Tag: process
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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…