These are shorter-form notes to capture thoughts, events, links, and images that don’t fit in my site’s main feed.
- From the vow made
We were watching a video of a conversation with British painter Rose Wylie and they were looking at a short series of hers in the style of retablos or ex votos — usually small paintings honouring a saint or showing a moral story.
We have a few wonderful Mexican ex votos painted on tin and part of what I love about them is the tight text at the bottom of each image. That was true of Rose Wylie’s versions as well and it made me wonder about trying something in that format for myself.
Gayla had brought out some cheap dollar store markers we have and I found an old half-used Strathmore grey-paged notebook and made a few drawings quirking pulling text from nearby books.
I don’t want to fully mimick the style of ex votos — although I have seen that done quite well by people like Esther Pearl Watson.
But there is definitely something that feels good to me in this format that I should follow up on in some other form.
- Red Book 36 – Live Drawing
I did a Substack live video drawing and talking through the making of the most recent page in the Red Book.
https://open.substack.com/pub/davinrisk/p/red-book-live-drawing
- Starter Magic
The simple act of “activating” a sourdough starter culture is both mundane and alchemical. There is a magic in tending to this basic mix of flour, water, and the myriad invisible yeasts that reside in spaces around us.
And then the power of this seemingly inert goop to spring into action and allow me to turn more flour and water into a loaf of rich soft and crusty bread is a secondary magic.
- Firefly Season
Since moving here one time of the year I look forward to is when we first start seeing the magical blinking and trailing lights of fireflies. It’s been a mostly cool spring here but with a heat wave coming on and the night feeling heavier and humid I felt like I might see them. So I went into a dark room that looked out on our mostly unlit backyard (neighbours on one side have permanent “security” lights) and yes, firefly season has begun.
- Images as Wayfinding
Sometimes I buy an old book from a thrift store or junk shop simply for one image inside. In this case, this image is from a 1927 book called, Brock’s Book on Birds, which seems to be one of those advertising in book form that was fairly common in the 1920–30s especially.
This very unique etching is in the chapter “Washing Canaries”. I loved the oddity of the rather awkwardly posed hand and the softly dismayed canary. It’s the sort of image that makes me want to make something without having any idea what.
That happens to me where I see something and a bunch of things tilt in a direction to pull my attention towards an initial curiosity that branches and takes me somewhere very different.
I’m not going to suddenly make art that connects in any recognizable way to having a suitably clean canary but these points of attention are still mental landmarks for me along a creative path.
- Sing a Plastic Song
Juvenile songbirds sing what is called a plastic song which means they are still learning their mature set of calls. I like to think sometimes that the plastic phase is what I hope to stay within in terms of art making and experience in general. I want to stay malleable and flexible while making the occasional “mistake”.
- It’s the gift not the wrapping
A conversation with a friend got me thinking about the pressure to start something new as an already formed, planned, and polished production. I prefer when things are raw and forming somewhat in real time.
I think it’s good for things to be rough around the edges but these days it feels like these are a lot of “brands” that feel like pretty wrapping around an empty box.
I’d rather have an unwrapped gift handed to me by someone.
- Haven
This is drawing number 35 in the Red Book. You can see me make this drawing in this video.
- Live Drawing
- More inputs than outputs
- Window Screen Pointillism
I enjoy how the harsh grid of the window screening softens the view into a light Gaussian blur.
- One Body Everywhere
Red Book drawing number 33. First use of enlarged thermal printer marks in a drawing.
- Texture Foraging
More thermal printing adventures. The phone to printer to copier flow makes for some great ways to take previous artwork and also bits and pieces of my home environment and change their context.
I gang up the small thermal prints on a quarter Letter page and then copy them at 100 and 200%. And then sometimes another 200% for good patches of texture.
I also use any extra space on the paper to do quick mark making so that can also be copied/enlarged.
- Reproduction as Mark Making
- In progress – Red Book Drawing 33
I have been picking away at this one over a few short sessions — while making coffee. The black structured forms follow the mostly hidden text that was on the page. I think I’ll be pulling some of the enlarged thermal print images into this so I am curious to see how that feels.
