n o t e s

re-post :: 2007 False Creek

2012-02-12T11:32:00.000-08:00

As Iceland Penny has requested favourite walks, this is a re-post of favourite long run along False Creek. It would make a great walk (ideal for cloud watching) and could include a side trip to Granville Island.
The walk, 1 to 24 and back: laurel and west 7th, the park with a bridge over 6th, west along the south side sea wall, past granville island, under the granville street bridge, along the sea wall under the burrard street bridge, vanvier park to kits beach. Vancouver, 2007

creative acts

2012-01-20T11:27:00.000-08:00

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

― Marcel Duchamp

In writing an artist statement, I've contempated the act of making or as Marcel Duchamp says "the creative act". The artist can create but is the work finished? No, the viewer or "the spectator" then contributes through contemplation of the work.

kelvin-helmholtz clouds

2012-01-19T09:39:00.000-08:00

the amazing kelvin-helmholtz wave clouds as seen in downtown birmingham, alabama on december 26, 2011

Sometimes I wonder about the ways clouds are represented by artists from other cultures. Is it a matter of personal style, technique, tradition or are the clouds really so very different in different parts of the world?
When I saw the photos and read about the kelvin-helmholtz wave clouds, it seems possible that even the most fantastic cloud art could in fact be based on natural phemomena.

Clouds in Alabama :: kelvin-helmholtz wave clouds over b’ham
Kelvin-Helmhotz clouds :: kelvin–helmholtz wikipedia

happy holidays

2011-12-27T10:12:00.000-08:00

Hope you have a good book to read this week!

From last year’s National Union Catalog Christmas tree at the Gleeson Library at the University of San Francisco, a lovely photo. Books, birds and lights. Merry! Merry!

2012 :: tangerine tango

2011-12-13T09:35:00.000-08:00

Just in time! Pantone forcasts the coming year's colour:
tangerine tango
“Sophisticated but at the same time dramatic and seductive, Tangerine Tango is an orange with a lot of depth to it,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute®. “Reminiscent of the radiant shadings of a sunset, Tangerine Tango marries the vivaciousness and adrenaline rush of red with the friendliness and warmth of yellow, to form a high-visibility, magnetic hue that emanates heat and energy.” pantone.com

romancing the stone

2011-09-22T22:44:00.000-07:00

portland, oregon :: august 13, 2011

7:31 pm :: view from the cafe window

8:38 pm :: view from the cafe window

9:14 pm :: view from outside the cafe

The play of sun, cloud and structure was lively and fantastically variable. Although I was at first attracted by the clouds reflected in the windows, I became increasingly interested in the beauty of the changing light and its effects.

pure feeling

2011-09-18T12:41:00.000-07:00

Elissa Cristall Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Sean Mills.
Sean Mills :: Pure Feeling
September 22 – October 22, 2011
Reception: Thursday September 22, 6-8 pm
:: "Pure Feeling" (above) is on exhibit to October 22nd. The works in the exhibition range in size from 6" x 6" acrylic on panel to 47" x 47" acrylic on canvas. More...

word of the day

2011-09-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

n. A deep appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of paper; a preference for reading items printed on paper rather than displayed on a screen. —paperphile n.

More at: www.wordspy.com

a hyphenation headache

2011-09-15T09:56:00.000-07:00

Just discovered: a lovely article about hyphens and their usage!

... the most exasperating and tiresome punctuation mark of all — the hyphen.

In general, we use hyphens to avoid ambiguity. Otherwise, how would we be able to tell the difference between a “man-eating shark” and a “man eating shark”? There’s also a big difference between a pickled herring merchant and a pickled-herring merchant. (And we don’t want to go around casting aspersions on herring merchants, as Lynne Truss says.)

A definitive collection of hyphenation rules does not exist; rather, different style manuals prescribe different usage guidelines. In the American Medical Association Manual of Style — there are 8 pages on the hyphen. These pages include rules for whento use hyphens and when not to use hyphens.

And hyphenation rules can be exceedingly complicated. Byzantine even.

To read more go to: impertinentremarks.com

to create is to relate

2011-09-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

CORITA KENT EXHIBITION :: September 8 to October 30, 2011
Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC

THURSDAY September 8: opening night
SATURDAY September 10, 1-4pm: Families are invited to a FREE printmaking workshop to make banners, posters and prints to then take on parade around the gallery.

