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Showing posts from April, 2009

the time is: lunch

The time is lunch ... which, around here, is like stepping within the confines of a moving cloud, and then trying to take dimensions. So I draw, then go to the library. * * * * * Returning to the library: Summer Blonde and Shortcomings , two bully reads from the Easter long weekend. Tomine's stories always have this ghost hanging around -- the unresolved, the agonized, the string snipped off. The presence of thin hope is just more or less than fifty-fifty. My favourite character is the miscreant, self-smothering Hillary Chan (from Summer Blonde ), who only emerges from her sour shell to torture passers-by with crank calls to a payphone she can see from her apartment window. * * * * * Suddenly: everything is green. It's been cold/wet, cold/wet -- last night, on my way to three pints of Guinness, I wore an insulated, almost-winter jacket with a toque. And for weeks now I've been watching the ground look stuck on the dun colours, the dried-dead-brown colours. But now

{fleeting} + {impossibility}

Last week's Illustration Friday theme was fleeting . Fleeting is: transient, ephemeral, fugitive, transitory, evanescent. We live, we die. We hold our life in our hands, then it pushes us down. The unimaginable comes true. Dark leads to light then back again. The wheels will always come off. The IF theme this week is impossibility . Same diff. Take the example of Carl "The Truth" Williams . Never mind that he was a serious contender during some of the heavyweight division's best days, that he fought guys like Mike Tyson and Larry Holmes, that he once got up off the canvas twice to stop an undefeated Jesse Ferguson in front of a national television audience -- for my money, The Truth had the coolest nickname ever conceived for a professional athlete (only John "The Beast" Mugabi comes close). His 1985 fifteen-round loss to Holmes -- notable for being (a) questionably judged and (b) the last heavyweight bout ever scheduled for that long -- took the teeth out

red jacket

Red Jacket #1; mixed media on canvas, 22 x 28 inches, the string series continues. Red Jacket #2; mixed media on canvas, 22 x 28 inches. Red Jacket #3; mixed media on canvas, 28 x 22 inches. * * * * * These three paintings accompany my prose poem called Red Jacket (below). The paintings will be showing at Studio 330 into the month of May. Have a good Easter weekend, everyone! * * * * * Red Jacket Fukushima says the City is ruined. At the very least it’s poorly. At the very least it’s under wounded weather and broken systems; beneath blotted snow the City has turned Drained Green, Dead Yellow, Rinsed Tin. Making me nauseous. The curtains stay closed. I say: take me away from this . My red jacket calls to me. All my life I wanted a red jacket like that – something from a foreign catalogue with a hand-stitched tag that says COLOUR: RED JACKET. Something so exclusive that it defines itself, that it’s its own thing. I lay it out on the bed. You can’t wear that , Fukushima says. M

{talisman} ... or I want to join the Peppy Kids Club!

This week's Illustration-Friday theme is talisman , which is just weird, so I decided to go seasonal and draw a rabbit, meaning rabbit's foot . Turns out it's all mixed up with hoodoo magic -- the best rabbit's foot coming from the shapeshifted form of a witch . * * * * * More mail magic in the form of a package from Jeannette yesterday, made marvelous with a weird and haunting Polaroid for my cubicle and a letter which stops dead in mid-narrative and discarded stationary from a mysterious (and highly-compelling) outfit called the Peppy Kids Club . I want in.

art for the peanut

The sweet aftermath of an art trade with Susan : it came in the mail yesterday. The black bird is so charming and C had a very good idea to frame the rabbit for the peanut's room. Go peanut! * * * * * Using this (above) to make these (below); monoprints from a scratched-up cutting board + water colour + some soap. For Susan's upcoming print show. The writing is text from a story I just finished (well, the first draft anyway). It reads: Now it’s been six weeks of silence and I know I know there’s something wrong and I know it has nothing to do with the mail or you being sick or away or anything like that, there’s only one reason and I can feel it as sure as a lump in my throat across all these many miles and that reason is that you’re cross with me and possibly even done with me. And this makes me so upset Quintal, I can’t tell you, just the thought of it sends me to the mirror again, standing there applying lipstick and not knowing what I’m looking for, just watching for th