Tag: words
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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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A conversation with a friend got me thinking about the pressure to start something new as an already formed, planned, and polished production. I prefer when things are raw and forming somewhat in real time. I think it’s good for things to be rough around the edges but these days it feels like these are a lot of “brands” that feel like pretty wrapping around an empty box. I’d rather have an unwrapped gift handed to me by someone.
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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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All those thousands of pinhole punched sparks of old light from minutes, hours, days, and years away from us — signs that we are part of something so much more vast and wonderful. But instead of exalting in that wonder, we turn and murder others because we want the land they live on. We are willing to watch as thousands of lives get buried under concrete. Connected generations halted under layers of industrial strata. Think about Gaza today and the people of Palestine with all of their family trees crushed and bulldozed, their bodies torn apart, mothers and fathers who…
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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,…
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I made these drawings for the second Swash & Serif typographic and lettering art show in Toronto in 2016. I had a large drawing from my Dots series in the show but I gave away these cards at the show. The cards are Victorian-era bereavement calling cards that would have been used by people at the time to write a small note while they or the recipient were in a period of mourning. The cards are roughly 3.5 x 2.5″ with a heavy black border printed some unknown years before I found them in a junk shop. The drawing and…
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In 2015, I created a site called Amateur Escapist that I meant to function as a quarterly collaborative art zine based on my experiences with similar projects online in the early 2000’s. The first release First Words included nine artists (including myself) and I was blown away by the work submitted. For a variety of reasons, AE didn’t go beyond that first “issue” but I still have hopes of reviving it one of these days. Assembled Dots and Feelings Davin Risk for Amateur Escapist 01 : First Words, 2015, digital collage A realization that I always move towards assemblage and…