Tag: process
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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”.
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I made drawing 34 in the Red Book live on video tonight. It was an experiment in the format and to get a sense for whether I would want to try it again. I’ll do a few more tests at least. Watch the live video
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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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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.
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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.
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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…
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I shared a number of my recent drawings with some friends and it was a nice reminder to keep how and when I share what I do a wide circle. For me at least, I do better at being kind to myself and making more things that feel good to me when I share aspects of that making and the feelings that come with it. One artist friend asked… “Are you just going with the flow when you work on these? Letting your hands make the decisions instead of your brain, like a creative game of Ouija board?” To which…
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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.…
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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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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.
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Sometimes I just end up smearing things around for a while to see what sticks. Nothing sticking on this one yet.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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. Watch me working on this drawing here: https://youtu.be/3cB6vtPYyd8?si=T4H5ZK4p53JdyA8v
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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. Watch on YouTube.
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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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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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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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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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I make most of my artwork in single sittings and it’s something I have occasionally held against myself. But I have the most comfort and connection with making when I just sit down to start making something and I am done within an hour or less. I say hold it against myself because there are many artists that research, sketch, build maquettes and dummies, and more before then possibly committing to an approach. And then they may take hours, days, months, years to complete a single project. I can rationally know that every person’s practice and each medium is different…
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I’ve been thinking about inconsistent art practice recently. Consistency is something that receives a lot of attention in art making and it has obvious merits. The call to show up regularly for creative expression is valid. Prioritizing time for making in whatever form it might take is healthy. There’s also a certain pressure for artists to be consistent in what we make. A pressure to develop a recognizable style and to reliably produce new work. Even the well meaning consecutive 30, 100, 365 day art challenges place a value in repetition. These can be powerful in jumpstarting a creative pattern…
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Here are two videos of the recent beach ephemeral, “Gull”, I made in collaboration with my partner Gayla Trail. Because these are dimensional temporary art works, I like to think of them as existing in many forms at the same time. I try to take photos and video to document them but they often don’t capture what I see/feel/think experiencing them.
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Slight work desk reboot. I like a certain degree of chaos in my art making space. I tend to thrive on some level of happenstance in reacting to what’s at hand. But I haven’t been connecting with this work space as much as I would like over the last few months and so I took a few minutes this morning and bit a bit of basic tidying and sorting. It’s enough that I can reset both the desire to make connections and also the facility with which I can make them without becoming overwhelmed.
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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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At least this is how I made one. You should make one too! I’m not usually someone that feels like the way I make things is of much direct value to other people. I feel the same about other artists’ work. I am interested in why artists make what they make and how they connect to a process for making but not as much in the techniques they might use. I know that I primarily learn and discover from direct experience and less so from following someone else’s patterns. In making my art book Imaginary Landscapes recently, I did realize…
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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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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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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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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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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…