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I have been picking away at this one over a few short sessions — while making coffee. The black structured forms follow the mostly hidden text that was on the page. I think I’ll be pulling some of the enlarged thermal print images into this so I am curious to see how that feels.
I also bought another book from the thrift store that will become some form of project book like this. More on that soon.
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We collected this water, soil, and plant material from two vernal pools that regularly form where we live. It is amazing to get this view into the under-the-surface activity of these ephemeral ponds. There are fairy shrimp, daphnia, worms, what look like gastropods, more that we can’t identify, and likely so much more at the microscopic level.
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This is exactly why I was interested in thermal prints. There’s a whole complex world of marks and matrices as I enlarge and then enlarge again (and again!).
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Made some 200% enlarged copies of the thermal prints. Fun to make secondary drawings on the copied versions. I’ll try also making some 400% copies next just to really zoom in on the pure texture and move passed the frame of the original drawings.
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We recently bought a few low cost and low quality ways to make thermal prints. It was an idea my partner Gayla and I both had for some time without either of us acting upon it. We both wanted a form of low committal analogue output to use in a variety of not fully discovered art projects.
Both of us had been nudged back into thinking and action by recently seeing other artists incorporate thermal printing into their work. Gayla sourced a few different toy camera and printer options in the $20–40 range and placed some orders.
Not knowing exactly what the outcome or the plan is, tracks with much of both of our art processes over the years. We each like to explore and discover how and what we make by learning and doing.
For me, the first thing I was drawn to was the coarse dithered black only rendering of the thermal images. Some of the thermal print options will output more tonal “greyscale” images but I really prefer the prints that are crappier and even a bit harsh in their dithering process.
I wondered about blowing up the textures of the prints for a variety of images and using them as collage materials. And I likely will do that. But the first thing that has piqued my interest is printing out images of my Red Book drawings. I am printing to a ~$20 thermal printer that uses a 57mm-wide roll of paper. This is the exact same kind of paper store receipts get printed to. There is nothing precious and certainly not archival about this as a material and that is much of the point.
These tiny images and the way they strip and condense the details of my drawings are interesting to me. I don’t think of them as a way to actually reproduce my drawings but more as a lateral way of using that work to make something connected but new.
I don’t know what that will be yet and that’s the exciting part.
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At least here in Ontario, the credo/reminder always holds true.
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Red Book drawing 32
This one is thick with paper and paint layers. At one point the yellow and orange paint was very dominant as it has been in previous drawings but I wanted to try pushing that back and so I brushed on and then scraped away some white gesso. It made things extra patchy and messy but it mostly did what I wanted by subduing some aspects and letting other parts come forward.
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I think that complexity and simplicity, chaos and stillness can reside together much of the time. Lately I have been thinking about the density and complexity of trees. As living presences, trees might be thought of a pure and simple, a respite from manufactured stressful complexity. But they aren’t all that simple and are embodiments of visual layers upon layers can be seen as a whole.
Visual art can be like that too. Marks placed upon other marks, paper pasted sheet upon sheet, paint mixing and thickening. The visual results aren’t always simple but there is still a singular nature to a work of art no matter how layered and complex it might be.
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This was written as a comment on this post by Manuela Thames.
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This mini orchard does exist. We have a row of three mature pear trees and an even older apple growing in the land where we live. But this sketch of the three pears is imagined in that I didn’t look at a reference or go out there and draw them from sight. I do want to try some plain air drawing out there this year though — something I’m not familiar with at all.
I added a few leaves to these imagined versions of our pears but they don’t actually even have leaf buds at this time of the year.
What is represented somewhat accurately is the spacing between the trees and which currently have other companion plants growing underneath them. There is also a small patch of raspberries between two of the trees.
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I was looking for something else in my insane camera roll and came across photos and a short video of this Land/Body piece from 2017. It was one of three that I made in this circular landscape format with these rough nervous system figures attached.
It was a rare case where I submitted the three pieces to a show and two of them actually sold. I hadn’t documented all three so I now only have some vague memories of what they all looked like finished and some in-progress shots.
Each had a different imagined landscape painting and unique carved balsa figure.
Finding this again made me realize that I want to play with this kind of dimension again. I loved the shadow play in this case especially as the video shows.
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This is a pine tree sketched from memories of recently seen pine trees. Trees are so difficult to represent because they take up space and have a type of visual density that can be hard to articulate.
I don’t mind this little sketch but it does feel more like a drawing of a scale model of a tree? I intentionally tried to place some of the imagined branches moving away from the front of the view but it still reads a bit flat like the tree only has one side.
