Author: Davin
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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 well with that sort of performative reading but second because I don’t really know where the story is going yet. I suppose three because the craft of fiction writing feels like a dark art. My friend Mark is adept at plotting out stories and having…
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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 work on it more in public. What’s held me back from doing that previously is that I don’t know if I will ever actually finish this piece of writing or why I am even writing it. But in visual art I have been actively trying…
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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 anything about him but I didn’t want my drawing to come with an assumption that I am saying something particular about this person. But I also don’t want to just cover the photo completely since a large part of working in this existing book is…
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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 that prioritizes people and making. It won’t be anything fancy, just links with a bit of contextual text but it’s good to be a simple link in a chain sometimes. I’ll post more about the page when I have it started.
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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 much to cover. But the next page has an almost half-page portrait photo so that will be a new challenge/prompt. The “save space” text in very very brittle Letraset are just words that popped into my head. The other text, “there is an evening twilight…
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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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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 I’ll come back again just to be sure. Watch on YouTube
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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.
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I started a new drawing project book tonight. It’s a 1976 Olympics commemorative book but that topic isn’t meant to inform the drawings I do. I like having something besides a blank page to react to and I’m sure in some cases the underlying text grid and images will nudge my drawings in interesting directions. I’ve posted a video to YouTube about getting started and showing me alter the cover and begin a drawing on the first page. https://youtu.be/Fy29waQDhr0?si=wH_TLDQ7Z6hHd-Ny
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When I say document, I mean it less in the “recorded for historical reasons” sense and more in the “just hold on to this for a little bit longer” sense. Holding the firefly of memory in cupped hands but knowing that it must eventually be released. I wanted to save my analogy and also clearly it is firefly season.
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Determined that standing in the dark of our yard trying to take pictures of fireflies is far less rewarding than just standing in the dark of our yard experiencing fireflies.
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10 years ago I started an online group art “zine” called Amateur Escapist. I meant it to be a series of themed issues but I got self conscious about it so there was only ever one issue. But every once in a while, I open the website and think, hmm should I do this again? http://www.amateurescapist.com
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The final drawing in my Openwork series. A couple different things on my mind starting soon. Made Ready, Davin Risk 2025
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A short video I made before making the final drawing in my Openwork series tonight. https://youtu.be/sGUvxolwblI?si=Z0UnjDYw0CPcAiIB
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This Masonite panel will be the surface for the last drawing in my Openwork series. There will be 30 drawings total and that number is somewhat arbitrarily set by how many of these dollar store panels I was able to find before they stopped stocking them. I’m happy with the number of drawings regardless and feel like it’s time to shift away from that path at least temporarily anyway.
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My drawings are almost never about one thing but this one definitely came from a place of deep frustration, anger, and sadness. People are being murdered daily and I am drawing. There’s a hard balance to be living a life of relative peace and be a distant witness to a diabolic genocide broadcast each day.
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We have a small cherry tree under a protective mesh bag and in the sunlight it becomes its own little world. It reminded me of this beautiful photo experiment by Diana Pappas and Tom Bland – https://pappasbland.com/17
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I recorded this flip through of my book work project I nicknamed “the ledger”. I made 149 drawings in this 90+ year-old insurance ledger starting in 2020. In this video I talk in real time about the project, some of the drawings, and patterns in my work that have continued after finishing the book. Watch the video on YouTube
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I don’t often start from dark or black ground but it definitely shapes the negative space in these drawings in an interesting way.
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What sometimes gets missed when people talk about AI and visual art is that there is this assumption that mimicry of style can replace real artwork. But despite the fact that many of us see artwork on screens these days, artwork still exists in physical forms and it’s hopeful point of connection is personal, tactile, and multifaceted. Even a simple piece of paper with a sketch will always be better than a tool that primarily can only output to screens. Of course systems can be devised that bridge AI output to physical forms but in its dominate consumer form, AI…
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I’m nearing the end of my Openwork series. I made this drawing tonight and I believe it’s number 27. I think it will be hard and somewhat freeing when this series finishes. I think it’s helpful to me create a somewhat arbitrary point where the series ends. In this case, the ending is based simply on the fact that I am about to run out of the dollar store Masonite panels these have been made on. I could continue and just shift the form but it feels better to end. Ending forms this higher level space around what will be…
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I make most of my artwork in single sittings and it’s something I have occasionally held against myself. But I have the most comfort and connection with making when I just sit down to start making something and I am done within an hour or less. I say hold it against myself because there are many artists that research, sketch, build maquettes and dummies, and more before then possibly committing to an approach. And then they may take hours, days, months, years to complete a single project. I can rationally know that every person’s practice and each medium is different…
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I’ve been thinking about inconsistent art practice recently. Consistency is something that receives a lot of attention in art making and it has obvious merits. The call to show up regularly for creative expression is valid. Prioritizing time for making in whatever form it might take is healthy. There’s also a certain pressure for artists to be consistent in what we make. A pressure to develop a recognizable style and to reliably produce new work. Even the well meaning consecutive 30, 100, 365 day art challenges place a value in repetition. These can be powerful in jumpstarting a creative pattern…
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Latest piece in my Openwork series. These have slowed down for me. Or art making as slowed down and these are just where I am right now. The series will finish (at least in this incarnation) soon since I am almost out of the cheap Masonite panels these are made on. Once the series is resolved, I need to document them properly and then I’ll put them up for sale. And then I might make a book with them, not sure yet.
