Stickin' Ideas Together

I was in my element two weeks ago when I joined Tilleke and 13 other talented artists in an embroidery workshop hosted by the Maiwa School of textiles in their beautiful loft studio on Granville Island. Together we spent three creative days stitching, sharing and collaging wonderful nothings on cloth and with paper. I say "nothings" because the joy and beauty of Tilleke's work is the "nothings" she notices on signs, in the newspaper or maybe overheard conversations. Her international sense of humour and unexpected cynicism was as amusing as her work is honest. What I love about Tilleke's style is the graphic randomness of the elements. Her work feels raw, unstructured and energetic. The image on the top of this post, is one of my collages from workshop. The exercise was to collage a flower using one colour (and tones/shades of it) from supplied magazines. Being a pretty colourful person, I decided to stretch my comfort zone by executing the ex

Here's the final painting that came out of my time with Ecole Pauling Johnston. What a great group of kids to work with! Kudos to their teacher, Laura Delasalle, for enthusiastically supporting this project and for accommodating my schedule. This piece really supports the work the school has done in adding to their existing playground Specifically, the wooden rounds are a new feature for the kids to jump and play on. They were simply calling out to be a feature on this painting too. Here are a few of the techniques used to make this piece: • CREATE: Vaseline resist and spray paint • Wooden rounds: acrylic transfers of vector art • Children illustrations: colour copied from a vintage story book • Support textures: combination of collaged papers and acrylic paint I'm looking forward to hearing the result of the silent auction for this piece. Good luck class!

This past Monday the fantastic students at Ecole Pauline Johnston’s gr. 6/7 class and I worked together again on their mixed media collage for the school’s gala fundraiser. Since I’d left the painting at the school last week, but needed to prepare for this next session, I decided to make a quick mock-up to help guide the process. I started by bringing a photo of the work-in-progress painting into InDesign. Then I tested out colour schemes and layered various elements to give a sense of what the final may look like. By then a strong idea of the final was beginning to form in my mind. On the second photo posted here you can see the mock-up at the bottom of the frame — the paper with the word PLAY printed on it in yellow. With that printout in front of us as a loose guide, we spent the afternoon adding on a few more magazine clippings (including words such a SPRING, GROW and J’ADORE), splattering and dripping a tinted acrylic glaze and transferring some photocopied imag

Yesterday the Gr. 6-7 class at Ecole Pauline Johnston did an amazing job creating the base texture for their gala painting submission! This 30"x 24" deep wooden cradled panel from Opus is the perfect substrate. It provided enough room for everyone to collage at least 3 pieces of found paper and begin to layer on some acrylic paint too while taking the expected abuse from so many enthusiastic hands. Next week we'll add another layer of imagery and textures.  The kids seemed to enjoy themselves -- or at least enjoyed a change of pace from the 3 Rs : ). I'm really looking forward to seeing how we progress this together. Check back to see how it goes!

... and SPRING! Today it's a wonderfully crisp and sunny day in Vancouver. Finally. So much rain and snow this winter has been emotionally challenging for many of us. However, there is always joy to find in any weather pattern from today's bright sky to our foggy grays such as renowned artist Toni Onley used to portray. Right now it's easy to find my joy since I have been invited to share my collage style with some students from West Vancouver school, Ecole Pauline Johnson, next week. This year their annual fund raiser is taking the form of a gala Art in the Park event. Working together with their grade 6/7 class, we will provide one of the actionable items. This will be so much fun! How did you survive the winter? Did you take a vacation from your local scene or engage in a new hobby? Maybe you simply hunkered down and created your way into bliss? Let me know if you have any "how-to-survive-the-winter-dulldrom" secrets to share. We may wish to stash the su