More about Corita Kent: www.corita.org

Image: www.corita.org/collection/photos/71-15.jpg

learning by heart

2011-09-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

Learning by Heart :: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit, Corita Kent and Jan Steward, Oct 14, 2008
:: A personal interest in learning, creative and critical thinking has manifest in my recent reading choices. Learning by Heart, although it appears to suggest a rather loose and even unconsidered teaching method, really provides suggestions for authentic experiences that are paired with experimentation and exploration.
:: The book records lessons and projects once done by Corita Kent and her students. Kent's fascination with fonts, everyday consumer product packaging, and chance relationships generate free and expressive art works. Students were coached, encouraged and moved beyond self-limits. Today, similar projects would likely be welcomed by independent minded students wanting to make public art.
:: For readers of this book or followers of Corita Kent's art, a retrospective show of serigraphs will soon open in Vancouver. (See following post.)

dyslexie :: a new typeface

2011-07-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

I just came across Christian Boer's "Dyslexie", a typeface designed to help dyslexic readers. A short video shows how dyslexics see English type forms and provides some ways type has been modified to help readers. Some of the tricks could easily be added to teacher board work for iteracy and ESL students.

Yesterday I subbed in an intermediate ESL class. The students were writing essays. One student put a capital letter at the beginning of every line, new sentence or not. We reviewed sentence structure and the use of the capital letter and the period. The video shows the punctuation drawn larger. Drawing larger periods and commas might have been useful for my student as well.

I readily admit that I have a personal stake in this issue as I really felt that I'd never, ever learn English because "b" and "d" were one huge problem for me - sigh. I finally discovered "bed" which has both the "b" and "d" and looks rather like a bed with head boards so that I could remember "b" and "d" and also that "b", as in "bed", comes before "d" in the alphabet.

view the video and read more about dyslexie

what's on in vancouver

2011-07-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

the georgia straight :: july 14, 2011

Make a curving, gestural line for the DRAWN Festival, which celebrates drawing around town from Saturday (July 16) to August 6. Exhibits range from Petley Jones Gallery’s The Power of Line show, with works by the likes of Jack Shadbolt, Andra Ghecevici, and Michael Hermesh, to the Burnaby Art Gallery’s The Solitudes of Place: Recent Drawings by Ann Kipling. Head to Gallery Jones for Anselmo Swan’s renderings of Hostess Cupcakes and other name-brand desserts, or visit the Elissa Cristall Gallery to see Louise Phillips attempt to make drawings that equal a line 55 kilometres long—the supposed life span of a simple pencil.

DRAWN :: Vancouver 2011

rarely is the day truly "just" grey

2011-07-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

a response to today's weather description "GREY DAY" on the front page of the newspaper...

in observing vancouver skies over the last three months, grey days seemed perhaps common but a careful, frequent viewing has shown that even the grey days have surprising moments of blue and white with plays of various greys

frequent observation (detail), drawing series "pencilled, as it were: drawings," graphite and coloured pencil, dimensions: 22 inches x 30 inches

DRAWN 2011 Launch Party :: Friday, July 15

2011-07-09T09:22:00.000-07:00

:: Come to the official launch of Drawn 2011, Vancouver's third annual festival of drawing.
:: Watch and mingle as some of Vancouver's best known artists create drawings in one of the city's most stunning historic venues.

What: the drawing party 3
When: Friday, July 15th, 7:00 - 11:00 pm
Where: 330 West Pender Street (between Homer and Hamilton)
Cash bar proceeds benefit the Vancouver Drawing Festival Society

pencilled, as it were :: july 17 - august 6

2011-06-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

From July 17 to August 6, "Pencilled, as it were" will be shown at the Elissa Cristall Gallery, 2245 Granville Street, Vancouver. Tuesday - Friday: 11- 6 pm, Saturday: 11- 5 pm. Telephone: 604-730-9611.

:: a description of the work :: The series, “pencilled, as it were” began with a statement found in a school textbook, “One pencil can write 50,000 English words or make a line 55 kilometers long.” (1) The double statistic prompted multiple inquiries; first about the drawn line and then about English words.

:: Making lines with a single pencil, proved to be quite straightforward. The lines were simply drawn across the page, one by one in much the same way as English words are written line by line. Together, the drawings “2.88148 km” and “2.87861 km” make a 5.76009 km line which is much shorter than the predicted 55 kilometers (or 34 miles).

:: However, the second inquiry: writing, was not quite so easy. Although, drawing lines and writing words are both forms of mark making; in the case of words, meanings and thoughts need also be considered. “Meaningful” text became important. The source essay, “The Modifications of Clouds” by Luke Howard (2) documents scientific observation similar to observing and measuring pencil mark length and word count. With the scholarly language of seventeenth century England, the text also chronicles clouds and their naming. The resulting drawings are: “11,449 English words about clouds” and “10,058 English words about clouds" (see image above).

