Presents! Kindness made material you guys.

I'm not sure why I get blessed so much sometimes.  Wether it's my inclination to count blessings or that I simply do just get showered with good things on a regular basis (and I also might be easily amused)...

At any rate, I found a rather precious envelope leaning against my door last week.  I was having a terrible morning - no spark and no fire in the gut - and had finally dragged myself out the front door to find this package marked "Contents: Art Paper".  Are there sweeter words?  Immediate fire back in the belly!

It came to me from the very kind (really, astonishingly kind) artist I'd met on Flickr - Catherine L. Mommsen.  She not only sent me a huge stack of the creamiest, most luscious papers (Fabriano and Portofine among them), she also tucked in a handmade card with one of her beautiful drawings on the front.  I do so love her art... there's a fineness, a tranquility, a sense of the religious unknown, and a kind of worldly dreamscape to it.  

So amazing, Catherine.  You are my art hero!  I have to get cracking on drawing on this wonderful new paper, I think. 

Also, while at the Boom-Chix-Boom art sale (more on that next post), I traded art for some buttons made by Kirsten McCrea of Papirmasse - a lovely service for anyone who needs more gorgeousness and whimsy in their life.  Basically for $60 you get 12 signed and editioned (and killer) prints throughout the year - now doesn't that sound much better than some quick-to-be-obsolete and full-of-ads magazine subscription?  Yes, I thought so.

the March issue makes me want to listen to rousing icy synthesizer music and eat snow...

oh yeah, one more thing (BOOM CHIX A BOOM)

While at La Centrale and enjoying Pantheon Petro, I picked up a little flyer, oh a little flyer indeed...........

With my name on it!  Shit gosh I guess that means I really have to sit there and sell postcards and little zine-type things now all weekend.  Shucks.  Who knew?  I mean, I did, but I didn't realize I'd be named on something official or nothin'.  (Colour me pleased.  And come see some performances and buy some stuff if you can!)  /shameless plug.  :)

4296 st-Laurent

514-871-0268

lacentrale.org

Pantheon Petro @ Galerie La Centrale Powerhouse

Amazing what we do with our lives.  Perhaps even more amazing to hear about the story when you can understand french a little better.  But it was an satisfyingly technicoloured artist talk @ La Centrale nonetheless!

Dominique Petrin, former member of tribally-petrochemical-punk-revival band Les Georges Leningrad has basically grown up out of her 20s and has started using her silk-screening skills of band poster madness for good and not delicious evil.  (well, it's all relative).  A whole gallery plastered with jungle bright rips and prints and wrinkled triangle eyes and macaw birds and eggs puking ribbons to the floor = Dominique's personal forest and an altar to her own religion.  If I got the translation right!  

I remember hearing about Les Georges Leningrad (Montreal local of course) a few years ago, I'm not sure when they broke up or whatever, but I'm glad I got the heads up just now to go listen to them because they will eat your head with jungle thrash.  So so so very good.

Download LGL- Sangue Puro here!

(she did all the cover art for the band, and many many posters I wish I'd been able to take pictures of, they were twisted and gorgeous.  Some for Deerhoof and Add N to X, too.)

The gallery has become a jungle, chaos.
A petrochemical place.
A timeless space, dangerous, violently stimulating.
In this space, which I call forest, women have built an altar; this is where they pay respects to what we will call the “inaccessible”, symbolized by the stone.
A ritual will take place at night, a paper-made voodoo, sort of.
We do not know if it is black or if it is white.
Jean Cocteau transpires the supernatural; it inspires me. 
There is in papier-mâché all the magic that children possess naturally.
On the other hand, silk screening allows ephemeral universes filled with mystery to emerge.
Anyway, mystery is a fleeting gasp.

- D. P.

PANTHÉON PÉTRO 
DOMINIQUE PÉTRIN

Exhibit 
August 21 to September 20
Opening 
Friday, August 21, 7pm
Artist talk 
Saturday, August 22, 3pm
Performance as part of Viva ! 
September 20, 9pm

Idle thoughts, special guest appearances...

One of the things I love most of all about drawing is the unexpected nature of it.  

