Return to home page
... ongoing
| The blog
from Australia and Australian paintings |
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As well, there's still a regular flow of correspondence and photos relating to Vanishing British Columbia which I put up in the on-line section.
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...added May 6, 2008
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Because I'm spending a lot of time focused on the idea of travelling and painting (and teaching courses thereon), I've redone the Travel Section, including the old sections on Winter in the Mediterranean, my Canada book and the Tasmania trip, which had been unchanged (and not very good) since I started this website 8+ years ago. |
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...added January 29, 2008
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Vancouver Remembered wins the Vancouver Book Prize!! |
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...added January 28, 2008
| A wonderful collection of vintage colour photos of stations, etc. on the old Kettle Valley Railway, submitted by Don McKay and posted on my Brookmere page in the Vanishing BC section. |
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... added December 11, 2007
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The first instalment of my "Mid-Life Crisis Bus Story," based on the time when I had a bus and was contemplating the writing and artwork for Van Ordinaire, has been published in the January/February 2008 issue of the Old Bus Review. Second installment posted in March. |
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... added November 1, 2007
A few sketchbook watercolours from trips to BC's Cariboo region and the town of Wells in 2006-7
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...added August 16, 2007
A complete reorganization of my pages on my paintings, watercolours, woodcuts, etc.
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...added August 3, 2007
a look back at the Fraser Valley: "travel watercolours" I did a year ago, after we'd sold the farm and moved to the city
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... added May 8, 2007
The "Suitcase Paintings" that will be in the BC touring exhibition at Island Mountain Arts Centre in Wells-Barkerville in June/July, 2007
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...added April 4, 2007
Very tentatively, I've begun to paint down here. At least, to paint the world around me, as I'm spending quite a lot of time painting out the pencil jottings of my iconic BC landscapes for the exhibition opening at Island Mountain Arts in Wells/Barkerville in June. The first oil is the triptych above, 20 x 90 inches, of the mountain mist coming up through the eucalypts and pines in the gully below our back yard. It's unfinished, I think, but I won't know how to finish it until I've looked at it for a few more months.
... added March 22, 2007
Correspondence & maps relating to an almost forgotten tram line connecting Vancouver with North Burnaby, Coquitlam and Mission
(this file opens as a pdf, 2.6 mb, in a separate window)
...added February 20, 2007
A website for the Elizabeth Flats, our new place in Australia, which has a holiday rental flat
A correspondence page relating to Vancouver topics and Vancouver Remembered
...added February 9, 2007
Images from the book Vancouver Remembered
Tower Beach looking toward the city, watercolour, 2006, approx. 10 x 11 inches
Return to home page
...added February 9, 2007
The Mary Ann Pictures
Pencil drawings of the cat from early in 2006, before we left the farm.
Return to home page
...added February 7, 2007
Printer's mark for the Alcuin Society
The Alcuin Society, which is
greatly interested in traditional printing
techniques, commissioned a series of printer's marks from Canadian
artists in 2005-6. They all had to be woodblocks, which they will later
print as editions and include in their published journal, the Amphora. Along with
artists Gary Sim, Leonard Hutchinson, Alistair Bell, Shinsuke
Minegishi, George Kuthan, and Jim Rimmer, my woodcuts and linocuts were
featured in Amphora.
A printer's mark is a small graphic image to identify a particular press. Ralph Stanton of the Editorial board wrote, "To make the project more interesting we are asking the artist to create a design of a printer’s mark of a press that should have existed in the past but did not, or should exist now but does not, or should exist in the future. It is of course up to the artist to decide what the 'should haves' are. We wanted to give the artists the scope to create in any style from the fifteenth century to the 21st and beyond."
My master drawing is below. I carved the block and delivered it and, one day, when it's printed, I will post the result. The text below is the "artist's statement," as it were, describing my raison d'être.
A printer's mark is a small graphic image to identify a particular press. Ralph Stanton of the Editorial board wrote, "To make the project more interesting we are asking the artist to create a design of a printer’s mark of a press that should have existed in the past but did not, or should exist now but does not, or should exist in the future. It is of course up to the artist to decide what the 'should haves' are. We wanted to give the artists the scope to create in any style from the fifteenth century to the 21st and beyond."
My master drawing is below. I carved the block and delivered it and, one day, when it's printed, I will post the result. The text below is the "artist's statement," as it were, describing my raison d'être.
"A printer's mark, like a logo,
is a symbol that is usually more
graphic
than it is textual -- that is, it is absorbed through the emotions
before being read or analyzed by the intellect. The best ones make
their impact before the mind begins to deconstruct them into component
parts. The historic printer's marks I've seen divide into two groups: a
pictorial one, which tend to be technically brilliant but cluttered,
and a more graphic one, sometimes involving the interweaving of letters
in an almost Celtic way.
"As an artist, I've used the equivalent of a printer's mark -- an image on my business card. Twenty-five years ago, I used a pencil self-portrait caricature. About a decade ago, when we were living on a farm, I began a series of woodcuts reflecting that milieu. One of them, of a farmer on a tractor, had the sort of graphic quality that made it ideal for a business card and, indeed, for a printer's mark, which historically were woodcuts.
"In 2006, we returned to the city after more than 13 years on the farm. After that lengthy period when I was more preoccupied with natural forms than human-created ones, I began to work on a woodcut image that would reflect the muscular, diagonal, dynamic reality of modern Vancouver. For better or worse, the skylines and infrastructure of cities are the icons of our age, replacing the rustic, utopian scenes of earlier generations.
The untitled woodcut image above incorporates the sense of a gateway, created both by the stylized perspective and, with the strong diagonals, the imminent sense of arrival at somewhere new. Conceived of as a printer's mark, it would work for an urban press -- on the sort of books that would seek gateways into new ways of seeing and thinking."
"As an artist, I've used the equivalent of a printer's mark -- an image on my business card. Twenty-five years ago, I used a pencil self-portrait caricature. About a decade ago, when we were living on a farm, I began a series of woodcuts reflecting that milieu. One of them, of a farmer on a tractor, had the sort of graphic quality that made it ideal for a business card and, indeed, for a printer's mark, which historically were woodcuts.
"In 2006, we returned to the city after more than 13 years on the farm. After that lengthy period when I was more preoccupied with natural forms than human-created ones, I began to work on a woodcut image that would reflect the muscular, diagonal, dynamic reality of modern Vancouver. For better or worse, the skylines and infrastructure of cities are the icons of our age, replacing the rustic, utopian scenes of earlier generations.
The untitled woodcut image above incorporates the sense of a gateway, created both by the stylized perspective and, with the strong diagonals, the imminent sense of arrival at somewhere new. Conceived of as a printer's mark, it would work for an urban press -- on the sort of books that would seek gateways into new ways of seeing and thinking."