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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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I recommend Colberg‘s long and short form writing primarily on photography. Find him here at his site CPHMag.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 that they might tsk tsk more sternly next time unless people are given access to the absolute sub-basics for survival. But nothing further happens and the handshakes and polite official meetings continue.
There’s nothing complex about all of these ended families and those degraded daily. We see the photos and video of bodies twisted and crushed, stacked and buried by bulldozer. The most shared atrocities we’ve ever lived through popping up on social feeds with tapped hearts floating up.
Our hearts wish for an end and our minds search for a reason other than hatred and greed.
Life, sovereignty, and dignity for Palestinian people.
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 thrill in even seeing one so I didn’t really need a spectacle.
More tonight if you have a dark enough sky. Standing in the dark quietly and facing the universe doesn’t hurt even if you can’t see a single star.
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.
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 the words that popped into my head that are broken up in the lower grid cells.
I’ve read a few of things recently about the use of words in artwork—how they can be a distraction and lead a viewer towards an interpretation. I think of drawn words as a form of mark making that happen to suggest meaning. And I also feel that words and imagery together don’t necessarily compact meaning or stifle emotional impact.
In the end, it’s how each person forms their own associations between the elements in an image that might allow it to have subjective meaning.
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 materials are somewhat decaying pigment ink stamp pads and also a mounted stamp that just has a square of halftone-ish texture. The inks are a bit annoying because they don’t dry well but the colours are good.
This page has this dominant image of the Gothic revival Notre-dame cathedral in Montreal. It’s not an image I would naturally pick were it not part of the underlying page but in this project book I am trying to make the best use of the photos.
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 others have text and images that might form key aspects of a final drawing.
So far in the Red Book, I have been equally, if differently, sparked by sparse almost blank pages and also those with a dominant image.
“Blank” is relative in this case. Every page in an altered book is blank in this context until it is drawn, painted, or collaged upon. And this type of blank is full.
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 baseline grid there was a lot to work with. I was conscious of partially erasing the colonial statue in the centre of the photo but liked the architecture and the mixture of walking and seated people.
The text was spontaneous but I do find that I return to certain words like “begin.” like the title suggests, sometimes the words I draw are instructions to myself.
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 drew in the lower squares but also conceptually relates to the “acquisition” of visual sensations — me thinking about photography while drawing.
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 elementary school spelling texts in our collection. I’m not sure where it’s originally from. I often look to those books for strings of unrelated words to prompt my drawings but occasionally longer passages stand out.
I also started adding letters and numbers somewhat like a stitched sampler. Not sure if they will stay yet.
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 we assign meaning to.
A page from What Shall We Do in Art? an elementary school text from 1957.
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.
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 and the program was Multicolor Character Generator.
We spent ages reading out the many many lines of machine code while Vince typed it in to the VIC-20. We got it wrong at least once. Sorry Vince!
The program, written by some guy named Bill Gates, was a way of making simple 8-bit symbols that could be used in making games or other software.
It was one of my earliest experiences with making anything visual on a computer.
Here are PDFs of that issue—the ads are incredible! Computes! Gazette issues (and loss of other commodore ephemera) are archived by the commodore.ca website.
In a recent creative Zoom call, I read aloud from the first chapter of a story/book/? I have been picking away at over the last few years. It’s a story that is piecing itself together based on drawings I have also been doing for years.
Vagabond, 2018
Reading the story was difficult first because I don’t do well with that sort of performative reading but second because I don’t really know where the story is going yet. I suppose three because the craft of fiction writing feels like a dark art. My friend Mark is adept at plotting out stories and having arcs that lead to new arcs worked out. Like making visual art, writing for me is more like I type the words and see what happens next.
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Let me back up a bit and talk about the drawings that prompted this story and the film that prompted the drawings.
Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi), Agnès Varda, 1985
The film is Agnès Varda’s bleak and beautiful film Vagabond. The film is a uniquely told story of a woman living on the fringes of society in rural France. I won’t talk too much about the plot, it can be a tough watch but it’s also one of my favourite films. The original French title of the film is Sans toit ni loi — without roof or law. I highly recommend it.
