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If you’re looking at this site in 2023 or later, just keep scrolling to see the most recent posts about my art. Or you can load the Art Category Page.

A gun is pretty useless if your opponent can bend reality or is really good at yoga (animated code rain version) from Chonky Bug People series.

You can safely ignore much of the rest of the site as it’s out of date, neglected from around 2012 to 2021 when I had retired from art practice. I was also too occupied with other things to have much interest in blogging.

The Rumours of My Site Revival are Greatly Exaggerated

“Reaper” from Chonky Bug People series.

In fact, if there were rumours, they were that the site is dead. Assessing the degree of their exaggeration is an exercise left to the reader. Buuuuuut… 14 months between posts, 3 months before that, 5 years before that, and so on. Less like multiple revivals and more like a zombie blog.

The most recent rationalization/excuse:

  • Last year I struggled to resolve some technical issues on the site. With the tech somewhat broken, I didn’t feel comfortable attempting to drum up traffic for the site, and therefore didn’t post anything. (For those curious about what was broken, I couldn’t get the secure (SSL/TLS) version of the site working, but have now resolved it.)
  • It didn’t help that I was caught up in various art activities interspersed with Lia having a few major health crises, punctuated by several catastrophic events in crypto.
  • Needless to say, with the combination of compassion/caregiver fatigue, chaos of the crypto space, and a general malaise induced by the threat of COVID-19, my mental state was very poor.
  • Taken together, 2022 started with optimism but by the second half of the year was pretty much a write-off for me.

Despite all the headwinds, I did manage to have a fairly productive year, which I will review in greater detail in (a) future post(s). Here are some illustrated highlights.

Completed a daily drawing practice (except for October), filling ~7 sketchbooks with over 700 pen-and-ink line drawings.

Sketchbook Drawing – 2022-04-25

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Site Revival, Art Retirement, and Miscellany

  • I’ve revived this site and migrated it to a new web host.
  • This means that some things are broken, including many links, navigation on the older portfolio galleries, and various other features that no one is likely to miss. I may fix them eventually.
  • Much of the content describing me, my goals as an artist, or build details about the site are out of date. I may update them eventually
  • I am no longer actively pursuing art as a career, having decided in 2012 to retire from being an artist. I will likely write about this eventually.
  • Here’s is what I’ve been up to:
    • 2007-2009 I was the Communication Coordinator at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon.
    • 2009 to 2015 I worked at Concentra Financial, first in communications, then in estate administration.
    • 2015-2016 I completed a Master of Business Administration at the Edwards School of Business at the University of Saskatchewan

I’ve joined Saskatoon’s Mendel Art Gallery as Communications Assistant

If anyone has been wondering what happened to my online presence, a full-time day job found me and has taken over a large proportion of the time I would otherwise spend in the studio. Any scraps of free time have gotten parceled out between family, a prior commitment for me to repaint the exterior of the house we’re renting, and daily necessities. Studio time ranks fairly low on the list of priorities, and blogging time is even lower.

But you’re wondering about the job. As of August 8, 2007 I am the Communications Assistant at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon. This means that I work on such things as maintaining the web site and blog at www.mendel.ca, doing print design for invitations, posters, Folio magazine, and other stuff. I also do assorted proofreading, editing, and copywriting, interface with the media, and work on press releases.

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Tinkering with the Site

I’m tinkering with the site, specifically an upgrade from WordPress 2.0.x to 2.2. I think I’ve got everything back to normal except for the date and comment info on the front page post listing and a few idiosyncrasies with the recent post listings on the sidebars. This is all in preparation for the testing and possible addition of a shopping cart, a new search function, and an integrated email announcement system.

Please let me know in the comments or via the contact form if you see any stray code or other strangeness.

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.

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The Upgrades are Complete

I spent most of November and December slaving away in the deep recesses of my web server. Aside from a few cosmetic changes, there have been some fairly significant structural changes that—if I’ve made them properly—are unlikely to be noticed. I was pretty much done with the updates before Christmas, but deciced not to make an announcement because it’s generally such a busy time. I figure that people are more likely to be spending quality time with friends and family over the holiday season than sitting in front of computers. I’m going to save the tour of the new content until next week. In the meantime, feel free to snoop around and discover what’s new around here. And if you find any bugs, let me know in the comments.

Reconfiguring the Warp Core

I’ve been fiddling around with a bunch of the behind-the-scenes stuff on the site. I may have fiddled a bit too much where I shouldn’t have. What this means is:

  1. All of the image links in the blog are broken.
  2. Some of the other pages have moved, specifically: About and Contact. Others may also have strayed.
  3. Anything you may have bookmarked in the site may be nonfunctional.
  4. RSS Feeds may or may not be dead.
  5. The home page for the blog (http://edpas.net/) only displays the most recent post, and the navigation links at the bottom of the page don’t lead anywhere. If you want to browse earlier posts, I’d suggest you use the chronological archives listing from the sidebar.
  6. Error messages are less than useful.

But don’t touch that dial! I’m going to fix everything or else put it back to the way it was. For those of you curious about what’s happend, I’m not exactly sure. But I have strong a suspicion that it has to do with a conflict between some of my custom mod_rewrite rules and those of my blogging software. Regardless, I made a full site backup before I started changing things around. If I can’t sort things out, I’ll simply do a manual restore.

My apologies for any inconvenience or despair this unfortunate situation may have caused. All of this is in preparation for some significant new content that I’ll be posting in the next couple of weeks.

Restoration and Upgrade

I’m going to overhaul this site over the coming weeks. I want to more appropriately reflect my planned change in focus from a photographically-centred journal about my life in Japan to a site that is primarily about my professional arts practice.

As a warm-up I decided to try to get the existing site into some semblance of order. To that end I’ve done a bunch of housekeeping, all of which was long overdue. The short version is that I’ve made some cosmetic changes, restored the missing posts from July 2005-July 2006, upgraded the backend software, and changed the web location of the journal. I’ve also committed myself for the foreseeable future to calling this a “journal” rather than a “blog.”

And even though I’m steering this journal in different direction, I’m planning to leave all of the old posts online.

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Technical Difficulties: Disappearing Posts

Most of my recent posts have disappeared from my database. I have backups, but it’ll take some time to restore the blog to its former state. I’ll be restoring the missing posts as soon as I have time. Hopefully I can also restore the comments on those posts.

Regardless, I’ve been really busy with a couple of projects. My writing-about-my-art project is coming to a close. The manuscript is hovering at around 38,000 words including the footnotes. And I’ve started to work on the final edit of my Crossroads video, which I started in 2002.