"Femme Avec Un Chapeau Rouge" Series

This project requires a bit of back tracking to explain it best. In 2002 I was looking through some old magazines in art class, in a French haut-couture magazine from the early 90’s I found a grainy but captivating image. I wasn’t sure what it was but something about this woman dining with this huge red hat really fascinated me. In 2003 I tried to paint the image to the best of my abilities in acrylic paint. In 2005 I found the image again and thought it would be an interesting experiment to paint the photograph again as a measure of my artistic growth, this time in oil paint. In 2006, I had a university painting class where the teacher had asked us to work with repetition. I decided to test my painting skills, but also artistic range once again and painted the “Femme avec un Chapeau Rouge” over twenty times in various mediums and styles. Above is the original magazine image (I drew on the horizontal and vertical lines in 2003 for reference) and the first and second attempts. On the right are a select few of my attempts from 2006.


In the fall of 2009 I spent a month in France. While I was there I was looking for non-digital photobooths (a personal passion of mine, see old post) and was visiting more booths than normal, though I didn’t necessarily have ideas every time I was taking pictures. A week into my trip, in the children’s section of the gift shop for the Musée D’Orsay I found a mask. Being in France and seeing this red had, I was automatically reminded of the magazine photo from years before. For the rest of the trip the mask and signature pose of the woman became a default pose for me while photoboothing. Since returning to Canada I’ve played around with the background in these photos because the background in the original photo is very non-descript and it was always a difficult formal decision to make when painting. The mask is conveniently light and small so it’s been ideal to bring it with me for my other travels this year. I brought the mask on my latest trip to Ontario, Quebec, New York, Massachusetts and Illinois. I’m also going to bring it with me while touring an improv show across Canada in May and when I visit Australia and Japan in July.

Here are some pictures I have taken with the mask during my travels so far.

The next step in the project is to do a stop-motion photobooth animation, done in a similar style to an animation I made with artist Pamela Norrish last year, which you can check out here.

Comics Everywhere! Adventures in Montreal and New York City

I’ve had very lovely visits to Ottawa, Montreal, Boston and now New York. In Montreal I had the pleasure of visiting the Drawn & Quarterly storefront. I whizzed with excitement and ended up making multiple visits to pace myself. D&Q are my favourite graphic novel publishers and also happen to be Canadian. At the shop they sell all the works they publish but also a wide variety of other books (comics or otherwise).


New York has always been great for comics and graphic novels, in between the amazing selection at Forbidden Planet and Midtown Comics and the ultra-discounted finds at the Strand Bookstore. This past weekend though, was particularly exciting as it was the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s (MoCCA) Festival (a.k.a. a finer comicbook convention). There I got to meet some up and coming graphic novelists that I’ve been following like Austin English and Lucy Knisley. I also got to meet a long-time admired illustrator, Jillian Tamaki. My favourite of the booths included Drawn & Quarterly (obviously), Sparkplug Comic Books, PictureBox Inc., Secret Acres and Book by its Cover. Unfortunately I forgot my camera that day and have no pictures.

I’m here in New York working on a graphic novel with writer Elizabeth Archer. The book we are working is mostly auto-biographical but a melange of her’s and my experiences, it’s titled “Arc in the Sky”. Elizabeth and I have been working with the help of telephones and the internet for months now but I came to New York specifically to take photos to use as reference for the drawings. I’ll be doing some sneak-peek drawings when this leg of travels whines down and post them here.


And on another graphic novel note, I’m going to be in Toronto at the end of May, where I’m already saving for my next visit to The Beguiling. It’s an amazing independently owned little comic shop tucked away in the Markham area. I’ll be arriving too late to attend the Toronto Comics Arts Festival, May 8-9, but I would give my pinky finger to be there.

A Visit to Our Nation's Capital!

I’m in Ottawa for a week to volunteer at the Canadian Improv Games National Festival, where hundreds of high school students from across the country will participate in friendly competition. In high school I competed in the games myself and owe many thanks to the organization for giving me an outlet in my formative years. It’s one of the two weeks a year (the other being Improv Camp) that I whole-heartedly look forward to! It’s a fun and uber supportive environment and hosted in the National Arts Centre! This photo is of one of the founders of the Games, Howard Jerome speaking before the competition.


This trip also marks the start of 6ish weeks of travel in the area. I’m working on various projects, (most of which are collaborations), of the visual and performing arts variety. After Ottawa I’ll be visiting Montreal, Toronto, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Chicago. Stay tuned for some recounts of the adventures! This photo is of a Louise Bourgeois sculpture outside the National Gallery, with Parliament in the background.

Back from the Woods

I spent the month of February in Saskatchewan, most of that time I was in a cabin on a lake near Prince Albert National Park, up north. I was there all by myself to work on art in an internet-less, cellphone-less and more or less distraction-less environment. I chose to go this lake because my great grandparents bought a cabin there many years ago and the area has hosted five generations worth of family reunions. I spent many of my childhood summers there and I was interested to return as an adult, this time in the starkness of winter and without the company of dozens of family members. In my art practice I’m interested in origin points, familial history and personal meccas; I felt like this place deserved some time and meditation. While there, I worked on a series of landscape paintings (not my usual medium), sorta as a means of reflection, while simultaneously I brewed about other larger, more conceptual projects. I was also interested in being a “Canadian artist” and what that means in a historical context. I couldn’t help but think of the members of the Group of Seven painting the great Canadian wilderness as a means of understanding it. The experience was a very rich and rewarding one, partially for the paintings I did but mostly for the time I had to think about the direction of my practice.

