The posts here are shorter-form notes to capture thoughts, events, links, and images that don’t fit in my site’s main feed.
- Imagined landscape zine idea
I was thinking about these small watercolour imagined landscapes I made a few years ago and that they might make an interesting zine or chapbook.
- Comfort
Regular Pace, Davin Risk 2025 This is the twentieth panel in my Openwork series. There is a rhythm and pattern in making these that feels good to me. Not that I don’t struggle when making them since there are points of discomfort in making each one. But discomfort in art making isn’t necessarily a sign of success or failure.
- On the table
A Saturday morning drawing continuing my Openwork series. Most of my recent work is done on this slab of particle board that I got for free at a local art club sale. I enjoy the layers of pint that have accumulated around the square ratio of these Masonite panel drawings.
- I have been
Many years ago, one of several art practices I had was placing these simple stickers around the city in a variety of locations. They were small and probably mostly got ignored given the layers upon layers of visual information encountered daily in a city life.
But my intent was a simple one. That anyone who may have read this text was connected to me through the straightforward meaning of the words. That the words can also hold an alternative meaning, an assumption of shared human experience and understanding was part of my intent too. Not that I could understand each viewer/reader and what they had dealt with in life but that we all live and share space and have emotions.
Small gestures can draw intangible lines between us all.
- Hobbies
Thinking about the things we call “hobbies” and how that term is used to diminish what are in some cases those things that truly fill us and let us connect with ourselves.
Where we find joy, play, discovery, and connection should be the core of our lives despite how it connects to success or money.
- Light and Heavy unpublished
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.
- The lives of artists
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 and put them forward for other people to experience.
- Family paper
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 envelope and paper that were mixed with the art.
- Framing the void
Sometimes the places where there has been an intention to create form their own unintentional creations.
- Done again
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.
As We May Think, 2024 That’s art sometimes. Our eyes and heads can need that false “done” moment to truly see something we have made.
- Snow day
Some improvised electric piano playing. Improv is all I know because I don’t know how to play the piano in at least a technical sense.
- Digital boundaries
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”.
- Tool blindness
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 original tool. Echoes of a single nameless mark repeated.
Another Question of Density, 2024