Tag: drawing
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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.
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An imaginary landscape I drew today. It feels as hot as this looks today.
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Work in progress in the Red Book. This doesn’t have much more to go but it got late so I’ll come back to it tomorrow. This uses a handmade rough cut circle stencil for the main dots.
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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. 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…
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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…
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This is the first complete drawing in my Red Book project. I found it was harder to establish when/how to end given my self-assigned experiment to not complete these drawings in single sittings. I’m also getting the feel for how the pages in this book will receive various media for better or for worse.
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Here’s me drawing in the new Red Book art book project. As I say in the video, I’m trying something with this book where I don’t finish drawings in single sittings as I normally do. This is the third (I think) time I have come back to this particular drawing. It might be done? But I’ll come back again just to be sure. Watch on YouTube
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A few more marks made on this first drawing in the Red Book. 📕 It’s already interesting to sit and then remove myself from a drawing without finishing it. Not exactly comfortable but it pushes me in an intriguing way.
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I started a new drawing project book tonight. It’s a 1976 Olympics commemorative book but that topic isn’t meant to inform the drawings I do. I like having something besides a blank page to react to and I’m sure in some cases the underlying text grid and images will nudge my drawings in interesting directions. I’ve posted a video to YouTube about getting started and showing me alter the cover and begin a drawing on the first page. https://youtu.be/Fy29waQDhr0?si=wH_TLDQ7Z6hHd-Ny
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The final drawing in my Openwork series. A couple different things on my mind starting soon. Made Ready, Davin Risk 2025
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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.
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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.
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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. Watch the video on YouTube
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I don’t often start from dark or black ground but it definitely shapes the negative space in these drawings in an interesting way.
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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. 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…
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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. 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.
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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.
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My connection to art making recently took a more curatorial turn. As I’ve showed in my last post, I was drawn back to work I had made in 2020 and made a small book from that work that I published. I feel very proud of the book and the revisiting this watercolour work in such a positive way has been helpful to me. My association with past work hasn’t always been a good one. Looking back on things I have made can sometimes be clouded by unwarranted self doubt. But I saw my own sense of beauty in the small…
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Openwork. An ongoing series of drawings. Thoughts on the vulnerability of making and the further embodied sense of what making means in a body. The way we have been taught to think and talk about art is in the context of groups, series, collections, exhibitions. And artists, we are told, are defined by movements, periods, and ultimately oeuvres. But day to day, artists’ work is made in fits and starts and often without planning or forethought. That’s not to say that every artist works the same way and some people have far more structure around their work than others. I…
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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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We use words to know better how we might speak. We use images to know more how we might see. This is part of what art does for us. It weaves aspects of ourselves together to show us ourselves. Not all art does this with strong intention but the effect is the same regardless. Art is a window framing humanity — sometimes a mirror. This sounds grandiose and I don’t mean to say that that artists are some higher beings with a rarified viewpoint. Artists are just people with a curiosity for how words, images, sounds, and forms connect with…
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In graphic design, grids are often used as the scaffolding that gives page elements a structure to align to. The underlying grid of a book page might supply a set of ratios for how text sizes relate to each other, how an image sits on a page, and even the subtleties of a where a page number hugs a corner. In many scientific and technical applications, grids become ways to translate measurements into a reliable visual form or they might form the cell structure for a matrix of data. Maps have a fundamental grid as latitude and longitude lines help…
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I have worked for many years now as a Play Designer. Explaining what this means is never a simple thing but I’ll try here as it may inform the rest of what I write which is still bubbling up for me as I type this. I work for a company that makes digital play and learning products for very young children. I design open playful and playable digital toys with a cast of cute characters that primarily end up on phones and tablets and are mostly played with by preschool-age kids. The job is empathy balanced with function and it…
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This is a bit of an origin story for one of the ways an image can mark a moment of change. It’s about how a titan of dust let me know I could trust myself more as an artist. … While most of my art making is connected to abstraction and intuitive mark making, I do occasionally make a more straightforward landscape or figure drawing. But I was thinking back tonight to one particular drawing that sat a bit between those two modes. In 2015 I had started making abstract drawings that I ended up calling Dots Series 1 &…
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Does art lay in wait in an artist’s materials? Is there a drawing inside every pencil, a painting in every tube? Do the artist’s hands contain the art or does it travel from the head, electric and formless, commanding the hand to make tangible from mental? In my conscious mind, there is never any fully formed art. There can be concepts, modes, structures, tools, and patterns that I choose from towards the idea of making art. But there is no plan or precognition of a final state or even its process in my head. I make choices in the moment…
