The posts here are shorter-form notes to capture thoughts, events, links, and images that don’t fit in my site’s main feed.
- A snippet of conversation about taking photos
When I say document, I mean it less in the “recorded for historical reasons” sense and more in the “just hold on to this for a little bit longer” sense. Holding the firefly of memory in cupped hands but knowing that it must eventually be released.
I wanted to save my analogy and also clearly it is firefly season.
- Experience
Determined that standing in the dark of our yard trying to take pictures of fireflies is far less rewarding than just standing in the dark of our yard experiencing fireflies.
- Colour
The other day, Andy Adams asked folks on Substack about their photos that explored colour. While I don’t actively think of myself as a photographer these days, it made me think about self-initiated trends I would follow like seeking out pops of red.
- Amateur Escapist
Assembled Dots and Feelings, 2015 10 years ago I started an online group art “zine” called Amateur Escapist. I meant it to be a series of themed issues but I got self conscious about it so there was only ever one issue.
But every once in a while, I open the website and think, hmm should I do this again?
- Openwork 30
The final drawing in my Openwork series. A couple different things on my mind starting soon.
Made Ready, Davin Risk 2025
- Ending Openwork
A short video I made before making the final drawing in my Openwork series tonight.
- Endings
This Masonite panel will be the surface for the last drawing in my Openwork series. There will be 30 drawings total and that number is somewhat arbitrarily set by how many of these dollar store panels I was able to find before they stopped stocking them.
I’m happy with the number of drawings regardless and feel like it’s time to shift away from that path at least temporarily anyway.
- Nations aren’t people
My drawings are almost never about one thing but this one definitely came from a place of deep frustration, anger, and sadness. People are being murdered daily and I am drawing. There’s a hard balance to be living a life of relative peace and be a distant witness to a diabolic genocide broadcast each day.
Redacted Flag on my work board - Vibes
Getting hot. Allergies ramping up. Scent of roses in the air.
- Good Life
Yesterday I made bread. Today I sat in the shade of a pear tree and marvelled at this beautifully wispy sky. These acts aren’t connected other than being core moments of an undeniably good life.
- Capsule World
We have a small cherry tree under a protective mesh bag and in the sunlight it becomes its own little world.
It reminded me of this beautiful photo experiment by Diana Pappas and Tom Bland – https://pappasbland.com/17
- The Ledger
I recorded this flip through of my book work project I nicknamed “the ledger”. I made 149 drawings in this 90+ year-old insurance ledger starting in 2020. In this video I talk in real time about the project, some of the drawings, and patterns in my work that have continued after finishing the book.
- 1:1
Another 44 minutes in 44 seconds
Here’s me making Hold True earlier tonight. This is the 28th drawing in my Openwork series. Two more and the series will be complete.
- Openwork #28
Hold True, 2025 - Hot Tip
I recommend wandering in a naturalized quarry filled with 300–400 million year old fossilized sea floor life.
- 44 minutes in 44 seconds
The Same Duet, start to finish. I don’t often start from dark or black ground but it definitely shapes the negative space in these drawings in an interesting way.
- Humanity
What sometimes gets missed when people talk about AI and visual art is that there is this assumption that mimicry of style can replace real artwork.
But despite the fact that many of us see artwork on screens these days, artwork still exists in physical forms and it’s hopeful point of connection is personal, tactile, and multifaceted.
Even a simple piece of paper with a sketch will always be better than a tool that primarily can only output to screens.
Of course systems can be devised that bridge AI output to physical forms but in its dominate consumer form, AI can only assemble pictures on a screen. Not that pictures on a screen don’t have power and emotion, but it’s just the shallow end of the depths that we can fully experience artwork.
It’s why zines, even in their most simple folded paper forms have so much power. Holding something in your hands and turning its pages, feeling the paper, seeing it in different lights, the sound of paper, the scent of paper. There is humanity in that.
- Openwork Closing
I’m nearing the end of my Openwork series. I made this drawing tonight and I believe it’s number 27. I think it will be hard and somewhat freeing when this series finishes. I think it’s helpful to me create a somewhat arbitrary point where the series ends.
The Same Duet, 2025 In this case, the ending is based simply on the fact that I am about to run out of the dollar store Masonite panels these have been made on. I could continue and just shift the form but it feels better to end.
