Category: Notes
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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 so I don’t generally consider the context of the left to right page spread but there are still elements that can’t help catch my eye and contribute something. In this case, the left page has a photo of the 1976 Olympic Stadium. I decided to…
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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 from an “active” surface like a designed book page — the book can act like a passive collaborator.
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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 feet away from the coffee machine. I have never been as good at instilling the same ritual and rhythm into my making. I will have periods where I make something everyday and then I stop and it takes some intention and even effort to start…
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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 suddenly back and I leapt on her cuddling her deeply and joyfully yelling that she was back. I could see and feel her body with such specificity and reality. It was just a few wonderful moments of dreamtime. I woke with a start and immediately…
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When walk out in the yard after lunch these days we can’t help but feel Molly’s absence. The paths she would take through the garden and the spots along the way that she always revisited to check for “messages” from other animals passing through. Part of the joy of living with Molly was getting to experience her maps and pathways. She would sometimes stubbornly insist on going a different direction than where we were headed. She found her own plants for healing and enjoyment to munch on and had such a curiosity for everything happening in this shared natural space.…
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I haven’t made any artwork for about a month. We have been caring for our sweet dog Molly as mast cell cancer affected her little body. We lost her last week. Losing her has torn and shifted us in so many ways. She was with us for almost 14 years and, with her loss, the dimensions of her presence in our lives have shown themselves to be so many times her physical size. She filled every room and beyond. I have experienced grief before. Family has passed and friends have gone from illness and accident. Those loses rippled out over…
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Latest drawing in the Red Book.
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Update from the earlier photo showing the light, but wet!, first snowfall (more like slushfall) we got this afternoon. Gayla was saying that we can look forward to a fairly different snow-covered garden this season given how much has changed over the year. There’s a kind of winter architecture that’s exciting in gardens. We leave most structures and plants in place over winter so lots of aspects will catch snow in unique ways.
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A short video with photographer Jem Southam that was linked from Jörg Colberg’s newsletter. Watch the video here Southam expresses in the video the process of discovery in creating The Red River body of work. Though my own landscape photography work is far less practiced (mostly non-existent these days) I feel a kinship with how he describes the subconscious sense of connection between visualizing the sense of a place. … I recommend Colberg‘s long and short form writing primarily on photography. Find him here at his site CPHMag.
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I wrote a second post for the new Much Quality publication that Gayla and I started recently. American Beauty is a look at fan-art, archives, subcultures, and digital ephemera.
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Dark and wet morning but the fall colours are still revealing themselves. We have a patch of snow forecast for this afternoon/evening but like most November snows of recent years it will likely only last a day.
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I’ve been scoring my sourdough loaves with an X recently and today’s turned out really nicely. Making simple bread at home is such a rewarding thing. It’s a remarkably easy thing to do with three very basic ingredients.
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This is the 16th drawing in the Red Book. I started this page with some loose “blackout poetry” that provided the main phrase that I later added with some vintage white Letraset. I found a thick roll of heavy striped wrapping paper at the thrift store and I love the high-contrast punch it adds. I tend to work between blends of colour and texture up against bits of higher contrast. I like to use black in my drawings especially but mostly try to balance it or ground it within other structures like grids. So far the drawings in the Red…
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Sometimes Google Street View provides snapshots so rich with narrative they beg for whole novels of story to spill out from the blurred faces of the people frozen in them. Kimball, Nebraska 2024
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I have only a tiny fleck of hope that this showy orchestrated “peace” will allow fewer Palestinian families to be murdered. I have basically zero trust that their lives have been considered at all as part of this phased approach to bringing Palestine further under Western control. Most of our countries are complicit in a variety in a variety of ways and can’t wait to now profit off the vast project of building anew on a pulverized nation-sized graveyard. As always, may Palestinians find their own true freedom, peace, agency, sovereignty, and dignity.
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This page in the Red Book was interesting not only because it was mostly blank but because the part that was printed had such a strong piece of text to react to. As I’ve said before, my primary reason for working in a printed book like this is the “active ground” of each page. There’s always something there that provokes a response. The response might be erasure or highlight depending on the page. I was also trying some new materials here and some infrequent techniques. My partner Gayla tipped me to using oil sticks on vellum as a transfer paper.…
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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.…
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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 baseline grid there was a lot to work with. I was conscious of partially erasing the colonial statue in the centre of the photo but liked the architecture and the mixture of walking and seated people. The text was spontaneous but I do find that…
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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 drew in the lower squares but also conceptually relates to the “acquisition” of visual sensations — me thinking about photography while drawing.
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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 elementary school spelling texts in our collection. I’m not sure where it’s originally from. I often look to those books for strings of unrelated words to prompt my drawings but occasionally longer passages stand out. I also started adding letters and numbers somewhat like a…
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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 we assign meaning to.
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An imaginary landscape I drew today. It feels as hot as this looks today.
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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 and the program was Multicolor Character Generator. We spent ages reading out the many many lines of machine code while Vince typed it in to the VIC-20. We got it wrong at least once. Sorry Vince! The program, written by some guy named Bill Gates,…
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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.