If you're in town through December and January, be sure to check out a solo show of my paintings and sketches at Lock Street Brewing Co. in historic Port Dalhousie. With a launch night of Dec 29 (8pm-11pm), the collection features paintings and sketches of familiar hometown icons such as General Motors, the drydocks, Cloth Co, Facer St., portraits & more.

More and more I find myself enjoying painting just as a process and less for the end result...studies rather than completely finished details I don't have the patience for. No sense in spending time on something you aren't going to be into in the end anyway. An interesting surface is just the ticket for this type of painting to add an extra unexpected element and help with the rough feel.

This is a quick oil painting of some building tops in Paris, done in a few hours... it would have been cool to do it on location, but then it would seem like work while on vacation! Plus, I'm pretty sure you'd get trampled. I painted on chunk of nice wood I had left over from some cabinet doors and was sure to let the tone show through, to help with the old yellow colour all the buildings are in the city. Though I went with a taller vertical composition, I find it more interesting cropping in, getting rid of a bunch of extra windows.

I'd been saving up a sweet piece of cardboard, with some unique manufacturing graphics for an interesting painting. Finally the idea hit me to capture one of my favourite song lyrics. James Taylor's classic, "Fire and Rain" is hauntingly well-written tale of a friend's suicide, dealing with drug addiction and with fame and features the line "sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground".  Though in his case it refers to his old band the Flying Machines breaking up, the metaphor is a powerful one.

I choose to use the canvas vertically to represent the difference between a fiery old-fashioned biplane crash on the ground and the dreamy clouds in the sky. Other than that, I wanted to weave in some type, while using colours and textures and images in an experimental manner, to capture the melancholy of the song. I maintained some of the original cardboard imagery, for texture, and because the ladder kind of ties in...a high/low connection.

I tend to get bogged down by larger scale creative projects which can end up feeling like a chore by the time they're finished. In order to avoid the boredom and explore new ideas, I like to slide in a quick painting now and then. Just something done in an hour or two, with no expectations of what it will be, or how it needs to end up. Here are a few recent items...

Hustle
I just painted this one up loosely based on a sketch I did. I've missed working in oil. It's my favourite medium and it had been over a year so this one just felt good. I enjoyed wiping my hand around in the paint and blurring out some of the face. I find a lot of my effort goes into loosening up and not caring about details which I know I really don't have the patience for.




Carriage
I also used to do a lot of work on a more collaged surface. I layered a few snippets from my collection onto a canvas and spread out some colour over it as a start. It needed some sort of outline drawing, of something unexpected, which I picked flipping through an encyclopedia. I think this type of old-time carriage even had a special name I learned (but have since unlearned).

Latest illustration for an article about the battle to eat healthy. As is the case with many people, a favourite snack food like potato chips can be your kryptonite, standing in the way of a clean eating regimen. Substitutes are usually tried, but to no avail...in this article a particular hatred is developed for kale chips.

Done in ink with digital colour, I started out quite abstract in the rough work, just trying to establish a strong feeling of being weakened by the chips in the pose. I also threw in some Superman references like the red and blue colours, and the draped couch blanket which hints at a cape.

Every time I venture into an abstract painting I find myself somewhat lost. I guess the point is that by the end of the painting you should have found something along the way but with abstract works, I just never know when the journey is complete. There is a good amount of layering, making marks and covering them up, in this case across a six foot canvas for a conference room...but unless you regularly work in the abstract there is always the urge to improve upon it.

There is great challenge to be had, in reducing something down to to basics of colour and composition. I found this piece to be unique, actually going into it with a bit of a plan and colour tone, but finding out quickly that doing what feels right actually is the logical choice. Putting constraints on drips and splatters of paint is not a very sane thing to do.

It's hard not to take notice of chart-topping rapper Macklemore, both for his success as an independent artist and his unusual fashion sense. As his most popular single suggests, Macklemore does indeed have a love for great thrift shop finds and one-of-a-kind items, which tends to make him stand out even more in the hip-hop community.

He also brings to his music insightful lyrics, including songs about homophobia, mocking brand names, white privilege and staying independent, a direct contrast to typical rap songs about fame, money and material possessions.

One of my favourite lyrics about dedication to your craft:
 "See, I observed Escher
I love Basquiat
I watched Keith Haring
You see I study art
The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint
The greats were great cause they paint a lot"

In this illustration I envisioned his famous thrift shop coat as a dreamcoat for a knowledge-dropping vagabond. Done in ink with digital colours.

Inspired by the amazing work being done by comic colourists, I wanted to explore adding some dramatic lighting and atmosphere to a quick inked sketch. Even though the image I was working with wasn't very dark, it lended itself to being heavily in shadow. I wanted to capture a sort of haziness with a bit of dim lighting coming from a window so I built up different layers of desaturated colour and filled in large dark areas to accentuate the highlights. I finished off with some rougher texture to give it a grittier flavour. These are two of my favourite colour experimentation results.

I've been looking at this abstract print for a really long time, and have concluded that it has to be a jaguar. Maybe a hyena even, but mostly jaguar. Printmaking can be an enlightening process as it forces you to rely less on drawing and more on solid areas, and prevents you from becoming too focused on details.

The original was done as a black print on white paper, with oil paint on glass and has been sitting around for a while, so I thought I'd lend it some new life. Some digital colour and texture were all it needed in Photoshop to make it a bit more interesting, though no less mysterious.

