Artist Christopher Paul grew up in Prospect, Nova Scotia, just 10 km from Peggy’s Cove, the crash site of Swissair Flight 111 and famous tourist destination. He attended Dalhousie studying Biology before choosing Fine Arts as his main interest. He graduated from NSCAD in 1999 with a BFA in Fine Arts, where for his graduation show “The Ascetic: A Brief Glimpse of Reality” Christopher merged figurative art, readymades and introduced his adoptive family to his real parents. He was searching for his real identity for years, finally discovering his artistic family from a small town in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

After graduating, he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1999 and began painting again full time in 2005. His current themes include dancers and Vancouver landscapes.

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Artist Christopher Paul Graves adopts humor in Glimpse of Reality
By Elissa Barnard
Arts Reporter
The Mail-Star / The Chronicle-Herald / June 11th, 1999
Hallifax, NS

Raised in a big family in Prospect, N.S., figurative painter Chris Paul always knew he was adopted "even before I knew what the word meant”.

His discovery that he was connected to filmmaker Lulu Keating's family completed his understanding of himself and of his desire to be an artist.

This week at Anna Leonowens Art Gallery, his Bachelor of Fine Arts graduating show, *The Ascetic: A Brief Glimpse of Reality explores a search for truth and identity, influenced by his own experience seeking his birth parents.

Last August Christopher, a month before he turned 28. started his search. He'd gotten the provincial social services forms three years earlier. "It took me three years to come up with the guts and do this. After 28 years I didn't want to interfere. There is the chance of finding out something you don't want to find out."

He found his mother. Peggy O'Brien. a nurse working in the Queen Charlotte Islands, and his father, Paul Keating. living in Vancouver. Paul Keating is a brother of filmmaker Lulu Keating.

"I was told by everybody you've got to meet Lulu," says Chris. He contacted his aunt just as she was finishing her award winning film about her family, The Moody Brood. That film profiles the giant, eccentric family from Antigonish where religion played a big part in family dynamics, as well as size.

Chris discovered he was given up for adoption because he was the product of an unmarried teen pregnancy in a small, fiercely Catholic town. "My mother had to give me up when I was born because she was so young and in the Roman Catholic Church it's a sin to have children when you're not married," says Chris, who was born in 1970. "Traditional religion has always been a problem for me." The day he phoned his mother for the first time was a difficult one. "It was a very intense moment, not knowing exactly what to say. She knew for some reason I was going to phone that day." She, in fact, had been planning on searching out her son. Chris met his father at the airport in Vancouver. "I was at the airport and looking for my luggage and I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around." He looked into a version of himself. "We had the same height, same build, same eyes, and same facial structures." He later learned his father had also been interested in art and that they shared other interests and habits.
"My interests reflect the Keating sensibility. That's why it made so much sense."

His art show, of figurative paintings and objects that are readymades, explores truth and asceticism - rigid self-denial especially for religious reasons. "How does one attain truth? Does truth always have a price? Asceticism and access to truth have always been more or less linked since antiquity. However, if every truth is only a path traced through reality, as the creative evolutionist Henri Bergson believed, then our truths are simply inventions created to utilize reality."
Truth, says Chris, is not dogma; it is something gained through experience. "It's something that's lived, something you're constantly finding as you find and create your own identity."

A big part of this art show is humor. "It's about transcending yourself and humor can do that. I have a comical perspective on the whole thing even though in a way it's a tragedy. Ultimately, he doesn't want to talk too much about his art. "It's about the experience of the viewer. The viewer's feeling is all there is."

Chris' birth parents and his adoptive parents, Irma and Dennis Graves, both plan to attend the show. It is at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, 1891 Granville St. through Saturday.