Ending forms this higher level space around what will be 30 drawings. It connects each drawing to each other.
- Slow
I make most of my artwork in single sittings and it’s something I have occasionally held against myself. But I have the most comfort and connection with making when I just sit down to start making something and I am done within an hour or less.
I say hold it against myself because there are many artists that research, sketch, build maquettes and dummies, and more before then possibly committing to an approach. And then they may take hours, days, months, years to complete a single project.
I can rationally know that every person’s practice and each medium is different but there’s still that point of comparison that can come in that makes me ask myself, “Should I be slower?” “Would slowing down make me more intentional?”
- Time
- Openwork
Latest piece in my Openwork series. These have slowed down for me. Or art making as slowed down and these are just where I am right now.
Gold into Lead, 2025 The series will finish (at least in this incarnation) soon since I am almost out of the cheap Masonite panels these are made on.
Once the series is resolved, I need to document them properly and then I’ll put them up for sale. And then I might make a book with them, not sure yet.
- Future View
Garden shed, May 27, 2025 This morning in the garden. We recently did some work on the bed in the foreground which will eventually be the backdrop for the pond we are digging. We planted a small Japanese Maple that will someday reflect in that future pond.
It is strangely life affirming to work at a pace that connects with years ahead of us.
- Lead or follow
Neighbours a few house away keep pigeons and we see them some days doing their fast racing loops. There seems to be a pace bird that flies in front and then drops back as they arc to guide the flock into their next loop.
- Gull in Flight
Here are two videos of the recent beach ephemeral, “Gull”, I made in collaboration with my partner Gayla Trail.
Gull in a light breeze Gull in its shadow form Because these are dimensional temporary art works, I like to think of them as existing in many forms at the same time.
I try to take photos and video to document them but they often don’t capture what I see/feel/think experiencing them.
- Actions
In our previous home in the city, I would take a photo from the rear window most days of the garden behind the house. Those images showed the subtle changes day to day that became broader changes with time.
View from my work room window this morning. In this home here in a small town, I haven’t kept up the practice mostly because our windows are scratched 1950’s tempered glass and don’t make for clear photos.
But I’ve taken it up again because I reminded myself that the practice wasn’t about the clarity or quality of the photos but the act of making a record.
I need to remind myself more often that even a “flawed” action can develop into a record or a voice that can ring true.
- Reboot
Slight work desk reboot.
I like a certain degree of chaos in my art making space. I tend to thrive on some level of happenstance in reacting to what’s at hand.
But I haven’t been connecting with this work space as much as I would like over the last few months and so I took a few minutes this morning and bit a bit of basic tidying and sorting.
It’s enough that I can reset both the desire to make connections and also the facility with which I can make them without becoming overwhelmed.
- Beach ephemerals, “Gull”
It has been a while since I worked on one of these and I especially like when I can create a set of balanced elements that respond to the breeze.
- Unintentional land art
- Zine in progress
Zine plotting continues. I made a couple of these mini dummies at half the size of the final zine. Handy for scrawling notes inside to get a sense of content and page sequencing.
This zine will be issue 1 in a series based on an idea I had a few years ago.
Trying to keep the production scrappy but special — handmade but not backbreaking.
- Unsent Prompts
Idea for a book of poems. A set of generative text prompts never sent to an AI.
That we can have visuals imposed on words is often so much worse than those words working on their own in our minds.
- Gardening is Resistance
Poem I love by Gayla Trail from the Grow Curious second edition.
Painting and design by me.
Both editions of Grow Curious had watercolour and gouache paintings by me but the second edition was full colour and meant I could play a bit more with how the artwork was used.
- Cottonwood ghost
- Perfectionism
Read a post where an artist said that they weren’t a perfectionist because they weren’t high achieving, were impatient, and not competitive.
I don’t want to police anyone else’s view of themselves but can say from personal experience that perfectionism doesn’t need to have any of the things above to be true.
Perfectionism can be messy and mid-performing. It can be fraught with impatience. It can be a purely solo competition.
- 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.
UPDATE: I made this book!
Imaginary Landscapes
https://ko-fi.com/s/e4e66e26a6
- 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