It was a crazy summer. Carolyn and I went our seperate ways somewhere along the way, Andrew and I crashed in the studio almost every night, I eventually moved in with my buddies Team Macho and I'm just getting settled in now... When I'm working hard on a show I tend to neglect every other element in my life, so now I'm done, but my phone has been shut off, I missed the last 5 months rent on my studio, and I've got 2 collection agencies calling me up. Well, they were calling me up before my phone got cut off, now they are mailing me letters. The letters are getting kind of scary, the latest one just says this:
WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY WE HAVE NOT HEARD FROM YOU.
PLEASE ADVISE YOUR INTENTIONS.
I don't even know what that means! When you call the phone company, the music that they play when you are on hold is really relaxing love song type stuff. When you call the collection agency, they play terrifying German horror music. But yeah, this is the fourth summer in a row that I have had a solo at the end, and the fourth time this sort of thing has happened. But once some payments come in from work things sort themselves out usually...
First off I want to thank my co-op student Nicolina Cloutier, shes an illustration student from Sheridan College. She worked really hard this summer helping Andrew and I in the studio, and did all of the shitty jobs that we didn't want to do and barely even complained about them. I'm hiring her on as an assistant starting this week, so now she gets to do a whole bunch of shitty jobs around the studio but she gets paid... But yeah, she was awesome to be around and pretty funny and I'm really excited that she'll still be around the studio this fall...
Here is a photo of her buying me socks and underwear from Winners:
I'll spare you the boredom of a million random studio photos, but heres a good one... A week before the show had to be finished Andrew got hit by a car. And not just a little hit, but face-smashes-the-windshield-missing-teeth sort of hit. I'm not sure if "hit" is the proper word, I think "smoked" is more accurate.
So he gets knocked out and when he comes to, he finds his teeth, puts them in his pocket, and immediately calls me and says: "um...I'm not sure if I'll be able to come into work today. I just got hit by a car. I'm about to go into emergency, but I'll give you a call as soon as I get out. Depending on what time it is maybe I can still come in and get some work done." What a selfish guy, he should have came into the studio FIRST, finished his work for the day, and THEN gone into emergency...
What a beautiful face...
okok, so here is a bunch of images of the work from the show...
The piece that looks like a grey scale doesn't translate very well, its actually a grid of 7780 bird portraits. I've posted the last image of the grids before, we released limited edition offset lithos of them at the show...
After the show I relaxed a bit, drew a bit, and went "up north" to chop some firewood...here are a few random photos of "up north":
As soon as I got back from the cabin, I got an email that my friend Crystal Yin ( www.flapflapfly.com ) and her sister Michelle was in town. I use the term friend loosely, we like each others work and have been emailing each other off and on for a few years, but had never met, but get along pretty well over the world wide inter web. What I wasn't prepared for however was her being the prettiest girl in the world and I had just spent 7 days in the woods and i was totally thrown off... I tried to show them the city but I was really nervous and tripped a lot and made long rambling sentences that made very little sense. Worst tourguide ever. But yeah, check out her site, her and Michelle make Sweet Toofs, they are really quite cool...
I didn't really get any photos, except for photos of their backs of them looking up at the CN Tower. Since 1976, it has been the world's tallest free-standing structure on land, though it will most likely lose this title to the still under construction Burj Dubai, which surpassed the CN Tower's height on September 12, 2007. The tower is the signature icon of the city, attracting more than two million international visitors annually. I took that whole last part from Wikipedia...
Ok, so that catches everything up to yesterday... So this time for sure, I'm going to update once a week! Except a drawing takes more than a week to complete so I don't know what I'll write about...I guess not every post will be art related...