, its white swirling rapids, its crushing momentum. I’ve always been in awe of it and returned to it often to think, to remember who I was in moments less clear. Two images etched in my memory that had impact were Sept-Iles in summer and Sept-Iles in winter. As a toddler, I grew up there. It was, in my child’s eyes, empty like a desert. In summer, it was covered in sand and wild bushes, some of them blueberry; in winter, covered meters-thick with snow, white everywhere, nearly over the top of the houses. It was dramatic and not at all like urban Montreal where I now live. Those years, always in the expansive outdoors, opened my eyes just a little wider.

VF: What prompts you to pick up a paint brush and paint with such emotion?

DGC: First, nothing could please me more than association of the word “emotion” to my works. Thanks for that. It must have begun when very young, because I always drew and then painted. I remember being very troubled by the feeling of loss toward my father as he moved away after the divorce of my parents. ... so early I learned that art and imagination was a way to heal. Art was powerful. Art has been about the search for happiness and identity, either personal or in the larger cultural context. I love the happiness it can bring to others, and I have always, even very young, enjoyed seeing someone’s face light up when looking for the first time at a new artwork, either with recognition of what was drawn or just simple enjoyment of the art. I used to do drawings or paintings and just give them to people. Now, I’ve painted many commissioned works of “loved ones”, of special moments and events, or even of people’s homes, coincidentally making use of knowledge of architectural rendering.

In later years, I was lucky to be influenced by a wonderful Canadian landscape artist, named Bruce Le Dain, Past President of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. We spent so many hours exchanging on art, devising a multitude of projects and debating aspects of art. He coached me, invited me along to painting trips, introduced me to other wonderful artists here in Quebec, such as Guy Légaré, an amazing colourist who paints masterpieces of the Parc du Bic area, Helmut Gransow, renowned for his rolling, gray-sky landscapes, and Stuart Main, who can literally paint a barn and a perfect herd of grazing cows in just one stroke, or almost…with dry-brush at that. Le Dain used to say he never met an artist he didn’t like; they are “a special brand of people”. I’ve learned that’s true. He lost his fight to cancer a few years ago and I’ve missed him terribly. Ten years earlier he had begun this fight, had won it at least temporarily though it left him seriously disfigured, with half his jaw having to be removed. Still, afterwards, no one who encountered him would come away unmoved by his contagious enthusiasm for life and most of all that art was a “special gift”, both for those that create it and those who appreciate and support it. “Hang paintings on your wall,” I recall Bruce saying, “and over time they become close friends that look back at you, uplifting your spirit each day.” His example crystallized how much painting had been a catalyst for good in my own life and for those around me. Bruce never said this precisely, but I know he thought painting, when executed with heart, to be a divine task with a purpose beyond its aesthetic and material qualities.

When I sit before a blank canvas, whatever has brought me there, to that moment in time, my intention is to do something meaningful, not only to make something pretty or correct. It is for me all about understanding the subject and attempting to put down on canvas that understanding, my empathy for it, that experience of it, immediately. I am not, when in that mode, preoccupied with how the work will be viewed afterwards. The purpose is all, selfishly, for my own understanding. My paintings are studies, reflective reporting on a scene or a subject, with no pretension or intention of being finished works. I am not concerned either with the carrying over of a style or of generating an identifiable brushstroke from painting to painting, but prefer the surprise at each endeavour. It has its price; I am a ghost-painter. Perhaps in time, I will mature on that point, or fall into a style, a controlled finish stroke that can be branded Coupal. Making me present in paintings, forgiving the occasional self-portrait exercise, has not been my goal and is not my search. If you will, a poem is written each time differently, its rhythm, its form suits its subject or mood. Its auteur can still be its binding spirit, if need be, present or legible between the lines, but preferably not, in my opinion, to be found in the words themselves nor the rhymes. The resulting work, following its own rules, can stand alone, disconnected from any other poem-painting. As example, a painting of a wolf should in priority communicate “wolf” and not: “this is another Denis Coupal painting, and by the way, it is of a wolf”. Picasso could get away with that and make it earnest and valuable, so could Cézanne and certainly Van Gogh and many other greats. I am not great. To me, the wolf is great. And that wolf never asked to be less important than a painting.

I loved what you asked about what seems “unsaid” in my work. Isn’t that how poems function, the words chosen just as important as those left out? I suppose this comes from an interest in drama. I like works that include some glimpse of a story, if even left unfinished or unclear. I like a certain tension in a painting, conscious that many have felt there is a certain sadness or enigmatic feel in my works. I have no problem with that. In fact, I will probably continue exploring it, emphasizing it in the future.

VF: I know Canadian painters are often influenced by the "drab" city and landscapes caused by the long, grey winters. However, in your pieces, the lack of light is offset by other elements. Could you elaborate on this?

