Tag: marks
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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Bombs that land without being dropped. A peace prize for casual violence. A sprawling social landscape without people. Notwithstanding a human heart.
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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. 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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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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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…
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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. In this home here in a small town, I haven’t kept up the practice mostly because…
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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…
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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…
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Yesterday my partner Gayla and I spent a bit of time at one of the small public beaches that is close enough to our place to be a quick drive away. We live in Canada near the northern shoreline of Lake Erie. From that beach we can look across the relatively small and shallow waters…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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This is a series of roughly 4.25×5.5″ drawings on paper made between May and September 2020. I started making these as a way to make marks and play with colour in a small and less intimidating (for me) format. I would often work on four of these at a time, jumping from one to another.…
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Early in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, people were looking for connection and ways to express where their heads and hearts were. Quarantine Zine was started by Dominic Arye on Instagram to provide a venue for artists and designers to do both. Dom’s stated goal was, “to give creative people space to contribute…
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Collaborative artwork made with Aaron Leighton Aaron and I traded these pieces back and forth from 2016 to 2018. We had a show at Liberty Arts in Toronto on September 6, 2018.
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Collaborative artwork made with Aaron Leighton Aaron and I traded these pieces back and forth from 2016 to 2018. We had a show at Liberty Arts in Toronto on September 6, 2018.
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Collaborative artwork made with Aaron Leighton Aaron and I traded these pieces back and forth from 2016 to 2018. We had a show at Liberty Arts in Toronto on September 6, 2018.
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At the beginning of 2016 I finished a number of drawings in quick succession. Half a year later I could see a shift in those and the subsequent drawings for the year that marked them as unique from the 2015 drawings I am now calling Dots : Series One. The drawings in series 2 (which…
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A series of drawings on wood exploring childhood narratives and the emotional geography of memory. Begun in April 2015, these drawings were/are a “beginner’s mind” experiment to shift the way I thought about my own art making. With the notion that I could start anywhere and simply make marks, I managed to attach myself to…