Start working more often in cafés?  Surprise musical guests will start showing up in your hair.  Or sushi might come to life if you happen to be idling next to a fish market (and call me a bad vegan but I love that salty smell of ocean and deep-sea creature).

Also café-born:  In the midst of a particularly perfect morning listening to french chanteuses and battling the august heat waves with a shaded window seat and a humble cup of joe,  I managed to distill two Very Important Thoughts I wasn't able to put into words before, regarding the way I work.

No. 1 : The act of drawing can be a litmus test for personal Truth.

When the lines become genius, impassioned, something more than I expected at the outset - I pay special attention to whatever I'm thinking about at the time.  It's usually important.  Okay, it's always important.  Or it's very very zen.  Is that not important?

No. 2 : Dream deja vu is a good sign of properly tapped intuition.

Just what it says.  It's pretty common for me to get little flashes of a previous night's dream while I work and I think now that just means I'm being subconscious enough.  

Obviously these insights won't apply to everyone's art!  But if you work in a pretty free-conscious style you might understand this I bet.

Summerpaintings.

We finished our last painting critique today, and my children were bare on the wall, full-colour splayed all vulnerable and unfinished, like feverish flowers or spider spittle or cup noodle ramen...

Not terrible!  I said that my influences were Matta, Japanese prints, religious art, comics, systems of organization and every manner of non-human humanity there is (ghosts, demons, robots, spirits, gods, chimera, golem, imaginary friend, faun, angel, what-have-you).  I feel like I could have made more... but isn't it the way to always be hard on oneself.  

I'll be setting up my home studio soon (ie: the bit of floor next to my bed), and make lots and lots of works in an experimental vein before the summer is out.  Portraits that are a little fucked up, faster works, maybe copy some old masters so I can figure out how the frell to paint silk.

Maybe I'll sell my bed so I have more room.  It's a thought.

Eating paint for breakfast. (Hero # 37 of 581)

I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open.  It's one of those massively beautiful sunswept friday mornings where I'm a little underslept but still sitting at the bask-point of summer, in front of my window.  Not too hot (not this summer anyway), and having to invent some activity to fill the rest of my day.

Ah, I know.  Galleries!

I think my brushstrokes need to some heroes to look up to, and I mean that so literally it's almost child's play to fix.  Essentially, my paintings are looking finicky (to me) and I'm pretty sure that the established contemporary artists might have some clues as to how to make an effective Effect without getting so OC all the time, every time I want pink to fade to orange I break out the hobby brushes!  Not so useful!

One artist who I can think of recently who's inspiration in this regard is Dana Schutz, who I just discovered.  She paints an alter-verse populated by people who have the ability to eat and reconstruct themselves like it ain't no thang, and the colours people, OH the colourss...  she's part of the movement that my painting teacher calls "Post Human", which apparently I'm a part of and you'll hear no complaining from me about that designation.  Human is so passe anyway, bring on the carnivorous cheery golems I say.

See? ----->

So rough yet so effective.  Wowee.

So I was in hiding...

... and now I am not.

Right now I am drawing little pen-pieces again, quite like the feeling I had while making Planetjam (which you should go buy and support wee little artsy me and my ever-growing need for canvas space even though I totally can't find places under my bed for all the finished works, egad!)

There isn't really a theme except for whatever's brewing just below the surface of my head, so the titles of these two are really more of a happy surprise than anything premeditated.  Fire and Water are the most passionate of elements, the sexiest and the most unpredictable... it's a small surprise that they're my favourite to try and capture in pen.  

With a few more of these finished I'll be printing them out onto lovely cardstock and selling them for a reasonable bit of pocket-copper at the BOOM-CHIX-A-BOOM sidewalk sale/benefit event at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, August 22nd and 23rd, it should be a hoot of a hootenany!  All my other zines will be for sale as well, and I'll be sharing a table with the lovely Amber of Ambeau Peanut Butter, + friend.  Hope to see you out in the sun-rays! 

(a poem)

WOOSH WOOPER SUPER-NATCH-O

oh no he's bought the owl!  and it's hungry

I used to collect matchbooks with one match left

in the behind of my bookshelf

just in case the sky got hungry

and went AROEIWOINRWNGAOEIROWIR *ping*