I also bought another book from the thrift store that will become some form of project book like this. More on that soon.
- Universe in a Jar
We collected this water, soil, and plant material from two vernal pools that regularly form where we live. It is amazing to get this view into the under-the-surface activity of these ephemeral ponds. There are fairy shrimp, daphnia, worms, what look like gastropods, more that we can’t identify, and likely so much more at the microscopic level.
- Enhance!
This is exactly why I was interested in thermal prints. There’s a whole complex world of marks and matrices as I enlarge and then enlarge again (and again!).
- Thermal printing experiments
Made some 200% enlarged copies of the thermal prints. Fun to make secondary drawings on the copied versions. I’ll try also making some 400% copies next just to really zoom in on the pure texture and move passed the frame of the original drawings.
- Experiments in Dithering
We recently bought a few low cost and low quality ways to make thermal prints. It was an idea my partner Gayla and I both had for some time without either of us acting upon it. We both wanted a form of low committal analogue output to use in a variety of not fully discovered art projects.
Both of us had been nudged back into thinking and action by recently seeing other artists incorporate thermal printing into their work. Gayla sourced a few different toy camera and printer options in the $20–40 range and placed some orders.
Not knowing exactly what the outcome or the plan is, tracks with much of both of our art processes over the years. We each like to explore and discover how and what we make by learning and doing.
For me, the first thing I was drawn to was the coarse dithered black only rendering of the thermal images. Some of the thermal print options will output more tonal “greyscale” images but I really prefer the prints that are crappier and even a bit harsh in their dithering process.
I wondered about blowing up the textures of the prints for a variety of images and using them as collage materials. And I likely will do that. But the first thing that has piqued my interest is printing out images of my Red Book drawings. I am printing to a ~$20 thermal printer that uses a 57mm-wide roll of paper. This is the exact same kind of paper store receipts get printed to. There is nothing precious and certainly not archival about this as a material and that is much of the point.
These tiny images and the way they strip and condense the details of my drawings are interesting to me. I don’t think of them as a way to actually reproduce my drawings but more as a lateral way of using that work to make something connected but new.
I don’t know what that will be yet and that’s the exciting part.
- It always snows in April
At least here in Ontario, the credo/reminder always holds true.
- Effective Speech
Red Book drawing 32
This one is thick with paper and paint layers. At one point the yellow and orange paint was very dominant as it has been in previous drawings but I wanted to try pushing that back and so I brushed on and then scraped away some white gesso. It made things extra patchy and messy but it mostly did what I wanted by subduing some aspects and letting other parts come forward.
- The Complexity of Trees
I think that complexity and simplicity, chaos and stillness can reside together much of the time. Lately I have been thinking about the density and complexity of trees. As living presences, trees might be thought of a pure and simple, a respite from manufactured stressful complexity. But they aren’t all that simple and are embodiments of visual layers upon layers can be seen as a whole.
Visual art can be like that too. Marks placed upon other marks, paper pasted sheet upon sheet, paint mixing and thickening. The visual results aren’t always simple but there is still a singular nature to a work of art no matter how layered and complex it might be.
…
This was written as a comment on this post by Manuela Thames.
- Semi-imaginary Orchard
This mini orchard does exist. We have a row of three mature pear trees and an even older apple growing in the land where we live. But this sketch of the three pears is imagined in that I didn’t look at a reference or go out there and draw them from sight. I do want to try some plain air drawing out there this year though — something I’m not familiar with at all.
I added a few leaves to these imagined versions of our pears but they don’t actually even have leaf buds at this time of the year.
What is represented somewhat accurately is the spacing between the trees and which currently have other companion plants growing underneath them. There is also a small patch of raspberries between two of the trees.
- Land/Body
I was looking for something else in my insane camera roll and came across photos and a short video of this Land/Body piece from 2017. It was one of three that I made in this circular landscape format with these rough nervous system figures attached.
It was a rare case where I submitted the three pieces to a show and two of them actually sold. I hadn’t documented all three so I now only have some vague memories of what they all looked like finished and some in-progress shots.