There's a cool initiative that's been happening for a few years called InkTober. I'm not sure why I've only just heard about it, but basically for the month of October, artists from the world over, contribute drawings trying to produce a drawing day.

I haven't really kept up with the pace, but here's a brush pen sketch of Buffalo from this month. I'm always intrigued by Buffalo driving through it, seeing it's different areas. The revitalized downtown with arena and ballpark, the waterfront, the faded Rust Belt factories, the dense urban decay and the older spires and deco buildings that remind me of Gotham.

The birds in the yard can be loud. Loud and mornings don't go very well together. I sometimes wonder what all the chirping is really about...maybe birds are just bellyaching about their early morning commute. Incidents of birdrage may be on the rise.

It took a long time to complete, but I was finally able to put the finishing touches on the first volume of my hardcover anthology. I thought it would be a cool idea to put together a book that collects the work from my first ten years as creative, and then each decade subsequently after. Given how much effort this one was, I don't know if I'll follow through on that, but it did turn out pretty good.

I used Blurb to produce the book, which allows for real layout flexibility. You can actually design your book right in InDesign and export it into a printable pdf, which is a great benefit compared to just having a few static templates to drop photos into. Other than a bit of crashing and an extremely picky pdf exporter, the entire process was very smooth and turned out the way I wanted. A ton of time was spent just combing through different pieces for inclusion...and fighting the urge to just include all newer work. The end result is a snapshot of my development through design, illustration and fine art.

Here's an illustration I did for an article about a middle-aged woman's foray into Aqua Fitness. Though it may seem like a simple adventure on the surface, she discovers an unspoken aquafit code. Those not wearing swim caps, nose plugs, full-coverage bathing suits and, in general, moving too fast, can be seen as outsiders by the pack. Aquafit is a serious fitness pursuit, and you must treat it as such.

The full page artwork is done in my typical style but I finally experimented with inking via tablet. I can't really tell the difference from brush, though the tactile satisfaction of paper and ink was missed. I will admit that inking with a tablet is handy when the artwork is detailed and can't be produced at a larger size and shrunk down, but I'm certainly not giving up on the traditional method.

I busied myself for a few days with a little cute cat footstool project for Mother's Day. As my first cat project of this nature, I wasn't sure I could make it as endearing as a career cat painter, but it seemed to turn out ok. I don't know if my success will carry over to a genre specialist but it was an interesting challenge. Painted in acrylic with an antiqued feel

Sometimes when big corporate sponsors take over, an event can lose its meaning. I think that's happened with Earth Day. It shouldn't be about agendas and opportunities for lobbyists to push agendas. The spirit of the day is goodwill towards our planet and reconnecting with the natural world. A simple and honest message.

In that vein, here is an older print I dug up which I think speaks to that feeling. Just a guy out for a stroll by the lake, feeding a swan some bread. A simple moment, kept deliberately minimal always seems to feel right.

Looking through different location reference photos called my attention to the new cultural phenomenon of phone addiction. I mean, I knew about it of course, but it's not something you digest the full effect of until you see it made obvious. Twenty years ago, if you were to look through photos, you wouldn't find people sitting around playing with their phones in the background. I'm not sure what they would be doing, if anything. Maybe they'd just have their hands in their pockets instead.

Observations like this are important because artists need to replicate reality often. Patterns, groupings, the way objects fall naturally are all subtle details that make a setting believable. So if you're doing an illustration of a crowd now for example, making it current would require a bunch of people texting on their phones. And more specifically everyone has their own technique too. Index finger tappers, piano fingers, thumb shovers...all different ways you'd see people using their phones.

Since it seems that winter wants to hang around for a while still, here are 2 quick vignettes, inspired by the cold temperature and grey landscape.

The first is a photo collage, pieced together with some random photos and some textures I had lying around. Just an excuse to play around with a cool palette, which I don't usually restrict myself to.

The next is a doodle done with leftover paint. The thought popped into my head that winter is also about rosy cheeks and knit patterns, so I tried to sum that up in under a minute with only a few brushstrokes.

Here's a new portrait of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, Academy Award wining actor. Though acclaimed in both Hollywood and the theatre, he is most remembered as a great character actor. This makes sense to me, because I can't remember any specific roles where he needed the spotlight. But then stop and think...he was that dude in Twister, and that manager in Moneyball...and so on, and so on. He was able to make an impression with his characters, while not having to be a star.

For this portrait I originally intended it to be a quick brush drawing.  I thought the drawing turned out ok, but it seemed to lack a bit without his ultralight blonde hair, so I put down some pastel shades to complete it.

Luckily 2013 was the year of Rob Ford. So 2014 really can't get much lower than that. The rotund, sweaty, mess of a mayor of Toronto was a media machine the past year.  There was something about his Chris Farley sketch antics that people just couldn't get enough of. Or, maybe it was more of a sign that not much happened in 2013. There weren't any new books, TV shows, albums or movies that gripped me enough to specifically remember them. So I've got nothing to review for my year in review. But who needs content when you can just draw a funny picture of a crack-smoking mayor.

Here's a recent illustration I did for an article about discovering yoga. It explores the ups and downs of the yogi boho life for the unathletic and how as it turns out, it can be pretty relaxing. It's just a different sort of me time.

For the artwork I wanted a fun drawing with some cool drowsy tones. I've been enjoying watercolour lately and it just felt right to throw some in to add a little texture and moodiness.