Sexy Pollutants

The first shot of my next film! 40-50 more shots to go!


The film is coming from drawings I do every morning. I've been drawing without a specific intention except to say "yes" to whatever strikes my interest. What is consistently emerging are drawings of misshapen and asymmetrical insects, chunks of plastic bags floating in the ocean, and water-borne liquids (pollutants). Sexy!

Central to many of my drawings (and the film) are little red dots that are inside all the living things. Life force? Souls? Spirits? I don't know yet, but I'm discovering it as I work on the film.


An underlying intention is that I want the designs and colours be beautiful and fantastic. I want it to be something that will delight my son.

Three Superimposed Things

Three Superimposed Things

I overlaid these studio-tidbits for this post, and now I'm wondering if something like this might be good for Alicia Hansen's new album cover. (She's asked me to do the art). Her next album is coming out in Spring 2018 and it's so vulnerable, heartfelt and raw that I can't stop crying when I listen to it.

She gave me permission to post the lyrics to one of her new songs, which fits the theme of the blog:

I Don't Believe It

Maybe I suffer from grand delusions

Maybe you should sell your soul down the river

Maybe we have made nothing but poor choices

Maybe they were right about that after all

But I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it

I don’t believe it, and nor do you

Maybe I lack essential drive

Maybe you really are too sensitive

Maybe we are naïve and foolish

Maybe they were right about that after all

But I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it

I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it

(addendum: She thinks it might be too "bodily fluid" coloured. Point taken.)

 

 

Fantasy Land

Sunday Snapshot

I struggle to describe myself as an artist, because I straddle so many mediums and genres. Because of that, I sometimes feel like there is no focus.

I need to continually remind myself that my focus is the process.

By process, I mean that it's not about the outcome - it's about showing up to the studio and listening to what wants to come out of me that day. It's not about forcing a project to completion - it's about trusting that some projects will come to completion in a joyful way if I just show up and keep making. Perhaps my description as an artist will be the aggregate of all my work when I die. It's not my job to determine what that is.

I have a quote from Will Smith that I think about a lot: (From subreddit /r/inspirationalquotes ):

"You don't try to build a wall, you don't set out to build a wall. You don't say 'I'm going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that's ever been built.' You don't start there....You say 'I'm going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid'. And you do that every single day and soon you have a wall."

For me to perfectly lay a brick, I need the studio to be a safe place. This is where I come to evade the chaos of the internet, the expectations of others, and the responsibilities of the rest of my life.

It needs to be a safe place because this is where I need to be able to continually say, "This is not possible," and do it anyways.

I need to be working on the impossible, because if I thought I was making something that was already predetermined and easy and known, it would be a waste of time, and uninteresting to me. There is no point to making art if you already know what it's going to be.

My studio is a Fantasy Land, where I build impossible, joyful little bricks. One by one, it happens - every morning.

 http://draworbedrawn.com/

 Best Studio So Far

Four years and one day later, I'm returning to Draw or be Drawn!

After forty-three years of life and forty years of drawing, I think I've finally settled into my own way of working creatively.  This blog will be a celebration of my own particular ways of working, and hopefully a way that other people can reflect on their own unique ways of having an impact in the world.

At present, I think this blog will be a way of sharing a few things:

1) My personal creative processes, which are messy, joyful, intense, emotional and abundant. I feel that I have two things to give: my artwork, and my experience with making the work. This blog will be more about the latter. I probably won't show much finished work, but I will show works-in-progress.

2) The things I get excited about, when it comes to writing and making. I'm influenced by scientific advances, animal lives, science fiction, tabletop roleplaying games, comics, films, indigenous knowledge and storytelling theory. I want to share the things I get stoked about.

Artists tend to only show finished work, or heavily edit their 'works-in-progress' so even those look great. Here, I hope to be vulnerable and show my mistakes and trials as much as my successes.

...But as with any creative endeavour, I have no idea what these posts will turn into.

be my ocean

Uprooting again.

This time there is comfort in the move, and I think it's because I'm not entering a completely foreign territory that I'll have to re-learn to navigate. There will be Douglas Fir, Cedar, Ferns, Ravens and Deer. I take comfort in knowing that the relationships I am developing with my current surroundings will not lay dormant, and that I can transfer that learning to a similar place. Maybe it's like learning the same language, but a different dialect:

I will no longer have the rocky coastline nearby, or River Otters, Herons and other waterfowl. I will be slightly inland, and on the mainland, with a new vocabulary of Coyotes, Bear, Skunks, Porcupines and Raccoons. I've been missing these larger omnivorous mammals in my last five or six years of living on islands and in the city, and I'm looking forward to seeing their signs again. A lot of the Gulf Islands are ecologically unbalanced - deer are allowed to propagate freely alongside humans, cats and dogs, because the coyotes have been culled to protect house pets, and to prevent competition for human-farmed meat.

It's undeniable that the majority of the world is already one big human-farm in one way or another, but I still enjoy feeling the power of the things that surround me - not just in terms of grand scenery and beauty, but in terms of a wariness and respect that other powerful entities are out there that can do drastic things outside of my control.

I suppose this is why I've gravitated to the ocean when I've lived on the Gulf Islands. There is a definite sense of humility in bobbing along the boundary between water and air - being completely incapable of even perceiving what is happening in the water that surrounds me.

May the bears and the storms be my ocean, in this next place-of-living.

co-heart

One month ago, I entered the second July Intensive, which is the halfway point for my Masters of Applied Arts at Emily Carr. On my first day in the studio, I transcribed the following on a big sheet of paper and posted it on my little piece of wall:

The story never stops beginning or ending. 
It appears headless and bottomless, for it is built on differences. 
The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it it to taste, yet can never truly possess. 
A gift that stays inexhaustible within its own limits.

-Trinh T. Minh-Ha, from Woman, Native, Other

This became a theme for the work I undertook in July, but I think it also describes my relationship with my cohort of fellow low-residency students.

This particular Masters is a low-residency program. I spend eleven months of the year talking to my instructors and fellow students online, and one month together in person. It's a fascinating and dynamic pedagogical project, but it also feels like a social experiment. We are subjected to the extremes of communication methods. For the majority of the time, we are writing quasi-academic forum posts that might never be read by each other. Then, for one month, we are lounging in a hottub together, sweating together through long days and nights as we install our interim exhibition, swimming in our underwear under the moon at Kits Beach, or dancing until the sun rises at an all-night party in Stanley Park.

Near the last day of the intensive, I removed Minh-Ha's quote, and posted another transcription:

I'll leave the stones here
But I'm taking the dream with me
Into the unknown.

-Fischli and Weiss, from The Right Way

See you next year, co-heart.

reflection

The arrangement of objects on my big tabletop called out to me, so I photographed it. I didn't adjust anything on or around the table, including the light umbrella. The object in the center is a rock.

This image makes me aware of how my art practice has transformed over the last year. It's nice to get that perspective every once in a while.