Each had a different imagined landscape painting and unique carved balsa figure.
Finding this again made me realize that I want to play with this kind of dimension again. I loved the shadow play in this case especially as the video shows.
- Imaginary Pine
This is a pine tree sketched from memories of recently seen pine trees. Trees are so difficult to represent because they take up space and have a type of visual density that can be hard to articulate.
I don’t mind this little sketch but it does feel more like a drawing of a scale model of a tree? I intentionally tried to place some of the imagined branches moving away from the front of the view but it still reads a bit flat like the tree only has one side.
Nature is wonderful and hard to capture which is also a wonderful thing.
- On Websites
Something I wrote in an email thread with other artists/makers…
My sense of websites, having had lots over the years that I started, finished, redesigned, endlessly tweaked, and deleted, is that they are never done and that is what can make them great.
The “finished” or “ready” website is often too late to do what we want it to do. It can feel immediately static or out of sync with where we are. Websites are, by nature, fluid and changeable things and so it can be wonderful to just let them do that and connect us with where we are.
I think the harder question is whether to narrow the focus of a website to display one version of ourselves. I have struggled with that. My current website is me in the various states that my creative practice takes but doesn’t really touch much on what I have done to make money over the last 30+ years as a designer and only lightly touches on the years in which photography was my primary art form.
We spilt ourselves into these versions of identity.
- Known and Imagined
A small sketch as I lay in bed with my leg elevated after knee surgery yesterday. This view has similarities to the woods at the back of the land we live on. The branches and forms made from quick scratchy pencil marks are imagined and don’t actually reference the true natural makeup of that space.
Despite mostly making abstract artwork, when I actually set out to “sketch”, natural forms are usually what comes out. This is also the kind of mark making I give myself the most trouble with. As soon as a drawing attempts to represent something real, my inner critic rises up to full height.
Something intended to convey an impression of a space always falls short to me. Possibly because the set of impressions natural spaces can make on us are so deep and multifaceted that I ask too much of my pencil marks.
- Mail Art from Wade Johnston
The other day, multidisciplinary artist Wade Johnston posted about a postcard project he was starting up for fun. I jumped at the chance to receive something human in my mailbox and even better a handmade piece of mail art.
And it was all I hoped for. Wade’s postcard has one of his artworks affixed to the front and then the back also has a print from his thrifted Kodak Memo Shot thermal printer/camera.
I have been curious about getting a little thermal printer for collage work so it was an extra bonus to have that as part of this artwork.
Thank you Wade!
- Sometimes Remember
- As Little Time
This is the 30th drawing in the Red Book.
I was both looking forward to drawing on this page and also had a certain level of anxiety.
The photo at the top of Jesse Owens in mid jump is such a powerful image to react to that I knew I would want it to stay the focus of this drawing. That comes with anxiety because I don’t normally have anything preconceived or assumed before I start drawing.
Not that I knew at all what I would do ahead of time but just simply that one aspect of the existing page was more important to me than normal.
I think it worked out.
As Little Time (Jesse), 2026 - Aim is True
- Red Book 29 – In Progress
Because the book that forms the container/surface for the Red Book drawings is a 1976 Olympics commemorative book, it’s not surprising that some of the existing photos and illustrations are sports related.
That aspect has nothing to do with why I chose this book to work in and in many contradictory ways I want to avoid those direct associations.
This particular page I’m currently working on had a colour diagram of a stadium layout. I enjoyed the pop of green as something to react to but didn’t want the sports stadium aspect to feel like it was a focal point. That may not really be up to me in the end of course so we’ll see when I finish this drawing how that aspect sits.
- Old Light, New Ghosts
Before our neighbour’s very large Manitoba Maple tree fell on our garage I would take night sky photos with it in frame and had named it Ghost Tree. Since then this tall but much smaller and further away from our garage Cottonwood tree has become the New Ghost. It doesn’t have the same presence as the other tree but it still adds some drama to these shots.
On clear nights when our relatively countryside-adjacent property doesn’t have much light pollution — other than the same neighbours’ perpetual backyard security lights — I love star bathing. Moving out here from Toronto has had me marvelling at just how many stars I can see on many nights.