Nature is wonderful and hard to capture which is also a wonderful thing.
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Something I wrote in an email thread with other artists/makers…
My sense of websites, having had lots over the years that I started, finished, redesigned, endlessly tweaked, and deleted, is that they are never done and that is what can make them great.
The “finished” or “ready” website is often too late to do what we want it to do. It can feel immediately static or out of sync with where we are. Websites are, by nature, fluid and changeable things and so it can be wonderful to just let them do that and connect us with where we are.
I think the harder question is whether to narrow the focus of a website to display one version of ourselves. I have struggled with that. My current website is me in the various states that my creative practice takes but doesn’t really touch much on what I have done to make money over the last 30+ years as a designer and only lightly touches on the years in which photography was my primary art form.
We spilt ourselves into these versions of identity.
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A small sketch as I lay in bed with my leg elevated after knee surgery yesterday. This view has similarities to the woods at the back of the land we live on. The branches and forms made from quick scratchy pencil marks are imagined and don’t actually reference the true natural makeup of that space.
Despite mostly making abstract artwork, when I actually set out to “sketch”, natural forms are usually what comes out. This is also the kind of mark making I give myself the most trouble with. As soon as a drawing attempts to represent something real, my inner critic rises up to full height.
Something intended to convey an impression of a space always falls short to me. Possibly because the set of impressions natural spaces can make on us are so deep and multifaceted that I ask too much of my pencil marks.
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The other day, multidisciplinary artist Wade Johnston posted about a postcard project he was starting up for fun. I jumped at the chance to receive something human in my mailbox and even better a handmade piece of mail art.
And it was all I hoped for. Wade’s postcard has one of his artworks affixed to the front and then the back also has a print from his thrifted Kodak Memo Shot thermal printer/camera.
I have been curious about getting a little thermal printer for collage work so it was an extra bonus to have that as part of this artwork.
Thank you Wade!
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This is the 30th drawing in the Red Book.
I was both looking forward to drawing on this page and also had a certain level of anxiety.
The photo at the top of Jesse Owens in mid jump is such a powerful image to react to that I knew I would want it to stay the focus of this drawing. That comes with anxiety because I don’t normally have anything preconceived or assumed before I start drawing.
Not that I knew at all what I would do ahead of time but just simply that one aspect of the existing page was more important to me than normal.
I think it worked out.
As Little Time (Jesse), 2026 -
I shared a number of my recent drawings with some friends and it was a nice reminder to keep how and when I share what I do a wide circle. For me at least, I do better at being kind to myself and making more things that feel good to me when I share aspects of that making and the feelings that come with it.
Aim is True One artist friend asked…
“Are you just going with the flow when you work on these? Letting your hands make the decisions instead of your brain, like a creative game of Ouija board?”
To which I replied…
“Very much so. It’s just reacting to what’s on the page to start and then I just follow myself as I make marks and add collaged elements. I’m not a planner when it comes to making art. I prefer intuitive flows for sure.”
It’s not something new that I haven’t said about how I make art before. But it reminded me that I enjoy the whys and hows of other people’s making and that revealing myself is often the way to find out more about others.
Just Fall The art shown here is all made within the last few months and is part of my on-going Red Book project. The Red Book is a 1976 Olympics commemorative book that I am drawing in. I like the active surface of each page as something to react to.
Show Your Arms I am not as interested in the literal process of “how” something is made that could be demonstrated in a tutorial of materials and techniques. Those can sometimes be informative and revealing, but I am more fascinated by the creative methods and approaches artists take. I want to know about the rhythms and personal systems that bring people to their easels and tables, move them through spaces with a camera, or place their hands on instruments to find their sounds.
I find in my work that tools and materials play roles but aren’t what gets me engaged. I need them in my hands to translate what’s in my head and heart onto the current surface but they are just a means to an end. They aren’t arbitrary since I choose media and tools based on properties I want but it’s still more about what happens during a drawing than what any of the component parts are.
There is No Record So when it comes to other people’s work, I want to know the same sort of things.
Questions like…
- What’s their relationship like with tools? Are they careful and specific or do they choose to make marks with whatever is close at hand?
- Do they want a type of control over colour that means they frequently mix pigments or do they work straight from the tube?
- Do they finish work in single sittings or do they come and go possibly over a long period of time?
- Do they work on multiple pieces at the same time?
- What are the processes that circle or connect to the process of making? Do they write to paint? Do they walk to sculpt?
