Category: Notes
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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A new quick start for a drawing in the Red Book. You can see the “blank” page in the second photo. The pages that have strong pre-existing images are interesting because depending on the image, my initial urge is to either highlight or obscure.
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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…
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The tiny angry pedant in my brain does backflips whenever I hear the word “aesthetic” used on its own as a description. E.g. “That’s so aesthetic.” I know… I should get out more.
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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…
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Bombs that land without being dropped. A peace prize for casual violence. A sprawling social landscape without people. Notwithstanding a human heart.
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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…
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There’s a sign aboveThat says, sorry we’re openThere’s a breaking chorusThat says, nobody’s happyNobody’s happyUntilThere’s a line belowThat marks all that we’ve doneThere’s a waking dawnThat says, the sun is above usThe sun is above usUntil
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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…
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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…
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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:…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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An imaginary landscape I drew today. It feels as hot as this looks today.
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This page showing the “Elements of Design” made me think about the recurring marks in my visual art. I have a palette or a lexicon of marks that I return to. They take different forms and are adapted to a variety of media.
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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…
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Just made this for fun to see myself removing marks instead of making them.
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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.
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One of the joys and difficulties of sharing things online as they are made is that reaction or lack of reaction can colour the process. I try my best to stick to what interests me first and to follow that thread where it takes me.
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Every great writer must __. Every great artist must __. Stop trying to assume that everyone walks the same path.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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Because the Red Book is an existing 1976 Olympics commemorative book, the date is likely to come up frequently on the pages. I was seven years old in 1976 and I feel like that year is going to inform some of these drawings in a way I can’t be conscious of just yet.