- First Frost / Final Bloom
I ordered this gorgeous photo zine from Diana Pappas and Tom Bland and it came this week. The photos themselves are wonderful but the storytelling and the overall care in how they designed and packaged it really shines.
Get your own! https://pappasbland.com/fffb
- Beautifully Ugly
At a plaza here in town recently, I saw this scene from a distance in the fog and drove over to snap a few phone shots. This is a development site for new housing that used to be meadow and a pretty woods I hiked through a few times.
A deep swath of the woods was cut down and the meadow scraped down and this year it looks like there is further excavation to probably make way for utilities and such.
It’s an ugly eyesore and sure, people need homes but the way we treat the land to make that happen is pretty shocking.
But in the peculiar light of a foggy day, there is still a kind of beauty and mystery to be found.
- No Contact
In May 2007 I created an outdoor photo show in reaction to the large photography show Contact taking place in Toronto at the time.
Down the block from our apartment near Queen and Dufferin was a brownfield site with a tall chain link fence along the sidewalk.
I snuck in a back gate and made my way down a rough slope into the tangled brush behind the fence and arranged 36 photos I had printed at 2×3″ and mounted on popsicle sticks.
The size and the placement of the photos where less about people seeing my photos and more about people passing by and engaging with the non-space parts of the city that go unnoticed.
Those parts of the city were the subject of many of my photos from that time. The in-between and behind areas and the worn and broken elements. I was drawn to the suggested stories of things left behind but also simply to the beauty of texture and light in the city.
I watched in the weeks afterwards as the photos faded and fell off their sticks blowing away and mixing with the trash that always collected behind the fence.
- Show Your Arms
Red Book 28
I wanted to be blocky and messy and I got messy for sure. There were more heavy black shapes initially but the impulse to make grids won out.
- Just Fall
- Red Book – Project Update
I have posted a new video with a casual progress report about my Red Book project. I talk through the first 25 drawings and demonstrate how I react to the active surface of the pages as I draw.
- There is No Record
Drawing 26 in the Red Book
- Red Book 26 – In progress
- Time Machines
All books are mechanisms for traversing time and space. These two books that I recently grabbed at the thrift store do that in multiple ways.
These Choose Your Own Adventure titles first came out in the lates 1970s and were just the thing for me as a pre-teen reader. I was reading the Narnia books and Madeleine L’Engle’s time warping novels. I also read loads of Ray Bradbury, Asimov, and harder science fiction like Larry Niven’s Ringworld books that mostly went over my head.
I was into computers and fantasy at the same time so there was something about stories that felt like smart adventures.
- Solid Phase
Red Book 25
- Beach Fog
Foggy and melting at this beach today. As I arrived there was a couple in their full wedding clothes trudging through the slushy snow with three photographers including a drone pilot.
I guess they were trying to catch the magical feeling of the fog bubble today. The lake was essentially invisible, just a wall of hazy wall of white.
- Over Winter
Foggy day in our little almost post-industrial lake shipping town. A bunch of the big lake ships are moored and over-winter for a couple of months.
- Open Again
Open Again
This is drawing number 24 in the Red Book, my current active surface drawing project.
Some of the last marks I added to this as I finished it this morning were two lists of five words. Lists of words have been common in my drawings over the last 10 years. I enjoy the somewhat random poetry they can evoke and also the visual shape of words and words in sequence.
Sometimes the words are pulled from a source text—like one of the 80+ year-old elementary school spelling books my partner and I collect—and other times they are just words that rise from my mind. Single words that suggest other words in turn, not to form sentences but to arrange in an associative matrix. You can see them just as words on their own or as a path to follow.
Might
Laced
Marks
Mirror
Loose
Lines - Movement by increments
- Edges
A physical artefact of an ephemeral time and place on the web. Joshua Davis’ Praystation Harddrive released roughly 25 years ago.
It was a time when the web meant exploration, discovery, and community to me. It was rough around the edges but if you looked you could see those edges and follow them.