- Are there meta-creative structures or organization that allow people to get into a flow faster or deeper? The practice of keeping a maintained mise en place (a culinary term for “putting in place” or gathering tools and ingredients) can be crucial to some people and without it they feel adrift.
Open Again Beyond the how, why people create is even more compelling. It’s also something that is harder for most people to place or articulate. They may simply say that creation is just a necessity, that they need to make to feel whole or sane or grounded.
For myself, those are all true and more. When I make there are a variety of connective and contradictory reasons why.
- Physical presence in my body and an awareness of the motions I make as I make marks.
- Physical disconnection from undue control I might be exerting over my body. Loosening and releasing.
- Taking something mental that feels “stuck” and translating that into the action of drawing.
- Communication of thoughts and feelings.
- Connection with something inside myself.
- Connection with something/one outside myself.
- Transmute a hard or dark emotion into a safe and creative action.
Some artists wonder about their “purpose” or the meaning of what they make. I have found that while those questions aren’t without merit, they are also traps that for me lead to shut down.
The broader scope of how and why I make things is an active set of questions that interconnect and are less likely to have me turn on myself.
We Fade Art can have purpose and meaning but both of those primarily happen after something has been made. And the shape the purpose and meaning are mostly in other people’s hands.
Truly My friend asked…
“Are you generally happy with how most turn out or are there some clear winners and losers?”
I said…
“It’s a mixed bag. I definitely don’t love them all but I love that I made them. My primary goal is making with a secondary goal of enjoying myself. And then I like to share them even when I don’t like them since they might mean or feel something to somebody else. Trying not to engage in preciousness and self doubt.”
Celebration Because this friend showed this kind of interest in my process, I also shared a link with them to one of the real time drawing videos I have posted to YouTube. It’s 52 minutes of me making one of the Red Book drawings start to finish. No edits or commentary. Just me making marks and choices.
Describe the Shape of a Heart – Complete drawing process
I don’t post these videos often even though I shoot video of myself drawing most of the time for my own purposes. Most people’s appetite for watching art be made in real time is limited but I love it whenever I find someone just doing their thing and allowing an over the shoulder casual view.
Harry Stooshinoff’s videos are great in this way.
Reach out if you want to share some aspect of your creative process. I am curious to hear other people’s Hows and Whys of making.
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Because the book that forms the container/surface for the Red Book drawings is a 1976 Olympics commemorative book, it’s not surprising that some of the existing photos and illustrations are sports related.
That aspect has nothing to do with why I chose this book to work in and in many contradictory ways I want to avoid those direct associations.
This particular page I’m currently working on had a colour diagram of a stadium layout. I enjoyed the pop of green as something to react to but didn’t want the sports stadium aspect to feel like it was a focal point. That may not really be up to me in the end of course so we’ll see when I finish this drawing how that aspect sits.
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Before our neighbour’s very large Manitoba Maple tree fell on our garage I would take night sky photos with it in frame and had named it Ghost Tree. Since then this tall but much smaller and further away from our garage Cottonwood tree has become the New Ghost. It doesn’t have the same presence as the other tree but it still adds some drama to these shots.
On clear nights when our relatively countryside-adjacent property doesn’t have much light pollution — other than the same neighbours’ perpetual backyard security lights — I love star bathing. Moving out here from Toronto has had me marvelling at just how many stars I can see on many nights.
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I ordered this gorgeous photo zine from Diana Pappas and Tom Bland and it came this week. The photos themselves are wonderful but the storytelling and the overall care in how they designed and packaged it really shines.
Get your own! https://pappasbland.com/fffb
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At a plaza here in town recently, I saw this scene from a distance in the fog and drove over to snap a few phone shots. This is a development site for new housing that used to be meadow and a pretty woods I hiked through a few times.
A deep swath of the woods was cut down and the meadow scraped down and this year it looks like there is further excavation to probably make way for utilities and such.
It’s an ugly eyesore and sure, people need homes but the way we treat the land to make that happen is pretty shocking.
But in the peculiar light of a foggy day, there is still a kind of beauty and mystery to be found.
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In May 2007 I created an outdoor photo show in reaction to the large photography show Contact taking place in Toronto at the time.
Down the block from our apartment near Queen and Dufferin was a brownfield site with a tall chain link fence along the sidewalk.
I snuck in a back gate and made my way down a rough slope into the tangled brush behind the fence and arranged 36 photos I had printed at 2×3″ and mounted on popsicle sticks.
The size and the placement of the photos where less about people seeing my photos and more about people passing by and engaging with the non-space parts of the city that go unnoticed.
