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 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.
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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 patchy and messy but it mostly did what I wanted by subduing some aspects and letting other parts come forward.
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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 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…
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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 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…
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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 always something there that provokes a response. The response might be erasure or highlight depending on the page. 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.…
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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 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…
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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 drew in the lower squares but also conceptually relates to the “acquisition” of visual sensations — me thinking about photography while drawing.
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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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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 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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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 our windows are scratched 1950’s tempered glass and don’t make for clear photos. But I’ve taken it up again because I reminded myself that the practice wasn’t about the clarity or quality of the photos but the act of making a record. I need to…
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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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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 of Erie and, on clear days, see the shoreline of New York, a small wedge of Pennsylvania, and possibly a bit of Ohio. This beach has a small lightly tended woody park between the thin cottage service road and the water. Tall oaks, shag bark…
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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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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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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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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. I also wanted to jump between media and tools using acrylic and gouache paint, pencils, carbon paper, paint pens, brushes, palette knives, and more. I wanted play and spontaneity to be the primary goal and didn’t have a predefined aesthetic or visual in mind. As…
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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 to a black and white only feed as an outlet in these uncertain times…” — @quarantinezineto I joined in, creating drawings with pencil, pen, paint, and old Letraset that I scanned and altered. I made eight images from two original source drawings. The images were…
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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 are on-going) share the same general process as the ones I made in 2015 but there is a freeing apparent to me, a permission I gave myself to push further and make broader marks. Some of the phenomenological notes in these drawings are also much…
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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 the process of these drawings in a better way than I had previously. I have always made associative art in some form or another. These drawings are the most successful to me in that sense. As I worked, I could better observe the recurring marks,…