:: “The Modifications of Clouds” records Howard’s research and reasoning in naming the clouds with Latin words: cirrus, cumulus, stratus, cirro-cumulus, cirro-stratus, cumulo‑stratus, and nimbus. The essay is a scientific study, yet it is surprisingly poetic. Many of Howard’s words and phrases endure and proliferate when relocated in art making. For example: Howard suggests that because clouds change form moment to moment, there is a “necessity for frequent observation.” In response a record of the sky as frequently seen through windows, between buildings and overhead has been observed, recorded and drawn in a coloured pencil drawing of “frequent observation.” Another Howard phrase “tracing the clouds” has lead to a “tracing” of the words for clouds as found on pages 5-12 of “The Modifications of Clouds.” In addition, the series’ name “pencilled, as it were,” has migrated from Howard’s original description of clouds “pencilled, as it were, on the sky.”

(1) Ackert, Patricia and Linda Lee, “Pencils and Pens,” Reading & Vocabulary Development 2: Thoughts & Notions, Second Edition, Publisher: Thomson Heinle, 2005. page 15.

(2) Luke Howard, Essay on the Modifications of Clouds, first published 1803.

vancouver drawn festival :: july 16 - august 6

2011-06-27T11:12:00.000-07:00

Surprisingly, although I was drawing a lot, I had not seen myself as a drawer or at least not until the 2009 Vancouver DRAWN Festival. As I travelled from venue to venue seeing the drawings, listening to artist talks, and being a part of the engaged public; I realized how important drawing was in my own practice. Ever since, I have consciously pursued drawing.

My latest series of drawings "Pencilled, as it were" will be shown year's festival shown at the Elissa Cristall Gallery.

I encourage anyone who is curious about drawing, drawings as art, and the artists making drawings to visit the galleries and attend the artist talks. In the past DRAWN has proven to be enjoyable and uplifting! To find out more, visit: DRAWN - Artists and Drawings / Vancouver 2010

clouds before summer

2011-06-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

vancouver clouds as seen though early spring foliage

contact 2011 photo-a-day

2011-05-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

Josef Schulz, Pearson Airport

How broad is Contact’s reach across the GTA? Broad enough that festival exhibitions find themselves in high-security zones like Pearson International’s domestic departures plaza, on the other side of the x-rays and metal detectors. In truth, a trove of permanent art on the other side of the screen has long made Terminal One one of the better museums in town — it’s the home of our city’s one-and-only Richard Serra — and this year marks the fifth time Contact has installed at Pearson. As ever, it’s a good one: A series of pictures by Josef Schulz capture the mundanity of workaday temporary architecture — all corrugated metal and right angles — in an array of dazzling colour. That tension between prosaic and exuberant gives a strong dose of visual pop, but in proportion and colour massing, Schulz’s precise compositions evoke colour something else entirely: Late-era abstract colour field painting. At Pearson’s Terminal One, domestic departures, until Aug. 29.

- Murray White, also see: contemporary art in Toronto and beyond

on the front page

2011-05-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

these days when the canucks win, they make headlines and the front page of the city newspapers.

none the less, for those who watch the clouds, this week's weather (also found on the front page) seemed almost biblical.

although, it does seem rather like vancouver has had forty days and nights of rain!

in appreciation

2011-04-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

above: one of last summer's clouds, vancouver, bc. 2010
over time I've become more and more attracted to the skies above. specifically I'm drawn to the clouds*: their colours, shapes, movements and endless beauty
* see more clouds, hear cloud watching music and to become a member: cloud appreciation society

clouds by Eadweard Muybridge

2011-04-13T14:32:00.000-07:00

Eadweard Muybridge, Yosemite Valley, 1935

http://derblauewriter.wordpress.com/category/photography/

Note: WALKING + FALLING, april 2 - sept 5, 2011 at the Vancouver Art Gallery includes several photographic motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge. Eadweard Muybridge @ VAG

lost cloud

2011-04-12T08:58:00.000-07:00

André Kertész, Lost Cloud, 1937, New York. http://whilebird.tumblr.com/post/3047120455/andre-kertesz-lost-cloud-1937-new-york

Soon after immigrating to New York, André Kertész observed a solitary white cloud lost in a vertical expanse of sky, dwarfed by the monolithic presence of the Rockefeller Center. He said that the cloud represented himself and his feelings as a newly arrived immigrant – a being adrift and subject to the prevailing winds. - Chris Burnett, Which Cloud, JAB, the Journal of Artists' Books, number 27, Chicago, 2010

Which Cloud?

2011-04-06T08:47:00.000-07:00

Mood: Potential (book) 5×7 inch, 32 pages, duotone offset on 80 lb. Dulcet, letterpress on cover and colophon and supplied in an enclosure with letterpress title. The publication of Mood: Potential was made possible in part by a grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB).