Those parts of the city were the subject of many of my photos from that time. The in-between and behind areas and the worn and broken elements. I was drawn to the suggested stories of things left behind but also simply to the beauty of texture and light in the city.
I watched in the weeks afterwards as the photos faded and fell off their sticks blowing away and mixing with the trash that always collected behind the fence.
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Red Book 28
I wanted to be blocky and messy and I got messy for sure. There were more heavy black shapes initially but the impulse to make grids won out.
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I have posted a new video with a casual progress report about my Red Book project. I talk through the first 25 drawings and demonstrate how I react to the active surface of the pages as I draw.
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Drawing 26 in the Red Book
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All books are mechanisms for traversing time and space. These two books that I recently grabbed at the thrift store do that in multiple ways.
These Choose Your Own Adventure titles first came out in the lates 1970s and were just the thing for me as a pre-teen reader. I was reading the Narnia books and Madeleine L’Engle’s time warping novels. I also read loads of Ray Bradbury, Asimov, and harder science fiction like Larry Niven’s Ringworld books that mostly went over my head.
I was into computers and fantasy at the same time so there was something about stories that felt like smart adventures.
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Red Book 25
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Foggy and melting at this beach today. As I arrived there was a couple in their full wedding clothes trudging through the slushy snow with three photographers including a drone pilot.
I guess they were trying to catch the magical feeling of the fog bubble today. The lake was essentially invisible, just a wall of hazy wall of white.
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Foggy day in our little almost post-industrial lake shipping town. A bunch of the big lake ships are moored and over-winter for a couple of months.
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Open Again
This is drawing number 24 in the Red Book, my current active surface drawing project.
Some of the last marks I added to this as I finished it this morning were two lists of five words. Lists of words have been common in my drawings over the last 10 years. I enjoy the somewhat random poetry they can evoke and also the visual shape of words and words in sequence.
Sometimes the words are pulled from a source text—like one of the 80+ year-old elementary school spelling books my partner and I collect—and other times they are just words that rise from my mind. Single words that suggest other words in turn, not to form sentences but to arrange in an associative matrix. You can see them just as words on their own or as a path to follow.
Might
Laced
Marks
Mirror
Loose
Lines -
A physical artefact of an ephemeral time and place on the web. Joshua Davis’ Praystation Harddrive released roughly 25 years ago.
It was a time when the web meant exploration, discovery, and community to me. It was rough around the edges but if you looked you could see those edges and follow them.
The web now mostly feels like an infinitely sprawling grid of big box stores with the occasional service road and even more rare raw alleyway. The alleys are where the edges still exist, they are just much harder to access.
Let’s still make things. Digital and physical things that come from our heads, hearts, and hands. Let’s share what we make in public, in private, in secret. We can connect and find the edges together.
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I think soon I will sit down at this table and spend more than two minutes making marks. But before then, it is good to still stand here for two minutes to draw grid lines and paste down paper towards something.
Marks and motion towards something are better than receding away from things.
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Other than some work-related sketching, I hadn’t engaged in making anything visual since the beginning of January. My last time sitting at my work table was literally on January 1st.
There have been things that felt like barriers — most of them of my own creation. There has been grief and frustration with myself and a variety of external circumstances both mundane and cultural.
Art making comes from an emotional place for me and while it can be an “unblocker” it can also be one of the first things to become blocked.
Last night I spent two minutes doing this. Unblocking can start with one mark or take a hundred. We will see.
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One simple thing I enjoy weekly is cutting the rough circles of parchment paper that go under my bread dough when it is placed in the Dutch oven.
That basic act of cutting a circle from a square feels like a creative act. It is throw away but still has a degree of care that feels good to have in my life.
I also enjoy scoring the dough and lately I’ve been making floral / sunburst cuts.
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We have been approved to adopt a rescue dog from Texas. He will arrive in Canada on January 17th. He was found on the streets and he is a possible Soft-coated Wheaton terrier and Poodle mix — a Whoodle!
When we lost Molly my initial impulse was that I could never go through that heartbreak again. But then, as we worked to process the intense grief, I learned that my heart would be more affected by never having the presence of a dog in our lives again.
So we started looking at rescue listings again and had an initial disappointment as one dog we had started to fall in love with from a distance was adopted ahead of our application.
Rescue adoptions have become quite complex since we adopted Molly 14 years ago. There is now much more care and detail in the process which presented some hurdles but we appreciate the care involved.
We got wonderful references from three friends and spoke with a dedicated rep from the rescue learning more about the absolutely dire situation for abandoned dogs in Texas.