DGC: I’m not specifically a “painter of light”, no debate there. I paint things. I don’t necessarily see past the forms, edges and shapes of these “things”. Rather, I stumble on them and the getting-back-up-on-my-feet-part is perhaps what ends up on the canvas. The trend, supported by the entire breadth of artistic and scientific thinking, is to say that light makes us see and we must expound and celebrate this. Yes, this is true, and my mind keeps asking: “but then what? What about the “thing” on which the light bounces, its edges, its lines, its mass? Is it near or far away from other “things” and why? My “Elephant” is a good example. It walks alone for a reason. The painting could have been about the light coming across the heated sky, flickering brightly or striking dull on the terrain, but really the light, even the colour actually, is somewhat restrained or stifled… the massive elephant is more important to me, and its state of being, than the weather that particular day, even if the sky and the time of day are admittedly key elements within the story. Same for “White Dog I”, which is even more deliberately stifled, and though I don’t quite know why or how to explain it… I love that the final painting has that pregnant pause sort of feeling. At one time I thought to call it something like, “Wait, don’t slide, the dog saw something”, which to me is very funny actually. If the light had been too interesting, too worked, it wouldn’t have been the same. The flat blackness of the youthful figures becomes, to me, more interesting than if more perfectly rendered. The sky also becomes nearly flat, as if they are in a room and not outdoors at all. I like that little bit of strangeness in it. But, I’ve strayed; we were talking about light…

VF: Let's talk specifically of a few of your paintings. I love the Grey Wolf with the boys and the dog/wolf.....so much unsaid here in emotion and color and form.

DGC: This one is painted from an old family photograph dating back to the 70’s in Sept-Iles, Quebec. It is of my older brother and sister and our white german shepherd, which eventually ran off. It means a lot to me personally as my brother was killed a few years ago in a highway accident, and it seems to be the only depiction I may have ever made of him. We were three kids with very strained relationships, but those years, that I look at sometimes creatively through the black-and-white veil of time passed, were happy years, being carefree kids and throwing ourselves in heaps of snow. There’s something very captivating to me in monochrome images, in the execution of a painting, as I work usually very quickly – though I am learning to work slower with more restraint – I often times enjoy disregarding color.

VF: What about Beethoven’s 5th or Manuscript One?

DGC: I love the passion and romantic boldness of Beethoven’s works. In Manuscript One, I wanted to create a snapshot of the feeling of the 5th Symphony, as I sense it. I also love looking at old manuscripts by writers, composers and even scientists, so when I found an image of an actual autograph manuscript by Beethoven, who sketched a great deal when composing, often while walking out in the woods, I thought to superimpose it over an abstract representation of Beethoven’s fierce, fiery internal vision …and see if the two layers would integrate well and convey that creative energy.

VF: St. Lawrence River Tree is so despondent, is there a back story to that painting?

DGC: Found myself at this very spot often in my life, sometimes to paint, other times to fish or throw rocks, or just to listen to the rushing water. I grew up close to there, at the south-western tip of the Island of Montreal, wrapped by the St. Lawrence River. I love the river and it has always been, very literally a source of inspiration for me. It has eroded many trees on that shore though and the fate of this particular tree was imminent. I will never forget two young kids coming up behind me when I painted this, one of them leaning on his bicycle and softly saying to the other kid, in commentary of my work in progress, only thick brown masses at that point, since I had just begun layering: “Oh, that’s gonna be ugly.” Every painting is a challenge, some more distinctly so.

VF: Please talk a little about your Blue Self-Portrait?

DGC: This was painted at my lowest point as a very broke student, before I learned that paintings I made could be sold for money that would buy food and paint supplies. I was painting a great deal then, mainly watercolour because it was inexpensive, vigorously and often into late nights, but didn’t quite know why. But this Blue Portrait has been a success for me, in the sense that many people have liked it and it has lead to interesting portrait commissions, which I really love to do, sometimes in a more classic approach, or sometimes in this sort of tense, energy suffused into the canvas. Paintings are about energy and spirit for me, deep down, not about depiction or correctness.

VF: White Cloudburst, out of your Energy Series, is exciting for its unique perspective.

DGC: Wanted to explode my own view of landscape, perhaps as if shooting outward into the stratosphere or free falling back down. The idea was to look for a texture of energy and the forces of nature and yet keep it full of space and air. More to come like this one and the Blue Storm in the future.

VF: Elephant is … well it is a book unto itself. Do you have a special affinity for this beast; conservation? It is such a strong image Sad and powerful at the same time?

DGC: I have a great kinship with animals and understand, I think, when they are silent before hasty, noisy humans. I hate haste and noise as well. There’s something stoic and beautiful about elephants and many large, wild animals. The painting is an ode to them, to animals in the wild and what they are left of nature, due to us. It is also an ode to the amazing wildlife photographer Michel Denis-Huot, whose photograph was the source for the painting. Normally, all my works are based on my own original material and sources taken direct from nature or purely imagined, except for a few studies of Rodin based photos of his works… and, of course, the aircraft series for which Bombardier either supplies me photographs or I take my own of the aircraft, but for in flight works, that’s obviously not always possible. In Elephant I hope to have created a respectful work that reflects the dignity of the animal, as was present in the Denis-Huot’s photo.