Elisabeth Tonnard’s Mood: Potential
by Chris Burnett, JAB, the Journal of Artists' Books, number 27, Chicago, 2010

Book was there, it was there. Book was there. Stop it, stop it, it was a cleaner, a wet cleaner and it was not where it was wet, it was not high, it was directly placed back, not back again, back it was returned, it was needless, it put a bank, a bank when, a bank care. –Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)

Note: Elisabeth Tonnard has kindly agreed to have this essay included as a blog post. Perhaps the longest essay I have ever posted, it is truly worth reading. LP

At first glance, Elisabeth Tonnard’s new book, Mood: Potential, presents itself as an unassuming, stable object. It opens as a continuous-page photo-bookwork consisting of twenty-eight full-bleed photographs of sky, tree fragments, and clouds. These natural elements are joined together in the layout to emphasize their union across the spread and to merge together visually as one continuous, pictorial landscape. The constant background of the sky printed in a similar deep-grey tone encourages graphic flow and the initial panoramic sense of the book. With the turning of each page, the panorama unfolds and reveals the book’s straight-ahead logic as a progression of wonderfully picturesque cumulus clouds. Only trees intervene among the clouds as their various branches and leaves join in with their neighbors. But these imagined continuities break up as a number of discrepancies insinuate themselves. On second look, this continuous-page sequence becomes a catalogue of discrepancies about photobooks, landscape, space, and shades of language.

Elisabeth Tonnard presents a jumpy little book of clouds, like one of Gertrude Stein’s nervous literary objects, each cloud insecure in its association with frame, page, and the stuttering space around them. It begins with a cloud more or less centered on the opening, but the page splits and doubles the cloud. And we’re left guessing as to the nature of the split: is it a particular cloud-image repeated and shifted in space, or is it caught at two points in time within a sequence of distinct instants? Throughout the book, cloud formations jump between their affiliations with time and space, and cause the reader to ask, “Which cloud?” In the context of a given spread, is it one or the other? Are the clouds, multiplied throughout the book, really just one cloud rendered in stepped phases of transformation? Cut as they are by frame and horizon, the one always lies between the two, splayed by the pages. Moreover, Tonnard’s graphic narrative of clouds re-enlivens questions about the historical identity of clouds (singular or plural) as a photographic possibility and their duplicitous role in the landscape.

Another important vector of the book points toward the cloudy formations of language and space. The book is textless but nevertheless its inherent jumpiness owes a great deal to the moods, vagaries and instabilities of language. The linguistic connection is not surprising given Tonnard’s background in creative writing and visual poetry. Along with her other imagetext projects, this particular book evolved out of an earlier version that contained single-word elements on each page. The words there were also jumpy in their bid to both connect to and depart from the stream of her cloud/sky/tree images. This final textless version retains traces of these syntactic jumps, leaving their footprint on the basic landscape forms as unstable linguistic entities. Indeed, the shifting elements may appear like linguistic shifters with the jumpy clouds behaving like common pronouns–“me” and “you”–whose meaning switches 180 degrees according to the position of the speaker. In a similar way, the uncertainty of “which cloud” in Mood: Potential forces us to resolve the ambiguity in the message itself. This book of clouds unfolds in a litany of jittery elements and forms a nervous grammar of spatial shifters in the history of clouds and landscape as a photographic possibility.

Which Cloud? Which Landscape?

The tenuous grammar of clouds in photography begins, of course, not long after its invention. It’s well known that the predominant, blue sensitivity of early photographic materials made the conventional, picturesque representation of clouds a difficult proposition because of the overexposure of the sky area. William Henry Fox Talbot, in The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), pointed out interesting characteristics concerning the light sensitivity of his invention, such as the delicate problem of rendering nuances of colored glass. However, the vision of a fully featured sky eluded him. Early photography could render fully detailed skies with proper exposure adjustments but, in so doing, the land would be underexposed and too dark. Photography could portray the land or sky, but not both at once within the same frame. With sharp contrasts between light sky and dark land, the discourse of early photography was marked by spatial shifters between these most fundamental constituents of landscape representation. Mood: Potential mimics this separation of sky and land mainly by excluding the latter just as early photography occasionally would do. The land is not only cropped out through framing but separated from the sky by exposure. The lens is stopped down favoring full detail in the clouds. To the other extreme, overexposure blows out sky detail in several contrasting frames that punctuate the sequence. The book’s jumpiness comes from the reiteration of photography’s basic form as a spatial shifter, the switching of exposure and light levels between land and sky.

Gustave Le Gray’s seeming reconciliation of these polarities a decade or so after Talbot’s invention is another well-known landmark in the history of photography. His technical feat of combination printing brought dramatic vistas of clouded sky into a balanced liaison with seascape and land. Yet this initial harmony is offset by an undercurrent of implied disjunctions also appearing in Tonnard’s modern book of clouds. Closer scrutiny of
Le Gray’s cloudy seascapes betrays their layered complexity as two images of time and place uncannily compressed within the same frame. Equal in exposure, these marvelous photographic composites only displace the gap between land and sky in time.

