On March 3, 2007 I will be giving a short, informal talk about my digital art practice. The talk is part of an ongoing series of artist talks at Paved Arts in Saskatoon, which are intended to address practices based on—or relying heavily on—digital technology and/or electronic media. I plan to talk about my art-making process and how I came to use the computer as an expressive tool. I will talk about the specific software I use—the vector-based imaging program Adobe Illustrator—and how it relates to a more general practice that includes painting, assemblage, and sculpture.
Category Archives: Art
Two Paintings Missing in Storage
In an attempt to consolidate the surprisingly vast collection of my own personal artwork, I’ve been trying to account for each piece that I lent out on “storage” duty after we sold our house and moved abroad in the summer of 2003. I’ve managed to track down all but two pieces.
Update 9 March 2007: Both pieces are now accounted for.
A Tour of the Site Upgrades
A couple of weeks ago I promised that “next week” I’d be giving a tour of the changes to this site. Well, “next week” came and went—and then some—without much web-touristic joy. I suppose late is better than never. In any case here’s the gist of this post: I’ve changed the home page and added a few new sections: portfolio, texts, and info. I’ve also added site-wide navigation, and a site map. This may not seem like a lot, but hiding inside those two short sentences are over fifty pages of new content, and at least two hundred images. As always, you’re free to explore this new stuff on your own, or you can read further to find out more before you take the plunge.
Galleries in Calgary
I’m in Calgary this week, touring the city’s art galleries as part of two projects. One is the ongoing project of reacquainting myself with contemporary Canadian art. The second—and probably more important—project is to get a sense of which galleries are going to be a good fit for my work, prior to submitting my portfolio.
Wrestling with the Omnibus Artist Statement
This week and last I’ve been busy trying to write an artist statement. I started with some notes, and then some research, and now a deep sense of doom and futility. Why? Well, an artist statement is supposed to encapsulate the artist’s ideas about their practice in approximately one page. Mine is currently running to about 15 pages. Single spaced. At last count it was about 7500 words. It’s about evenly split into thirds: one-third of that is quotes from texts I’ve been reading, one-third is my responses to the quotes, and one-third is stuff that I’ve come up with independent of quotes. Add to that another couple of pages of miscellaneous notes, lists of terms to define, and subjects for further research, and you can get an idea of the unwieldiness of it all.
Concerns About My Studio Practice
Deciding to work on an all-digital studio practice was not without its worries. In conversations with friends in Saskatoon in the summer before coming to England, I talked about my frustrations with creating digital works, and how those frustrations had led me to abandon—temporarily—digital practices.
A Poet’s Birthday
If you’re one to pay attention to these things, you’ll have noticed that this is the second poetry-related post in two days. Poetry lives!
At one point, this post was turning into a longish text that sounded more like a funeral speech than birthday wishes. Luckily, I know a good frankeneditor who cut out all the eulogizing.
More New Art
I’ve been spending most of my waking hours, and some of the hours that I’m supposed to be sleeping, on some new work. The piece I posted last week was the second one. I’ve posted all four below, in order of completion.
New Art
Here’s a piece I finished last week. No title yet. Click on the image for a larger version.