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Back in 2016, my partner Gayla Trail and I collaborated to self-publish her fifth book, Grow Curious. She was the author and I did the design and artwork. I don’t talk about my design work here as much but I have been working as a designer since 1994 across a variety of media and formats. My design and art practices heavily inform each other. Grow Curious was the fourth of Gayla’s books I designed. We used Kickstarter to successfully fund a two-colour offset print run of 1200 copies. It was a labour of love and each of us pushed ourselves…
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Since my last post I have continued drawing digitally in Procreate and testing how it feels to both pull from and challenge the habits and modes of drawing on paper. I’m finding myself distinctly enjoying drawing digitally. As I said in the last post, I am using an Apple Pencil on a ~10 inch iPad. I applied a Paperlike screen film which adds a very subtle “tooth” so that the Pencil feels less like hard plastic on smooth glass. I’ve started using some digital brushes like simulated halftone patterns which I have used lightly in the past on paper usually…
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A blank drawing surface stares back as a challenge. The smooth surface of a page says nothing about what it wants. A fresh sketchbook or canvas can stop many artists in their tracks. Often the way I will approach a blank page is to immediately make “random” marks and forms — scribble, smudge, glue, scrape, smear — to break up the space of the page. Because my approach to art making is intuitive, I rely on an interaction between the surface, the tools, and my hand to further the process. I react to the surface and then to my own…
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The how of making art is a cottage industry. There are countless classes and tutorials about the right tools, techniques, and mindset for people that want to make art but feel for whatever reason that they don’t know how. More often than not, these same people are also looking for some form of permission to be creative. They want some structure, purpose, and maybe even a set of achievable goals before stepping into something that feels like it requires mastery. And belief in mastery implies that the majority of us are not masters. What a lot of people want out…
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I’m going to revisit some older work again since it’s helping me to look back at a variety of work and see what it meant for me to make it when I did. Starting in 2018, I had begun working with sound as a medium — using the making of songs/soundscapes as a different form of connecting with a need I had to express that wasn’t fully coming out visually. I had made snippets of music before this point. In the early ‘90s at university, I had a late night radio show with a friend and we often made odd…
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In the previous post, I showed a series of abstract drawings I made on my phone. Digital finger painting. Making those miniature images of line and colour in motion were a therapy for me at various times. A way to pull emotion out of me expressed as visual motion. As I described, working on my phone was a space between other spaces. A way to duck into a creative space when the circumstances of a time or place didn’t allow for other modes of expression. What began as pure abstraction and motion studies in those phone drawings lead somewhat unexpectedly…
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The glossy glass slabs most of us now have with us in pockets and bags — the ubiquitous relative supercomputers that we mostly take for granted — are not inherently the most expressive artistic tools. “Phones”, in a short number of years, have supplanted the regular tools or at least augmented the structure of many creative practices. I have no real urge to get into how technology has shaped art and the lives of artists over the last few decades. It’s a deep topic of discussion and study but my interest is more homely. I’ve always had an fascination in…
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In 2016, my friend Aaron Leighton asked me one day at work if I would be interested in collaborating on some artwork. We were both at a point where we were wanting to explore new things creatively and Aaron had been intrigued by some new drawings I had started making. [Dots: Series 1] I enthusiastically said yes. Aaron didn’t have any specific goals in mind, just to start something and see where it went. He suggested we pick a simple but somewhat directive format. My work at the time were mixed-media drawings on birch wood panels and we agreed to…
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In my last post I talked about one of the main spaces I work creatively these days and having the tools, supplies, and various points of inspiration and connection at hand while I work. I’ve always been interested in finding the lines that join to and run through things. As a kid, my encyclopedia set and the image rich Time-Life nature, science, and anthropology volumes on our home bookshelves were a world of connections in my hands. Those books felt like they contained the universe. As part of how I make art now, I practice at finding transient connections between…
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I think most artists are remiss at documenting their work. Making careful records of finished art and process can often run counter to how we want to make the art itself. It can also be tedious if not impossible with some media to actually capture a document that represents it in any meaningful way — digital and interactive art, fibre arts, performance, conceptual work, and even collage and assemblage can be tricky to make records of. When we moved to the house we currently live in, my partner Gayla and I had the first time luxury of having a creation…
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Is this the first place I can find myself? Am I here watching unknowing as my grandfather sets up a tripod to take these photos tightly framing the screen of their Phillips TV? It’s July 1969 and I was born five months ago. People are walking on the moon. Is my round baby face in the room to see Walter Kronkite’s relief at those first deeply grainy but impossibly live images of those first steps on the lunar surface? No one is reflected back in these screens so attentively captured by my Grandfather’s camera. But I breathe, somewhere there in…
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The large maple tree in our neighbours’ yard that looms over our garage — I call it “ghost tree.” It’s mostly because I have taken many night time photos of it and the starry skies around it over the past few years of living here. The “ghost” is simply because the long exposures that capture starlight also twist and smudge the tree into a spectral figure. Benign and without fear. Since we moved here from the city, the relatively dark skies here on the edge of town have meant seeing more stars plainly visible than almost any other time in…
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I first heard about Aphantasia a bunch of years ago in a random news article and was fascinated so I immediately did the casual test for it. The test, if you don’t know about it, is to establish whether you can bring a mental picture of something to mind and what degree of clarity it might have if any. Here’s the gist of the casual test I did… Think about a red apple. Can you ‘see’ an image of an apple in your mind? You might close your eyes if it helps you to visualize. If you can hold an…