Category: Notes
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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. https://youtu.be/hVGbgsYXDWc?si=_o9UuteJ5F45VgQf
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…