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Since I first saw the film in the mid-90s, it has come back into my thoughts many times. Occasionally that has been in the form of spontaneous drawings. Sometimes I do not realize the origin of the drawings until after they are made and other times I have drawn with the intention of making something that connects to Varda’s narrative or at least its tone.
Vagabond, phone drawing, 2017
Primarily I have come back to drawing a character that sometimes looks a bit like Sandrine Bonnaire in Varda’s Vagabond. The character will often share similar clothing but then be a completely different person under the dirty, worn, and patched transient garments.
Vagabond, 2018Vagabond, 2020Vagabond, 2020
The figure can be a woman or a man, young or old, of various seeming ethnicity—but always in a similar set of jeans, military castoffs, boots, often with a heavy pack. They can have a variety of tattoos. They can be mid-travel or at some weary stop along their way.
In drawing these figures, I didn’t begin with the thought that I wanted to tell their story. The drawings are all from my imagination and are more about expressing humanity and emotion.
Two vagabonds at rest, 2020
Along the way, in thinking about these people that came out of my head, I couldn’t help but wonder what their story could be. I wondered if I could write their stories but also felt unworthy of expressing the life of someone truly “living rough”.
But one day in 2020 I began with a few words describing a person waking up in a forest. That became the first short chapter in a story that since then has taken more form.
I began to think of these various vagabonds as one being. Or maybe a series of beings in a single form. The thought of possibly eternal transience, a person that lives between other more mundane lives and is alternately seen in different physical forms.
I’m not as interested in this premise from a sci-fi or fantasy standpoint. My interest in the story is more about following a longer story of transient travel through different viewpoints.
I honestly don’t know if I can actually write anything well enough to match the type of story I would like to read. But it’s inside me so I might as well try to externalize it and see where it goes.
I have also thought that maybe this story would be best as a graphic novel but that is also another huge undertaking on top of even writing a compelling story. But it does make sense because when I think of these people and settings I can’t help but want to draw them.
The other day when I read out that first short chapter, I had the thought that part of what makes this harder for me is that the story only lives in my head and in a folder of notes and chapters on my phone.
With visual art, I have realized that sharing work as I make it can further the process of making more. Not in terms of receiving praise or recognition but simply because I kind of let the tension out of holding onto artwork for too long. There’s a freeing sense I can get from sharing something in progress. Even something Im not sure about. Maybe even more so in those cases.
There’s a type of enigmatic “magic” throughout the vagabond drawings. A sense of power despite a life of deep struggle. I will sometimes draw that as fields of energy or fire coming from the vagabond. I’m not sure what it means but that’s also part of the interest for me. Will my imagination reveal this story to me?
That’s where I am with this right now. I am thinking of releasing the few chapters of this story I have so far—serializing them without any fixed schedule. I want to free them from just being here on my phone and see it that prompts me to go further.
It’s not a promise that a whole novel will spill out of me but I believe in shared open experiences so I’m going to give it try with writing.
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.
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 work on it more in public.
What’s held me back from doing that previously is that I don’t know if I will ever actually finish this piece of writing or why I am even writing it. But in visual art I have been actively trying to get better about not trying to over validate what I make.
So I might just use my mailing list and website as a way to place this story as it goes out into the air and see if that makes me see it differently.
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.
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 anything about him but I didn’t want my drawing to come with an assumption that I am saying something particular about this person.
But I also don’t want to just cover the photo completely since a large part of working in this existing book is to respond to what’s on the page.
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 that prioritizes people and making.
It won’t be anything fancy, just links with a bit of contextual text but it’s good to be a simple link in a chain sometimes.
I’ll post more about the page when I have it started.
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 much to cover. But the next page has an almost half-page portrait photo so that will be a new challenge/prompt.
The “save space” text in very very brittle Letraset are just words that popped into my head.
The other text, “there is an evening twilight of the heart” is something that jumped out at me while flipping through a super old book I had near my work desk. I looked it up and it’s the first line from a poem by Fitz-Greene Halleck who I know nothing about. I just liked the feeling of the words.