It is especially curious to see one of Le Gray’s cloud pictures alone, apparently unlinked to any other landscape view. Knowing Le Gray’s methods, we see the singular image as stock material, a potential piece of a future picture-composite. Le Gray was one of the first photographers to build a library of systematically collected images in his documentary work for the Commission for Historical Monuments in France, and, consequently, his cloud images are one of the first artistic uses of archival material. As such, he is a significant predecessor to artists like Tonnard who base their work on archival photographs. Like Le Gray’s cloudscapes, Mood: Potential, as with a number of Tonnard’s other photo-bookworks, is a systematic product of the archive. She has collected her clouds like specimens plucked from the field and pressed into the pages of her book. “Which cloud?” here becomes a question of which choice among many others in an archive of stored photographs, and how those choices work according to the implied plurality of the “potential mood” in connoting other possible conditions. How does the single isolated and stored cloud-image coexist among the many?

Which Cloud? Many Or One (And At Which Time)?

As with Le Gray’s double exposures, each cloud photograph is as much an isolated instant in time as a single object. Just as Le Gray’s single instant found its place in an uneasy union of combined views, Tonnard sets her clouds on parade, making the whole book a kind of temporal composite of archival photographs. But rather than superimposed images, the instants follow one another in separate frames, even suggesting the time-motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. It’s interesting to note that Muybridge himself carried forward the cloud work of Le Gray with his remarkable landscapes of Yosemite Valley, in California, in the 1860s. He formed an even more extensive library of such photographs, some appearing for sale in his San Francisco shop but most remaining in the archive for potential use in the darkroom. Another stunning innovation for cloud photography came when Muybridge invented his “Sky Shade” process, which used a special patented shutter to make a differential exposure of sky and land balancing their tonalities in one instant. Muybridge streamlined the composite process of double-printing into one mechanical operation of the camera. This early innovation supports the insight that his obsession with time and his ground-breaking time-motion studies all sprung from his rendering the image of clouds. As fragments in time, one might even view his entire corpus of work–the thousands of gridded humans and animals captured in consecutive stages of motion–as so many Sky Shade figures. Just as bodies become clouds in time, clouds signify the mutable and the fleeting in space. In Mood: Potential, Tonnard underlines the instability of clouds in stages of movement, and the book unfolds more like a time-motion study of clouds out of control than a panoramic landscape.

Seeing the clouds as spatial shifters in a time-motion matrix points beyond the chronophotography of Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey to the capricious beginnings of stop-motion photography and the animation industry. As film historian Donald Crafton tells it, J. S. Blackton discovered the principle of stop‑motion camera work somewhat by accident in 1898 while shooting a “Méliès-style trickfilm” on the rooftop of the Morse Building in New York City. As substitutions of actors and props were being made between takes, “clouds of steam would drift across the background. When the film was projected these puffs appeared, disappeared, and jumped about the screen most unexpectedly.” The play of clouds in Mood: Potential harkens back to these “jumps” at the dawn of cinema. In them the raw effects of motion emerge from the background in clouds that dance, not according to their existence as bodies in space, but out of, and between, the gaps of their transition from one thing to another. Likewise, Tonnard’s clouds dance between the gaps of each frame defined by the gutter of the book. As a “bioscopic book,” Mood: Potential replays the early stages of film and works very well as a flip-book when the viewer fans the pages. In this proto-cinematic dance, the clouds behave in the linguistic mood of spatial shifters in switching roles between the fundamental drivers of being: here or there, something or nothing. Clouds as spatial shifters owe their existence not to any one staging or framing but to the jump between these states.

What, then, is the state of these clouds that lie between the pages and descend from jumps of vapor (filmic phenomena located not in front of, but behind the primary actors and staging)? What should we call them? If not clouds, these jumpy states, or spatial shifters, are “atmospheres” to use a term that fits film and photography subjects as well as the weather. These atmospheres relate especially to the potential “moods” of the book’s jumpy grammar. The sense of atmosphere here comes as much from the media environment as from nature marking various states of tone and ambient effect in the staging of a film or animation. Especially when animation productions have tried to compete with Hollywood films, such as Disney’s early feature-length “full animation” of Snow White, atmospheres would sometimes jostle against and compete with each other. Warm, muted tones and mists of the background would stand incongruously against the sharp acrid colors of figures playing in the foreground. As Norman Klein points out, Disney liked to show evil itself as bad weather with black wind and torrential rains. In a similar way, Mood: Potential is a tangle of atmospheres with different emotional colorations. Trees stand out briskly in clear light against the brooding fields of dark sky and turbulent clouds. In other frames, the clouds drift whimsically in gentle swirls while the trees appear bent forward as if by some driving wind. It is difficult to say whether the trees are leaning against winds currently blowing, or if they do so by a long habit of resisting atmospheric forces that have momentarily passed. In one key frame, a jet vapor trail stings the atmosphere of an ascending cumulus cloud. These shifts and competitions between incompatible atmospheres and moods suggest the Mannerist turn from clear-cut perspectival staging of figures to the tumultuously ordered divisions of heaven and earth, good and evil. Atmospheric shifters express emotional alterations as marked, again, as “me” and “you” in language.

