Month: August 2025
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All those thousands of pinhole punched sparks of old light from minutes, hours, days, and years away from us — signs that we are part of something so much more vast and wonderful. But instead of exalting in that wonder, we turn and murder others because we want the land they live on. We are willing to watch as thousands of lives get buried under concrete. Connected generations halted under layers of industrial strata. Think about Gaza today and the people of Palestine with all of their family trees crushed and bulldozed, their bodies torn apart, mothers and fathers who…
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I finished this drawing in a second sitting this morning. In part, it was a good test of some new materials. It was also a nice chance to work with what was on the page. There are only two collage fragments added since the two pre-existing photos are like readymade collage in this case. This page is also a bit more “painterly” and has more colour play since I was trying the new materials that came with their own palettes.
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This page has two strong photos that already have colour palettes in line with colours I tend to work with. That’s part of the excitement of working with an active base like this. There are both frictions and possible harmonies in how I might react to the surface. Watch me working on this drawing here: https://youtu.be/3cB6vtPYyd8?si=T4H5ZK4p53JdyA8v
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Life, sovereignty, and dignity for Palestinian people. Every day another 100 or more bodies. People and families murdered to erase and eradicate by bullet, bomb, and empty belly. A vengeance taken out tens of thousands of times over. A genocide we are all signed up for as our governments send “strongly worded” letters and promises that they might tsk tsk more sternly next time unless people are given access to the absolute sub-basics for survival. But nothing further happens and the handshakes and polite official meetings continue. There’s nothing complex about all of these ended families and those degraded daily.…
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Last night I went out to look for meteors. It’s the time of the Perseids. The general thinking was that with the recently full moon and residual wild fire smoke that there wouldn’t be much to be seen. But I still stood out in the dark to catch a few stronger “shooting stars”. There’s a thrill in even seeing one so I didn’t really need a spectacle. More tonight if you have a dark enough sky. Standing in the dark quietly and facing the universe doesn’t hurt even if you can’t see a single star.
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I thought I would post a video showing the first pass at a drawing in this project book. The video is unedited and real time. I don’t talk in the video but there’s some scratchy and thunky mark making ASMR sounds in there. Watch on YouTube.
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Because of some materials choices, this drawing ended up a bit weirder and maybe muddier than I might have hoped. But it has its own charms. I did want to do something with the applied grid that counter-balanced the cathedral photo from the original page and I like it in that respect. I also like the words that popped into my head that are broken up in the lower grid cells. I’ve read a few of things recently about the use of words in artwork—how they can be a distraction and lead a viewer towards an interpretation. I think of…
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Trying out a few thrift store art supplies on this drawing. The collage items are older junk shop papers a bunch of which were from a watchmaker’s archives: blueprints, receipts, and manuals. I have regrets from that time years ago because the shop had binders full of materials I didn’t buy. Ah well… The newer materials are somewhat decaying pigment ink stamp pads and also a mounted stamp that just has a square of halftone-ish texture. The inks are a bit annoying because they don’t dry well but the colours are good. This page has this dominant image of the…
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Each page in the Red Book (it’s a repurposed commemorative book from the 1976 Montreal Olympics) has something different to react to when I draw. That’s the core of working in a book that already had a purpose before becoming a substrate for something else. Some pages won’t give much in terms of prompting and others have text and images that might form key aspects of a final drawing. So far in the Red Book, I have been equally, if differently, sparked by sparse almost blank pages and also those with a dominant image. “Blank” is relative in this case.…