We are so happy to soon have little Nigel (the name we are giving him) come into our home.
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Sometimes I just end up smearing things around for a while to see what sticks. Nothing sticking on this one yet.
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Very very cold at the lake but it’s good to see this view through another flip of the calendar.
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The original page’s text in red, Citius Altius Fortius means Faster Higher Stronger in Latin. Not exactly a credo I would put much stock in. Which is probably why my reaction was the downer We Fade text. Sorry, Olympians.
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After finishing my previous drawing, Truly, in the Red Book last night, I went directly to the next page to start a new drawing. The underlying pages are quite different with the new page being mostly white space with stronger header text.
I am only making drawings on the right hand pages in this book so I don’t generally consider the context of the left to right page spread but there are still elements that can’t help catch my eye and contribute something. In this case, the left page has a photo of the 1976 Olympic Stadium. I decided to reference that photo by painting a rectangle of the same ratio on the right page in luminous pink.
So far, this drawing is fairly “minimal” — for me at least. I’ll likely have a bit of friction around that since it’s in my nature to over work things. We’ll see.
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Red Book 20
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I’m part way through this drawing in the Red Book. I think the stripes up top are too dominant in this case so I’ll likely either tone them down or cover them completely.
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This was the frozen surface of the partially dug pond in our yard today. It’s a long process because we have dense clay soil but someday we’ll have a new mini-ecosystem to visit and observe through all of the seasons.
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Initial mark making for a new drawing in the Red Book. Orange is one of my favourite colours to work with. The existing book page didn’t have much to respond to but I still quickly read through the text to see if words or phrases spark something. That’s part of what I like about starting from an “active” surface like a designed book page — the book can act like a passive collaborator.
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Our coffee machine is in our basement and I go down there to make a coffee for each of us at around 10am each day. It’s a ritual that stabilizes and warms.
Our shared art making space is also in the basement. We both make things elsewhere but most of my drawings happen a few feet away from the coffee machine. I have never been as good at instilling the same ritual and rhythm into my making. I will have periods where I make something everyday and then I stop and it takes some intention and even effort to start again.
I’ve been in one of those “dry” periods for a while. We were caring for Molly and then we lost her and in that I couldn’t find what was useful or important about making drawings.
Most of my drawings don’t go anywhere. They stay in the basement. Many may travel digitally to screens here and there and I don’t discount what that can mean. I have benefited and connected with many artists’ work solely through a computer or phone screen. I don’t want to engage in denigrating or negating my work simply because the majority of it stays physically here with me.
The lines, marks, shapes, and words I make stay with me but also move away from me. Art making is sometimes about pushing things away and sometimes about pulling things back in.
Over the last few days, while making coffee, I have gone over to my art table and made a few lines or dragged some paint around on a single drawing in my “red book” project book. For many people, visiting and revisiting a single drawing in process would be normal but for me, I tend to finish drawings in single sittings.
But right now I find that my capacity tells me that the way back is to just start a line on one day and continue it on the next. I need to take the time to breathe and feel and cry and know and the lines don’t care when they start and end.
The heart beats second to second and the days continue one to the next. We can’t tell the heart how to beat and our days are just shaped out of light and dark each one different in a similar box.
I made a coffee. I drew lines with red pencil and pasted down a scrap of gridded paper. I spoke with my partner. I wrote these words on my phone.
Life continues sadly and wonderfully with grief and joy in ebbs and flows.
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My usual feelings around my aphantasia are curious, just wanting to understand what my conscious mind can and can’t seem to process or recall. It doesn’t upset me and make me feel lacking.
Early this morning I had a brief dream in which our dog Molly, who has been gone now for three weeks, was suddenly back and I leapt on her cuddling her deeply and joyfully yelling that she was back. I could see and feel her body with such specificity and reality. It was just a few wonderful moments of dreamtime.
I woke with a start and immediately tried to will myself back to sleep to continue feeling the dream reality of her. But waking reality intruded and even though I was able to return to sleep, I didn’t return to that vivid, physical space, just jumping non-sensical dream story-telling.
Awake now this morning I find myself with a bit of misplaced anger at my mind that it is capable of such complete connection with my memory of sensations in dreams but shuts me out from them otherwise. Aphantasia means that I can’t even bring an image of Molly into my head “on demand” let alone feel the warmth and shape of her little body in a snuggle.
But I don’t want to be angry with myself and the way my mind works. I just want my beautiful dog person/friend/daughter back and to treat my mind and body with tenderness and love.
