Category: Notes
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Thinking about zines and artist publishing in general so I pulled out this unreleased book of photography I made in 2013. This was based on a 2009 trip we took to Barbados and Dominica where my partner Gayla was exploring her heritage. I’m pretty proud of these photos and also how they came together in this form.
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Artists’ lives are just plain human lives. Making breakfast and coffee. Caring for pets or children. Going to work. Watching TV and reading books. There’s nothing special. But there is a choice to see and hear and feel and to make something from that that is for ourselves but also for other people. There is a giving in that that is special. Not that all artists are somehow pure of heart — far from it — but it does take physical and emotional labour to expose our everyday and to seek the words, images, sounds, and ephemeral sensations through making…
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Pages Marked, Davin Risk, 2025 I received some of my mother’s high school sketches and early design work tonight that she didn’t have space to store anymore. I’m sentimental in my way and I said I would store them and would enjoy looking back at them. Some of them were from before my birth and others from my early teens. There were also a few pieces of my own childhood and teenage art in the mix that were interesting to see again after so many years. After looking through it all I made this drawing and used some bits of…
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Sometimes the places where there has been an intention to create form their own unintentional creations.
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I made this drawing yesterday and after “finishing” it I had a hunch and I rotated it upside down and then back and forth a few times until the upside down orientation became its true finished state. That’s art sometimes. Our eyes and heads can need that false “done” moment to truly see something we have made.
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As much as digital creation comes with some facility and convenience I still prefer working with physical media. Digital has that kind of “anything is possible” promise but actually often feels like there are more limitations than what can be done with a bunch of drawing, painting, gluing, layering, blending. And my mind and body feel differently when working physically. Not just the bodily sensations of making gestures with media on a variety of surfaces but there’s a change in how I engage with the actions and presence of making things “in person”.
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Another Question of Density One of the issues/interests I have with digital drawing is something I’m naming “tool blindness”. I can choose from so many simulated tools and then within those I can choose colour, size, opacity, and more. But the mode of drawing only shows those things as settings and it’s only in the mark that follows the Pencil that I see the shape of the tools. It’s not like grabbing a palette knife and knowing it’s width and feeling the reciprocal tension between the drawing surface, the tool, and my hand. The digital tools are ghosts of the…