Iron Men—Gary Michael Dault, John Scott and Matthew Varey—got together to paint collaboratively for the first time in early 2005.  We launched ourselves straightaway into the production of mixed media works on canvas that combined but, we felt, also transcended the sensibilities of the three of us. 

All of us are busy with our own careers and practices. Gary Michael Dault is a writer for much of the time (he contributes a visual arts review column to The Globe & Mail) and is an adjunct professor in the School of Architecture in the University of Waterloo.  He is an artist as often as possible, having mounted six solo exhibitions of his own work in the past two years.  John Scott is well-known and widely respected artist of national and international reputation (his latest exhibition, Event Horizon, was mounted at Toronto’s Nicholas Metivier Gallery last July). Matthew Varey is a teacher, novelist and wildly prolific painter—with a half-dozen shows coming up in the next few months (including a large exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art).
    

Despite three profoundly different approaches to art-making and the presence of three well-nourished egos in contention, the group worked well together from the beginning—as if we had always been doing so.
We paint together, in the sense that all three artists work simultaneously on each painting (with the brush and with anything else that falls to hand) and paint according to the dictates of what each thinks the work requires.  What is so satisfying to each artist—and essential, of course, for the well-being of every painting or drawing we make—is the degree to which all three of us enjoy the continual critique this process engenders: one makes a mark or a drawing or paints in a section or glues something onto a canvas; the other two look at what has happened and agree to leave it alone, modify it, embellish it, or simply paint over it.  The three of us work the way a think tank works: each suggestion is taken seriously, since there’s no way of knowing, no matter how initially unpromising any isolated painting moment may appear, where the new direction may ultimately lead.
    

Iron Men II is a departure of the most obvious kind from the first Iron Men exhibition in 2006, principally because all of the works making up the new exhibition are painted not on canvas but on paper. 

Gary Michael Dault