am i old yet?

30 days from now i will be married

a couple of days after that we will be welcoming the year 2014.

months will pass and i will be a 30 year old, married man. will i still be working the same miserable job? will my to-do list still be as long as it is today? will my string of bad financial decisions catch up with me? will i continue to collect action figures and the sort? oooh such concerns for the future!!

what am i going on about? am i actually concerned about these things? am i so vain that i worry about the white hairs that will probably soon outnumber the dark ones?... provided of course i still have hair.

the answer: mmmaybe. i don't know for certain. but that's really the root of all these concerns. the uncertainty of the future. i have a long, long list of plans and hopes and dreams, but unfortunately the time and energy i have allotted to attack this list is very limited. therein lies the rub.

so i am still on this dead-giant-astronauts kick. the above is one of many in the works. colouring takes more time than drawing sometimes. i blame technology....

so all these drawings and ideas are starting to actually become something in my head. i have an idea for what can be a pretty awesome zine/small book. not to give too much away; it is related to the one-way Mars trip that was announced. i keep thinking about it! i mean, i am obviously not going to apply (also its too late) but the very concept of it has turned my world upside down!

drew this a while back. then coloured it and made some prints to sell at a show. need to make some more and get printed. maybe assemble some postcards for peeps. ah the list! the list!!

apparently it has been a long while since i have posted on here, so of course there are tons of drawings that have passed between now and then. my apologies to whoever actually checks this blog. yes you. you!!

got some hardwood scraps to work on. maybe i will do a few more. if they were a bit longer i can connect them in various combinations and make some fantastic exquisite corpses. 

nothing too exciting to report. just felt the need to post SOMETHING! if things go well in my brains i will be able to post more frequently and with actual content. but who knows for sure. as i said, so much is uncertain. well... not everything i suppose.
30 days from now i will be married. so even though i am unsure of where i will be and what i will be doing in the years to come; i know who i will be with. and that makes me pretty gosh-darn happy. even if i can't get her to read a comic-book :-\

time machine-o

greetings!

soon to be seasons greetings i suppose, though really i do not know what that means. but anyways... the other day i was at SLEEPINGGIANTGALLERY at the reception for Different Strokes for Different Folks, i was talking with fellow artists Jacob Hughes and Mark Burnham. for obvious reasons the conversation turned to age, to the fact that Jacob was 17, Mark 32 and myself 24. three different generations in the same place at the same time. which got me thinking about what i was up to at 17, because sometimes to get a better idea of what the future holds one has to look into the past.
after taking a trip back in time in my amazing time machine i came to realize that although much has changed much has remained the same. many themes and subjects have stayed with me through the years. the more evident ones are as follow; figures, teeth, angel wings, outlines, white figures, superheroes, muscles, distortion of said figures, and darkness. haha looking at this short list i can't help but feel like i should have many more issues than i do (i got none baby!).

at the moment i don't care enough to dig up pre-highschool images so we wil make do with these:

these two images here are from gr.11. it was the first time having to create a "series" of work. for whatever reason my series was on phobias. above we have fear of public speaking and below we have fear of being alone. its pretty crazy looking back into old sketchbooks. i had "meanings" and "reasons" for every element in the paintings. haha and as much as they suggested i avoid outlining things.... i clearly couldn't help myself.

these two here are from a much longer series that came up from a strange dream and metaphors class i had in... first year at OCAD i believe. so i was... 19? i really liked these and stuck with them for a bit. the first one came before OCAD i think, while i was messing with some paint in trying to be a "rougher" painting... i think thats where the buildings came about. the one above here is actually the first piece i ever had in a showed outside of a classroom. it was for a square foot show. which was really open to anyone but it still made me feel very special. especially when i saw that little red dot on the wall beside it haha. good times.

ok so now we come to the present. which all began with much smaller ink on paper drawings in a 4th year class with Ed Pien. the idea was to challenge ourselves by working like one of the artists he showed us slideshows of. i think i actually went with Ed's approach to some of his works which was to begin with a random stroke of ink on the empty paper and draw from it and with it. my first reactions was to draw from inkblots but to draw superheroes. so i had a batman here, a superman there. Ed saw potential in it and told me to keep trying but to not use copyrighted images that the world recognize as such. which led to small random images which ithen decided would be fractions of stories, as they were based on random titles i pulled from books. eventually i tried out mylar as it would allow me to use layers much like i do in Photoshop. time passed... and here we are. the image above is actually one of the first mylar pieces that i regarded as a success. it remains one of my favorites and is the image on my business cards! the image below is much more recent and is currently in a juried show at StationGallery in Whitby.
the current series is doing pretty awesome for me. people seem to like it. which of course is all i can ask for haha. but as any good artist knows, i can keep doing the same thing for only so long. already its begun to evolve in leaps and bounds, at this point i can only guess where i will go. as much as i hate it... i think the plan is to go BIGGER!