The web now mostly feels like an infinitely sprawling grid of big box stores with the occasional service road and even more rare raw alleyway. The alleys are where the edges still exist, they are just much harder to access.
Let’s still make things. Digital and physical things that come from our heads, hearts, and hands. Let’s share what we make in public, in private, in secret. We can connect and find the edges together.
- Another two minutes
I think soon I will sit down at this table and spend more than two minutes making marks. But before then, it is good to still stand here for two minutes to draw grid lines and paste down paper towards something.
Marks and motion towards something are better than receding away from things.
- Unblocking
Other than some work-related sketching, I hadn’t engaged in making anything visual since the beginning of January. My last time sitting at my work table was literally on January 1st.
There have been things that felt like barriers — most of them of my own creation. There has been grief and frustration with myself and a variety of external circumstances both mundane and cultural.
Art making comes from an emotional place for me and while it can be an “unblocker” it can also be one of the first things to become blocked.
Last night I spent two minutes doing this. Unblocking can start with one mark or take a hundred. We will see.
- Orion searches for the seven sisters.
- Cold cold lake view
- Still here
- Almost a Bruegel
- Paper Circles
One simple thing I enjoy weekly is cutting the rough circles of parchment paper that go under my bread dough when it is placed in the Dutch oven.
That basic act of cutting a circle from a square feels like a creative act. It is throw away but still has a degree of care that feels good to have in my life.
I also enjoy scoring the dough and lately I’ve been making floral / sunburst cuts.
- Plans for Nigel
We have been approved to adopt a rescue dog from Texas. He will arrive in Canada on January 17th. He was found on the streets and he is a possible Soft-coated Wheaton terrier and Poodle mix — a Whoodle!
When we lost Molly my initial impulse was that I could never go through that heartbreak again. But then, as we worked to process the intense grief, I learned that my heart would be more affected by never having the presence of a dog in our lives again.
So we started looking at rescue listings again and had an initial disappointment as one dog we had started to fall in love with from a distance was adopted ahead of our application.
Rescue adoptions have become quite complex since we adopted Molly 14 years ago. There is now much more care and detail in the process which presented some hurdles but we appreciate the care involved.
We got wonderful references from three friends and spoke with a dedicated rep from the rescue learning more about the absolutely dire situation for abandoned dogs in Texas.
We are so happy to soon have little Nigel (the name we are giving him) come into our home.
- Mess in progress
Sometimes I just end up smearing things around for a while to see what sticks. Nothing sticking on this one yet.
- New Year at Lake Erie
Very very cold at the lake but it’s good to see this view through another flip of the calendar.
- Happy New Year
- We Fade – Red Book 22
The original page’s text in red, Citius Altius Fortius means Faster Higher Stronger in Latin. Not exactly a credo I would put much stock in. Which is probably why my reaction was the downer We Fade text. Sorry, Olympians.
- Celebration – Red Book 21
- December Rain
- In progress – Celebration
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 reference that photo by painting a rectangle of the same ratio on the right page in luminous pink.
So far, this drawing is fairly “minimal” — for me at least. I’ll likely have a bit of friction around that since it’s in my nature to over work things. We’ll see.
- Truly
Red Book 20
- In progress – Truly
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.
- Crystal Woods
- Someday a Pond
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.
- Active Orange
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.
- Hold On
- Lines started and continued
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 again.
I’ve been in one of those “dry” periods for a while. We were caring for Molly and then we lost her and in that I couldn’t find what was useful or important about making drawings.
Most of my drawings don’t go anywhere. They stay in the basement. Many may travel digitally to screens here and there and I don’t discount what that can mean. I have benefited and connected with many artists’ work solely through a computer or phone screen. I don’t want to engage in denigrating or negating my work simply because the majority of it stays physically here with me.
The lines, marks, shapes, and words I make stay with me but also move away from me. Art making is sometimes about pushing things away and sometimes about pulling things back in.
Over the last few days, while making coffee, I have gone over to my art table and made a few lines or dragged some paint around on a single drawing in my “red book” project book. For many people, visiting and revisiting a single drawing in process would be normal but for me, I tend to finish drawings in single sittings.
