Most of my brain cells are dead

Back in August, I started working on preparatory drawings and sketches for a painting I was hoping to realize. The work focused on an image I found of Japanese miners standing outside of a mine shaft in British Columbia. The process is a really tiresome one that involves laying several large glass palettes with a thin layer of oil paint.

After a couple of days, the paint dries. The otherwise ruined paint, is then scraped off with a stripping razor. After a couple of palettes have been striped, the ribbons of peeled paint form these mounds of colour.

The process becomes a means of painting by using fresh, wet paint as a fixative to apply these paint ribbons to the surface of the painting. Slowly, the painting gains this colour and texture that from a distance, mixes into larger forms and different colours; in much the same manner as painters Georges Seurat and Chuck Close. The illusion, known as optical mixing, is most readily available to one via computer monitors, television screens and virtually all colour imaging devices.

To ensure that the paint dries within at least a couple of days, I have to really dilute it with mineral spirits. This step here is the one that is killing me! Despite the ventilation I installed in my studio, the stink of the spirits just ruins me.

The next step after I built up the surface of the painting, was to lay down a thick layer of beeswax. The combination of beeswax and pigments, or encaustic painting, is one of the earliest forms of painting. Ancient Egyptians and Byzantines used encaustic paint two thousand years ago. So long as you don't leave it on the back seat of your car in July, encaustic painting lasts millennia. The technique allows molten wax, pigment and a binding agent, such as damar resin, to be applied to a painting in very thin and transparent layers. Drying instantly, encaustic paintings also have a stunning glow, texture and smell to them.

I wanted to use the transparency of encaustic painting to distort the underpainting, so I applied thick and gooey layers of wax to the painting. The wax also helps to bind the three-dimensional ribbons of paint.

I realize I've displayed only details from the painting. Once complete, I'll document the piece and add it to the website. In other words: you have to wait...

Back to Canada, back to work

After a good and long slog into the United States I am finally en route to Montreal. Through some gift of the universe, I managed to dodge Hurricane Irene almost completely. The weather networks reported that Irene would be downgraded to a tropical storm as it neared Boston. Despite the T shutting down, and the purchasing of all preserved food in the local Trader Joe's, I would place Hurricane Irene's presence in Boston somewhere between a light misting and a rainy afternoon.
Though of course preparation and forewarning is really the only advantage the human race may hold in such events.







I'll be starting on that painting of those Japanese Miners I sketched out two weeks ago once I purchase some materials and pay off the serious Visa bill I gathered while living off of Snickers and chocolate milk on the road.







Updates soon...

Northbound U.S.A.

Off to Georgetown, Maine for a couple days of camping on the ocean and all-u-can-eat lobster buffets. I have a notebook with me, so I'll scan images when I'm in Boston again this weekend or Montreal next week.

I just finished up a 6 day bicycle trip from Montreal to Boston. The trip took me and my fellow cyclists down Lake Champlain, over the Green Mountains of Vermont, through the hills of New Hampshire and finally onto the glass and nail lined roads of Massachusetts (seriously, the population of Massachusetts seems to take some sick pleasure in sewing nails onto the shoulders of highways and bike paths, and watering them with large and sharp shards of glass).

I will upload some photos when they get some developed, but most importantly I will be back in the studio shortly (and hopefully permanently for the Autumn). New work will be added then.

Location:Main St,Ashburnham,United States

Brushes for Iphone Paintings

Finally got rid of the backlog of Iphone paintings that were being kept on my phone.
They're all done through the program BRUSHES.

David Hockney, the technologically sly dog he is, has been painting some lovely still-lifes. I heard that he switched to Ipad though, for size and ability to use two hands.

For the meantime, I have been sticking to portraiture. Post midnight portraiture to be precise.

I have some more from my time here in Germany, however I will post them later. For now I am catching a train to Berlin and continuing onto London and Bristol.