Which Cloud? Mirror Or Metaphor?

Clouds have appeared again and again in art as raw expressive material, and nowhere as famously as in Alfred Stieglitz’s series, Equivalents. In the late summer of 1922, he started making apocryphal photographs of clouds (originally called “Music–A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs”) that, although straight, expressed his subjective states as metaphors. As variable and moody as these Equivalents were, they did not act as spatial shifters in the sense that I’ve been exploring in Mood: Potential. As mirrors of expression, these images often seem unswervingly hardwired to Stieglitz’s ego and to his autocratic vision of photography as a high form of modern art. Nevertheless, there is at least one important instance in print that reveals Stieglitz’s clouds functioning as a spatial shifter. In the middle of an early issue of Aperture, a single Equivalent is counterposed to a squared-off spiral of running text on the adjacent page. The content of the text testifies that Stieglitz would encourage people to turn the image around and ask themselves in which position it meant the most. The line of words continues, “Surely if one | preferred an upward movement of clouds it must | signify something quite different | from the favoring of a | downward sweep.” In our turning the magazine around to read this text, the Equivalent would rotate, too, and repeat Stieglitz’s experiment.

While there are no such instructions with Tonnard’s Mood: Potential, the form of the book invites the reader to encounter the clouds in different cardinal positions. Without a horizon line to tie the cloudscapes to the ground they become disconnected. (Gravity seems to be another lost “atmosphere.”) Around the book’s middle, strange amalgamations of trees and clouds combine like two-headed monsters divided by the gutter that one can view either up or down, left or right. In simple terms of the book’s form, the layouts exploit the feature of continuous page sequences to encourage comprehension no matter how one holds the book. Tonnard’s clouds are modified equivalents in using spatial shifters to reorient the readers’ viewpoints.

Interestingly, Tonnard appropriates and reenacts aspects of Stieglitz’s Equivalents, but no echo of modernism is stronger in Mood: Potential than the singular note of Andre Kertesz’s “Lost Cloud” of 1937. Soon after immigrating to New York, Kertesz observed a solitary white cloud lost in a vertical expanse of sky, dwarfed by the monolithic presence of the Rockefeller Center. He said that the cloud represented himself and his feelings as a newly arrived immigrant–a being adrift and subject to the prevailing winds. Strangely, even as multiplied as the clouds are in Mood: Potential, collectively they share an affinity with that lone cloud, a lost cloud that has escaped from some other land, even a renegade cloud on the lam struggling to reach some other space. Tonnard’s clouds shift among the pages and conjure a glimpse of the lost cloud not embodied by any one of them alone. Veering between the singular and plural, they endlessly enact the spatial shifts under the sign of “which cloud,” which stands in conclusion, no longer as a question, but a trope and linguistic mood. Which cloud in Mood: Potential figures the nebulous shifts between a proliferation of spaces in the form of clouds and the need to envision a potential place, if even for a glance.

Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898–1928 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 20–21.

Norman M. Klein, Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (London: Routledge, 1993), 114.I owe a great deal to this fascinating cultural reading of the animation industry.It brought me back to my exploration of the theory of cartoons and a “cartoon of theory” in my early 1990s media work, Muto(scape). Much of this current review is a transposition of the figurative jumps of Muto(scape) rediscovered in Klein’s history and in Mood: Potential.

Dorothy Norman, “Alfred Stieglitz – Seer,” Aperture 3:4 (1955), np.

cloud icons cloud weather forecasts for vancouver

2011-03-02T15:38:00.000-08:00

the rabbit arrives february 3

2011-01-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

a time of peace and tranquility

as a long time letter writer, postage stamps of beauty are a source of personal pleasure and delight. Canada Post's stamp commemorating the upcoming lunar new year is a beauty!

the colour of 2011

2011-01-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

a colour for all seasons

According to the Pantone Company Honeysuckle 18-2120 is "Courageous. Confident. Vital. A brave new color, for a brave new world. Let the bold spirit of Honeysuckle infuse you, lift you and carry you through the year. It’s a colour for every day – with nothing 'everyday' about it." To read more go to www.pantone.com

about the osborne collection

2011-01-06T11:34:00.000-08:00

For anyone interested in children's books and book related art, historic and modern, The Osborne Collection is a wonderful resource. Below is a description of the collection. Sound Science and the materials/drawings of its making are proudly included in the archives.

Etta Kaner. illustrated by Louise Phillips, 1991.