But right now I find that my capacity tells me that the way back is to just start a line on one day and continue it on the next. I need to take the time to breathe and feel and cry and know and the lines don’t care when they start and end.
The heart beats second to second and the days continue one to the next. We can’t tell the heart how to beat and our days are just shaped out of light and dark each one different in a similar box.
I made a coffee. I drew lines with red pencil and pasted down a scrap of gridded paper. I spoke with my partner. I wrote these words on my phone.
Life continues sadly and wonderfully with grief and joy in ebbs and flows.
- Shelter
- Molly in a Dream
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 tried to will myself back to sleep to continue feeling the dream reality of her. But waking reality intruded and even though I was able to return to sleep, I didn’t return to that vivid, physical space, just jumping non-sensical dream story-telling.
Awake now this morning I find myself with a bit of misplaced anger at my mind that it is capable of such complete connection with my memory of sensations in dreams but shuts me out from them otherwise. Aphantasia means that I can’t even bring an image of Molly into my head “on demand” let alone feel the warmth and shape of her little body in a snuggle.
But I don’t want to be angry with myself and the way my mind works. I just want my beautiful dog person/friend/daughter back and to treat my mind and body with tenderness and love.
- Bread in a time of sparkle and tears
- Almost Winter
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.
Love you Molly. Miss you.
- Lessons in Sacrifice
- Molly
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 years. Grief comes and goes — creeps and surprises. We see the faces of people lost in the streets on other people’s bodies and we feel them missing as our bodies make their way at through once familiar motions.
I have still been making bread each week and the simple flower-form cuts in the top of each loaf are the closest to a creative act I have felt capable of.
Making bread is a warming and sustaining act. It’s simple and has both an immediate purpose and a grounding sense as we tap the sweet scented loaf in a ritual my partner Gayla and I share.
…
I know that for my head, hands, and heart I need to return to the basement table where I make most of my art. I know that grief requires tenderness and patience.
Losing Molly, more than any other grief I have felt, is like a breach of the heart. I feel her everywhere and the love I have for her bounces around in me looking for what was its familiar wonderful previous direction. It’s a singular love for her as a being who became a deep part of our family.
She is gone but the aspects of her that touched me will always be there. The initial chaotic frenzy of my nervous system’s search for her will soften but I think I will always feel an absence around me and within me.
She is the closest to a child I have ever felt in my life. We cared for her deeply and she cared for us. She changed me by softening my heart towards her, externally to others, and internally to me allowing the tenderness I felt for her to also embrace parts of myself that needed soft care.
- Autumnal!
- Pass the Buck
Latest drawing in the Red Book.
- Near-winter Garden Shapes
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.
- Jem Southam – The Red River
A short video with photographer Jem Southam that was linked from Jörg Colberg’s newsletter.
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.
- Much Quality – American Beauty
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.
- November Reign
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.
- Wrestle
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.
- Loaf Pride
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.
- Events
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 Book are following patterns from my last Openwork series. But because I am reacting to the content and material of the existing book pages, there are adaptations and new pathways to explore.
- Words
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.
- Autumn evening gold
- Untitled Memoir
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
- Peace
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.
- Temple
Bombs that land without being dropped.
A peace prize for casual violence.
A sprawling social landscape without people.
Notwithstanding a human heart.
- Colour and the Future
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.
Colour and the Future, 2025 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.
The blank spread before any marks were made. 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. We recently purchased some luxurious R&F drawing oils and I got a highly pigmented orange that you can see in this drawing as transferred scribbles and rough grids.
- A Dark Wand
- End, Begin
- Until
There’s a sign above
That says, sorry we’re open
There’s a breaking chorus
That says, nobody’s happy
Nobody’s happy
Until
There’s a line below
That marks all that we’ve done
There’s a waking dawn
That says, the sun is above us
The sun is above us
Until - There is a Keen Transparency
- Atmosphere
- Describe the Shape of a Heart
- Stars
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 have lost their children, children with no one left. Thousands more still alive but limbless, deeply traumatized, waiting to die.
We are all responsible for them.
- Storm Grid
- Jewel
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.
