Friday, November 27, 2009

Genesis of a Blog

The Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to keep people informed about upcoming exhibitions and projects I’m involved in. I also wanted something more professional-looking than a Myspace or Facebook profile displaying my portfolio. Eventually I’ll have a website that will handle that part and this blog will be reserved for news, updates and musings on my creative process.

The Mixed Media Life-Drawings

I used to do Friday-night life-drawing sessions almost every week with my dad at the Toronto School of Art from 2004 to 2006. The poses varied in length from 1-minute to 25-minutes long. I would often spraypaint on pastel paper before-hand and then draw the figures over -top of that with a pencil or ballpoint pen. When I got home I would add some more colours with pencil crayon and sometimes acrylic paint and frame the most successful ones. I was influenced by the illustrations of Canadian artists Elicser and Ben Tour at this time because their work was in my friend's older brother's hip hop culture magazine. I was impressed by the effects they were able to achieve with cheap stationary-store ballpoint pens. A lot of my works from this time were included in the first solo show I organized at a place called Fez Batik, which used to be at Peter and Richmond. Here are some of them.


























First Forays into Painting


I was also starting to paint with acrylic on canvas around this time but mostly just for school assignments.This diptych of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt was also shown at the Fez Batik show. The rule I made for myself was that I was not going to use brushes. I mostly used a rolled-up T-shirt caked in paint. I think I also used some guitar strings.



My thinking was that I was doing two Abstract Expressionist paintings that happened to be representational, an idea that I've continued to consider when I paint. I'm much happier with the Klimt one on the right because it could almost work as a strictly abstract painting and it occurred more naturally than the Schiele portrait (which I did first.)