Moleskines: kinda bullshit

I got some money here in Germany as a stipend for eating from the ever generous Arena Festival. I instantly decided that food was secondary to creature comforts, so I grabbed the cash and ran to a German stationary shop where I bought a bad-ass new pen. One of the coordinators noted that since I can't buy a big red convertible, I bought an artist's meager equivalent: a big red pen.
I wonder if it suffers the same stigma follows a big red pen, as it does a big red convertible. That is, when I whip it out of my pocket in public, do onlookers catch a glimpse of me filling in a crossword, overconfident of my answers written with permanent ink, clutching my giant red phallus, and say, "Do you think he's making up for something?"

I ran out of the store, cherishing my new pen. I realized I had nothing to write on, so I ran back into the store and spent another hour looking at notebooks. Now here is where shit got crazy.
I went to grab the usual Moleskine. It sits there, black, sexy and untouched. I know when I open it, it will contain the same small letter as always that chronicles the legacy of the Moleskine Empire. I will shed a tear as I read of Hemingway, new to a broken post-war Paris, as he sits and (now I quote:)

reflects on the quintessential moments ordering a cafe au lait and pulling out his notebook and pencil from his pocket to start writing. It is this simple ritual that he describes so well.

I am puzzled. I think, I just need a book to draw boobs in, and maybe write down a good poop joke. But Hemingway I'm sure, drew boobs and, knowing Ernest probably wrote down a good racist joke or two. So I read on, until I find:

Capturing reality in movement, glimpsing and recording details, inscribing the unique nature of experience on paper: the Moleskine notebook becomes a battery that stores ideas and feelings, releasing its energy over time.

Now I'm kind of mad. It seems that since some assholes bought the name 'Moleskine' in 1997, they've been branding Moleskine as synonymous with the actual act of recording creativity. If you write, draw or record anything of value in a notebook: boom! you just got moleskined. It's like the Greeks and their idea of the muse. The mind of the artist doesn't produce art; rather the muse bestows the artist with the gift to channel the art. Artists don't make art; moleskines do.

So then I started to look next to the Moleskines, and I found these bad-boys:

Right off, I was like "Oh snap! Is that font Futura!?"

It is.

Then I was like, "Damn, is it really half the price of a Moleskine?"

It is.

Then I was like, "Shoot, is the colour of this notebook really called tobacco?" Keep in mind that Moleskines only come in one true colour: Fascist Black.

It really, really is called tobacco. Other colours include Caramel, and Cornflower.

The moral of the story: hell yes I'll pay less and choose a colour with a silly name over an artificial dynasty that has claimed more evocative adjectives than a car ad. Leuchtturm as a company started in the midst of the First World War, and kept pumping out notebooks during the Second. I'm sure the Free France were super pissed when they had to spend 30€ on their moleskines and they sipped their cafe au laits and enjoyed the quintessential moments in life.

And in the end, I'm not even sure how to pronounce Moleskine.

Ein Kanadischer auf fremdem Boden

Just as the weather in Montreal was finally starting to transition into real Spring (not the freezing, raining, damp and cloudy months that follow Winter in Quebec), I got flown to Germany to work in this year's ARENA Fest in Erlangen. I'm not complaining, as Springtime in the South of Germany is possibly one of the best places to be. I would gladly trade my bottle of Raftman and my cone of Bilboquet for a stein of Kitzmann and a ... stick of meat.

After working in Germany last year, I vowed to try and not drink beer every night. However, it has been 3 days in Bavaria so far, and I have broken this vow nightly.

For the duration of the ARENA festival, I will be constructing 9 installations around the city of Erlangen. I don't want to give too much away, but I am very much inspired by the utterly sublime work of the great Canadian artist David Hoffos.

I will be updating this NEWS section of the website regularly with photos and other documentation of the festival and my work, so check back regularly.

WILD LIFE

7TH & PRINCESS
DAWSON CITY, YUKON

Dawson City

I have been invited to the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture in Dawson City for the month of December. Check it out here.
The other artist in residence is Rosemary Scanlon. Rosemary's work can be found here.

Documentation and work from the residency will follow shortly