Category: Notes
-
I did a Substack live video drawing and talking through the making of the most recent page in the Red Book. https://open.substack.com/pub/davinrisk/p/red-book-live-drawing
-
The simple act of “activating” a sourdough starter culture is both mundane and alchemical. There is a magic in tending to this basic mix of flour, water, and the myriad invisible yeasts that reside in spaces around us. And then the power of this seemingly inert goop to spring into action and allow me to turn more flour and water into a loaf of rich soft and crusty bread is a secondary magic.
-
Since moving here one time of the year I look forward to is when we first start seeing the magical blinking and trailing lights of fireflies. It’s been a mostly cool spring here but with a heat wave coming on and the night feeling heavier and humid I felt like I might see them. So I went into a dark room that looked out on our mostly unlit backyard (neighbours on one side have permanent “security” lights) and yes, firefly season has begun.
-
Sometimes I buy an old book from a thrift store or junk shop simply for one image inside. In this case, this image is from a 1927 book called, Brock’s Book on Birds, which seems to be one of those advertising in book form that was fairly common in the 1920–30s especially. This very unique etching is in the chapter “Washing Canaries”. I loved the oddity of the rather awkwardly posed hand and the softly dismayed canary. It’s the sort of image that makes me want to make something without having any idea what. That happens to me where I…
-
Juvenile songbirds sing what is called a plastic song which means they are still learning their mature set of calls. I like to think sometimes that the plastic phase is what I hope to stay within in terms of art making and experience in general. I want to stay malleable and flexible while making the occasional “mistake”.
-
A conversation with a friend got me thinking about the pressure to start something new as an already formed, planned, and polished production. I prefer when things are raw and forming somewhat in real time. I think it’s good for things to be rough around the edges but these days it feels like these are a lot of “brands” that feel like pretty wrapping around an empty box. I’d rather have an unwrapped gift handed to me by someone.
-
I made drawing 34 in the Red Book live on video tonight. It was an experiment in the format and to get a sense for whether I would want to try it again. I’ll do a few more tests at least. Watch the live video
-
I enjoy how the harsh grid of the window screening softens the view into a light Gaussian blur.
-
Red Book drawing number 33. First use of enlarged thermal printer marks in a drawing.
-
More thermal printing adventures. The phone to printer to copier flow makes for some great ways to take previous artwork and also bits and pieces of my home environment and change their context. I gang up the small thermal prints on a quarter Letter page and then copy them at 100 and 200%. And then sometimes another 200% for good patches of texture. I also use any extra space on the paper to do quick mark making so that can also be copied/enlarged.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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…
-
At least here in Ontario, the credo/reminder always holds true.
-
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.
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.
-
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
-
Drawing 26 in the Red Book
-
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…
-
Red Book 25
-
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.
-
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.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.
-
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.…
-
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.
-
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…
-
Sometimes I just end up smearing things around for a while to see what sticks. Nothing sticking on this one yet.
-
Very very cold at the lake but it’s good to see this view through another flip of the calendar.
-
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.