Month: July 2025
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The sixth drawing in the Red Book came together in one sitting. I started this book project with the loose goal of taking more time with each drawing. But I purposely didn’t make it a rule because I didn’t think that would be a healthy constraint. Because this page had a strong photographic image and…
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Drawing five in the Red Book. This one started with very little on the original printed page. I left the word “City” while applying gesso to the rest of the page and then drew a grid over the whole of the page. The title Sampler comes from the broken series of letters and numbers I…
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The spreads will often be weird/interesting in this project book since I am leaving the left hand pages as they are. So there’s a little play with the original form of this book and my drawings on each right hand page. The text, “life is made of smallest fragments” is from one of the vintage…
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This is the fourth drawing in the Red Book. I am finding that even the simplest page layout in the underlying book makes for something good to react to. I had an initial worry that showing too much of the text would be distracting but it just becomes texture. Words are just mark making that…
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An imaginary landscape I drew today. It feels as hot as this looks today.
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This page showing the “Elements of Design” made me think about the recurring marks in my visual art. I have a palette or a lexicon of marks that I return to. They take different forms and are adapted to a variety of media.
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I don’t take “real photos” much anymore but sometimes the light does something special and the phone is what’s at hand.
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With a prompt in a recent creative Zoom call to share a magazine from our youth that we still thought about today, I shared a memory of my friends Vince, Mark, and I typing in code for the Commodore VIC-20 from an issue of Computes! Gazette from February 1984. I was 15 at the time…
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Just made this for fun to see myself removing marks instead of making them.
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Work in progress in the Red Book. This doesn’t have much more to go but it got late so I’ll come back to it tomorrow. This uses a handmade rough cut circle stencil for the main dots.
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One of the joys and difficulties of sharing things online as they are made is that reaction or lack of reaction can colour the process. I try my best to stick to what interests me first and to follow that thread where it takes me.
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In a recent creative Zoom call, I read aloud from the first chapter of a story/book/? I have been picking away at over the last few years. It’s a story that is piecing itself together based on drawings I have also been doing for years. Reading the story was difficult first because I don’t do…
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Every great writer must __. Every great artist must __. Stop trying to assume that everyone walks the same path.
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I finished Golden Bone from the Red Book tonight. Got to a point where ai felt like I made a few marks too many but with this kind of work, there’s not really any going back. I still like the colours, the general structure, and the text.
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I read the first chapter from a story/book/? I have been poking away at for a few years now on @Seth Werkheiser’s Zoom call today. It’s something I have in my notes files and poke at now and then but it made me wonder if I should treat it more like my other creative work and…
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Continued work on this third drawing in the Red Book. I used more extremely crumbling ancient Letraset on this one. I sprayed it with a casein-based non-aerosol fixative to prevent the letters from entirely flaking off over time. I like the look of the instantly distressed type.
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Started on a third drawing in the Red Book and it’s the first one to have a dominant image in the background to react to. Because the photo is a portrait of a person (Lord Killanin head of the IOC at the time) it makes reacting a bit more intentional. I don’t know or think…
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Make bread. It’s just flour, salt, water, and a bit of your time. Deeply rewarding.
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I’m going to create a links page on my website—what used to be called a “blogroll” back in the web days. I want a place where I can compile links to other people’s sites, publications, and projects. I want it for my own use but I also want to be part of a personal network…
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Here’s the second completed drawing in the Red Book. I’m learning what’s it’s like to draw on this somewhat glossy paper. I’m also beginning to make choices about what elements from the book’s content I cover and which I incorporate. Because this was the title page and this book has a modernist grid, there wasn’t…
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5+ years ago when we were living in Toronto I walked roughly 7km to work in the mornings and I had a habit of taking a self portrait in front of this alley garage mural of Yoda.
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The sky was doing some stuff tonight.
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Because the Red Book is an existing 1976 Olympics commemorative book, the date is likely to come up frequently on the pages. I was seven years old in 1976 and I feel like that year is going to inform some of these drawings in a way I can’t be conscious of just yet.
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This is the first complete drawing in my Red Book project. I found it was harder to establish when/how to end given my self-assigned experiment to not complete these drawings in single sittings. I’m also getting the feel for how the pages in this book will receive various media for better or for worse.
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Here’s me drawing in the new Red Book art book project. As I say in the video, I’m trying something with this book where I don’t finish drawings in single sittings as I normally do. This is the third (I think) time I have come back to this particular drawing. It might be done? But…
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A few more marks made on this first drawing in the Red Book. 📕 It’s already interesting to sit and then remove myself from a drawing without finishing it. Not exactly comfortable but it pushes me in an intriguing way.