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This morning in the garden. We recently did some work on the bed in the foreground which will eventually be the backdrop for the pond we are digging. We planted a small Japanese Maple that will someday reflect in that future pond. It is strangely life affirming to work at a pace that connects with years ahead of us.
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Neighbours a few house away keep pigeons and we see them some days doing their fast racing loops. There seems to be a pace bird that flies in front and then drops back as they arc to guide the flock into their next loop.
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Here are two videos of the recent beach ephemeral, “Gull”, I made in collaboration with my partner Gayla Trail. Because these are dimensional temporary art works, I like to think of them as existing in many forms at the same time. I try to take photos and video to document them but they often don’t capture what I see/feel/think experiencing them.
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In our previous home in the city, I would take a photo from the rear window most days of the garden behind the house. Those images showed the subtle changes day to day that became broader changes with time. In this home here in a small town, I haven’t kept up the practice mostly because our windows are scratched 1950’s tempered glass and don’t make for clear photos. But I’ve taken it up again because I reminded myself that the practice wasn’t about the clarity or quality of the photos but the act of making a record. I need to…
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Slight work desk reboot. I like a certain degree of chaos in my art making space. I tend to thrive on some level of happenstance in reacting to what’s at hand. But I haven’t been connecting with this work space as much as I would like over the last few months and so I took a few minutes this morning and bit a bit of basic tidying and sorting. It’s enough that I can reset both the desire to make connections and also the facility with which I can make them without becoming overwhelmed.
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It has been a while since I worked on one of these and I especially like when I can create a set of balanced elements that respond to the breeze.
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Zine plotting continues. I made a couple of these mini dummies at half the size of the final zine. Handy for scrawling notes inside to get a sense of content and page sequencing. This zine will be issue 1 in a series based on an idea I had a few years ago. Trying to keep the production scrappy but special — handmade but not backbreaking.
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Idea for a book of poems. A set of generative text prompts never sent to an AI. That we can have visuals imposed on words is often so much worse than those words working on their own in our minds.
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At least this is how I made one. You should make one too! I’m not usually someone that feels like the way I make things is of much direct value to other people. I feel the same about other artists’ work. I am interested in why artists make what they make and how they connect to a process for making but not as much in the techniques they might use. I know that I primarily learn and discover from direct experience and less so from following someone else’s patterns. In making my art book Imaginary Landscapes recently, I did realize…
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Poem I love by Gayla Trail from the Grow Curious second edition. Painting and design by me. Both editions of Grow Curious had watercolour and gouache paintings by me but the second edition was full colour and meant I could play a bit more with how the artwork was used. bookshop.org/p/books/gr…
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My connection to art making recently took a more curatorial turn. As I’ve showed in my last post, I was drawn back to work I had made in 2020 and made a small book from that work that I published. I feel very proud of the book and the revisiting this watercolour work in such a positive way has been helpful to me. My association with past work hasn’t always been a good one. Looking back on things I have made can sometimes be clouded by unwarranted self doubt. But I saw my own sense of beauty in the small…
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I’ve published a new art book! Imaginary Landscapes is a 7×7″ 32-page artist designed and published compilation of a series of my intuitive abstracted watercolour landscapes. This book has 34 paintings of natural spaces created purely from imagination and the properties of pigments in water. These small paintings, originally made in 2020 at 3×3″, have been sequenced and set as new complimentary pairs. Many of the paintings are presented at their original size as I quite love that scale as handheld portals into each of the natural worlds I painted. But part of my interest in pulling them together in…
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A recent post I made to Substack’s notes has been my only experience there of what is, for me at least, a “viral” post. I posted five images from a series of small watercolour “imaginary landscapes” that I made in 2020 and wondered whether they might make for an interesting zine. While I try not to pay too much attention to the number of likes and shares I get for things I post, it was hard to ignore getting roughly 500% more likes than one of my usual notes. The feelings I’ve had so far around those images getting far…
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Read a post where an artist said that they weren’t a perfectionist because they weren’t high achieving, were impatient, and not competitive. I don’t want to police anyone else’s view of themselves but can say from personal experience that perfectionism doesn’t need to have any of the things above to be true. Perfectionism can be messy and mid-performing. It can be fraught with impatience. It can be a purely solo competition.
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The other day a friend referred to something they devote a lot of time, energy, skill, and heart to as a hobby. I didn’t say anything in the moment but it struck me as wrong. This is something they are passionate about and have spent years working on but it isn’t how they earn an income. I felt that if that’s the measure of a hobby then many of the things that make up what I consider to be the best moments of my life and experience would qualify. Hobby feels like a diminishing term that tucks a vast set…
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I was thinking about these small watercolour imagined landscapes I made a few years ago and that they might make an interesting zine or chapbook. UPDATE: I made this book! Imaginary Landscapes https://ko-fi.com/s/e4e66e26a6