Kids Can Press, ISBN: 1550740547, 96 pages

sound science
@ the osborne collection

The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books had its beginnings in a visit by a British librarian, Edgar Osborne, to Toronto Public Library's Boys and Girls House branch in 1934. Osborne was impressed by the range and quality of children's services established and flourishing under TPL's first head of children's services, Lillian H. Smith. Osborne donated his personal collection of some 2,000 rare and notable children's books to Toronto Public Library in 1949, as a research collection in historical children's literature.

From this beginning the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books has grown to over 80,000 rare and notable modern children's books. These are classified in three parts: the Osborne Collection of books published to the end of 1910; the Lillian H. Smith Collection of modern notable titles; and the Canadiana Collection of materials written, published, or substantially related to Canada. Each of these collections includes book-related art, literary archives, games and ephemera.

activity expenditure

2011-01-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

the number of calories burned by drawing or writing is equal

worm world, illustration by Louise Phillips

Based on a body weight of 150 pounds, 156 calories are expended in an hour by either drawing or writing. Or the equivalent calorie count provided by 5.2 carrots or two glasses of wine (3.5 fl oz each).

about calorie counts

Kyuyoh Ishikawa :: calligrapher

2010-12-30T16:00:00.000-08:00

Kyuyoh Ishikawa, Koku-sho, Sumi ink on paper, 18.5 x 14 in.

According to Kyuyoh Ishikawa, the play of ink on paper is the play of light and shadow. Western calligraphy and drawing are rarely, if ever, described so poetically! Yet, in looking at Ishikawa's work it is perhaps possible to witness the magical play of light and shadow. His text, as he uses only text, is both playful and expressive.

For more about Ishikawa and his text based works, see "Kyuyoh Ishikawa" by Christine Flint-Sato in the Autumn 2010 issue of the Letter Arts Review.

beware of dog

2010-12-20T17:00:00.000-08:00

vancouver cat found on a rainy day :: 2010

impressions from the paper-obsessed

2010-12-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

For paper freaks: Felt and Wire, a website built by a paper company that includes news and a shop.

Eggzelent Mini Card: One of a series of sweet & snarky mini greeting cards printed on vintage business card paper with handset type and vintage cuts. Size: 3.5″ × 2″. Paper: Cream colored vintage business card paper, envelope included. Printing: Letterpress

the library turned insideout

2010-12-15T22:00:00.000-08:00

Photo: MGB

While in Gastown today I was amazed to see a wall of books. Inside LYNNsteven boutique is a room made out of books. From inside the changeroom part of the room, the spines of the pocket books are visible to make an insideout library of sorts.

The store's owner, Nicole, says over 6,000 books were used. As well, the store's architects, MGB, won an award for the store's design. (MGB | PROJECTS | LYNN STEVEN)

Beautiful products fill the store, all chosen with a designer's eye. A pleasure to visit!

oleana at urbanity

2010-12-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

A wonderful chance discovery!

On south Granville is a welcoming shop known simply as Urbanity. The store's owner, Julia Manitius proudly imports and sells a spectacular line of knit garments and accessories by Oleana of Norway. Julia spoke so highly of the company that I looked for more about Oleana online. I was completely taken by the video. Beautiful women and children in beautifully designed and manufactured garments are shown in compelling Norwegian settings.

The company aims for aesthetic beauty, practicality and modernity along with thoughtful production. Their garments deserve to be worn with pride.

clouds of colour

2010-11-29T11:55:00.000-08:00

The sky above can perhaps be seen as one flowing medium. One stuff or medium coloured blue, white, grey or black. Or even wonderful shades of pink and yellow but sky all the same.

In a somewhat similar way, this cloud drawing is just one medium: a pencil of may colours. The pencil crayon has at it's core a single multi-coloured heart.

The magic of this crayon is the possiblity of chance. As the drawing is made, the colours that touch and mark the paper change as the crayon tip wears away or the pencil is turned as it is used. Drawing becomes a playful exercise. Colours come and go by chance, so that chance becomes an unavoidable aspect of art making.

How pencil crayons are made is not easily deduced by examining a pencil! To see how pencil crayons are made click here.

the page is turning

2010-11-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

a little exercise in present continuous...
The papers are folding. They are unfolding. The papers are moving. They're turning. He's singing. They're singing and playing!

The paper's crumpling, flattening and disapearing; closing and opening; floating. The pages are turning. They're turning. They're turning! Now the paper's are multiplying, zipping and zapping. Mirroring, covering, growing. They're moving. He's looking. Oh, they're crying. Now, a flowering. There's a sticking and a dropping.

Ah, the papers are folding.