Here are two of the ten oil paintings I made. I’ve sold all the pieces to fuel the next leg of my travels.

Canadian Winter = Time for Crafts!

I wrapped up my travels by going to my parents’ home in Edmonton for the holidays. I get antsy if I go five minutes without having something to do with my hands so I capitalized on being locked in doors by making some commissioned Go Eat Some Poison products and by organizing some family-fun crafts.

The first project was a Solstice banner (our holiday of choice). On the Winter Solstice every member of the family completed one or two banner pieces by sewing letters I cut out in advance to a triangle of a different material. The level of sewing ability varied greatly but everyone felt very accomplished in the end.

We also made a felt wreath, I crocheted some berries and everyone cut-out different shaped leaves and petals (based on their scissor abilities). I stitched the pieces of felt holly together and glued it to a wire wreath ring.

I was also busy making some more cross-stitched Interracial Sex Sketchbooks (I’m working on some gay couples now), and decided to try out a less controversial image for a sketchbook cover. All in all, it was a restful and productive holiday season.

Toronto's City of Craft!

Best friend and fellow artist, Pamela Norrish and I travelled thousands of kilometres to meet up at Toronto’s City of Craft event where we showed a film piece we had collaborated on months early, titled Coast to Coast to Coast. It was a stop motion animation that we shot it in a non-digital photo booth using objects made from various craft mediums. For now you can see the film here, but soon it and photos of our installation will be on my website once my computer savy friend, Scott Borys tweaks some things to support video files.

The event itself was a really lovely experience with loads of talented artists, crafters and DIY’ers. It was hosted in the Theatre Centre on Queen West, and for sentimental reasons ( I used to live in Toronto) it was really great to be back in that neighbourhood. I also showed pieces from my Crèche exhibition at a show curated by Tara Bursey titled Home and Away. To the right is a photo of the vendor's tables once some of the hustle and bustle died down.

Photobooth Pictures in Art and Abroad

Anyone who knows me knows of my passion/ obsession with photobooths. I’ve been collecting non-digital photobooth pictures for seven years now and have thousands of pictures. Taking and collecting photos is primarily a hobby but I have also used them in my artwork. I store my photos in archival plastic sheets and have divided them into four categories; Found Photos, Donated Photos, Film Stills (more on this later) and Self Portraits. I own almost all the published books on the subject matter and I’m especially interested in their history. This summer when I travelled to Australia I was happy to hunt for the remaining non-digital booths in Sydney for Photobooth.net’s Locator feature on their website. I was curious about what I would be able to find in Europe. At one time the continent’s train stations and streets were rampant with “Photoautomats” but today they have been almost entirely replaced with easier to maintain digital booths. In Paris I visited a few booths that are owned by businesses committed to preserving these iconic machines but it was only in Berlin that I found the occasional classic black & white “dip’n’dunk” booth in the streets.


Nevertheless, Paris was a real photobooth highlight for me because the Centre de Georges Pompidou had a very thoroughly curated exhibition titled “La Subversion des Images” or “The Subversion of Images” which featured Surrealist photography and film. The exhibition had original photobooth pictures by famous Surrealists such as Paul Eluard, André Breton, Louis Aragon, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Luis Brunel, Salivador Dali and others, taken for both fun and to use in their artwork.


Top photo is of the Fotoautomat in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Bottom picture is of René Magritte's "Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt", 1929.

Back from Europe and overflowing with inspiration

I feel a little bad for a leaving my blog unattended for so long, but I had good reason; I was overseas taking in some culture! First on my list was France, where I stayed with an artist friend in Paris before I headed south to Provence, the Alps and the Mediterranean. I returned to Paris for another week and then headed for Berlin where I stayed with a musician friend. The gray skies and freezing temperatures were pretty dismal compared to the sun in Southern France. I was in for more of the same when I flew to London to stay with some actor/improviser friends. I created a bit of a homebase there and took small trips to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Totnes (a small village in Devon). I returned to London for a few last splendid days and flew to Toronto from there... more about that later.

As you might imagine I saw a lot of art in that time, I visited approximately two galleries/museums everyday for two months. There is a point when you just can’t absorb anymore visual stimuli, (I hit it a few times), though there were still a few stellar exhibitions that managed to resonate with me. Since I’ve been back a lot of people have been asking me about the best shows I saw, so here’s a list of the best temporary exhibitions I visited while I was abroad (in order that I saw them):

-Chasing Napoleon at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris
-La Subversion des Images at the Centre Pompidou, Paris
-La Biennale de Lyon hosted primarily at La Sucriere, Lyon
-Né dans la Rue at Fondation Cartier, Paris
-Elles at the Centre Pomipdou, Paris
-Thomas Demand (retrospective) at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
-Kiosk – Modes of Multiplication, presented by Christoph Keller at the Kunstbibliothek, Berlin
-Anish Kapoor (retrospective) at the Royal Academy of Arts, London
-Jill Magid: Authority to Remove at the Tate Modern, London
-The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing at the Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh
-Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers at the White Chapel Gallery, London


















Photos are of 2/3 of Barry McGee's installation, titled "Installation" at the Biennale de Lyon.