If you want to see it and hear it. Go to Midnight Juggernauts - Lara Vs The Savage Pack: the video

word cloud

2010-10-26T10:08:00.001-07:00

Wordle generates “word clouds” that map supplied text. Prominence is given to the words that appear most frequently. The cloud above uses this blog as source text.
make a word cloud

the sketchbook as recording device

2010-10-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

The apartment affored a new perspective - over twenty floors above Vancouver. Blue sky framed layers of cloud above the purple, blue mountains. As I waited, I drew. When I looked down at my sketchbook, I chanced to see the words printed on a coaster on the table.

My focus shifted to the words 'filling' the room: on the table, on the walls and on the floor. I was suspended between the skies and the words. Just as I had drawn the shapes of clouds and mountain, I drew the letter forms.

As I continue to record the words of time and place, I observe that text is a constant either as background or foreground, noticed or not. It's on the bus, in the stores, at home, in the grocery, in the coffee shop - everywhere.

sketchbook pages, ink, pencil, and crayon, 2010

saturday morning cartoons

2010-10-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

who knew the path of ink in digital printing could be so wonderfully lyrical?
The Ink Journey
thanks to Printeresting, the thinking person’s favourite online resource for interesting printmaking miscellany.

the pink cow and the blue cow

2010-10-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

Last week when the blue cow on the side of a bus passed by, I was reminded of a pink cow in my sketchbook. Both have calm contemplative gazes.

As I kid, cows were the large animals that lived on my grandmother's farm. Huge unknown animals that were way beyond household pets. My childhood memories are more of their traces than of the animals themselves. Exploring their evidence was safer than 'embracing' the beasts. Their salt blocks were an ongoing fascination. I saw them change from solid cubes into fantastic field sculptures with beautiful hollowed curves licked clean. Hoove shaped holes in the mud by the stream marked their visits to drink and to cross to the other side. The woods were marked with smooth paths made by their walking. Fence barbs held brown and white wisps of hair from their tails.

Later when I lived on a Foxley River farm, cows became a part of everyday life. Their size continued to challenge understanding. A baby bull taught me much about their strength - at least in relation to mine! Often I would look at the cows as they looked back at me. Over time I begain to feel their gentle observation as a kind of curiousity mixed with their own kind of knowing.

In my collage the cow and woman seem to exchange glances and also share a common understanding. Perhaps the simple recognition mirrors my own experience with dairy cows.

paris lady

2010-09-14T13:42:00.001-07:00

lovely lady seen in Paris this summer

full image painted graffitti with integrated paper collage on concrete wall, detail of the newspaper collage to the right

blue sky

2010-09-03T12:21:00.000-07:00

Blue Bky, 2010. drawing, pencil, gouache and ink on paper, signed on back, size: 11.5" x 15.5"

An ongoing interest in cloudscapes has lead to the gathering together of colour chips and art supplies that reference the skies.

For example “Cumulus Cloud” names a light grey, “Blustery Day” a pale blue, and “Cloudless” a clear blue.

The drawing “Blue Sky” takes the label of a “Blue Sky” oil pastel (right) as its source.

Glenna Evans Memorial Fund Poster

2010-08-31T20:25:00.000-07:00

http://escene.ecuad.ca/news/glenna-evans-memorial-fund-silent-auction

Glenna Evans Memorial Fund

2010-08-30T21:34:00.000-07:00

Emily Carr student and competitive skateboarder, Glenna Evans tragically passed away from a longboarding accident on July 9, 2010. Glenna was a multi‐talented artist who had just completed her third year in the Fine Arts program and was about to begin the final year of her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree this fall.

Silent Auction
Glenna’s family and friends are organizing a silent auction in support of the Memorial Fund at Emily Carr.

Artists donating works for the silent auction include: Jenn Aitken, Ryan Amadore, Lesley Anderson, Neil Chung, Catherine Dong, Chad Durnford, Jeremy Green, Jeremy Herndl, Kevin Hubbard, Brian Kokoska, Sean Mills, Lawrence Lowe, Silke Otto‐Knapp, Lorenzo Pepito, Louise Phillips, Adrienne Rempel, Lucas Soi, Mitch Speed, Henry Sun, Asami Tsukada, Sean Weisgerber, and Melissa Wong.

Preview and Advance Bids:
Friday, September 3rd (10am to 5pm)
Saturday, September 4th (10am to 4pm)

Silent Auction:
Saturday, September 4th (7:30pm to 9:30pm)

All proceeds from the silent auction will support the Glenna Evans Memorial Fund.

sky mirror

2010-07-24T10:34:00.001-07:00

The color of the sky varies depending on the density of the atmosphere. Sunlight from the horizon travels through about 38 times more air than light streaming down from the zenith. Sky Mirror allows visitors to compare patches of sky from different altitudes, revealing the surprising range of shades and hues in what often seems a uniformly blue dome.

located in San Francisco, EXPLORATORIUM at fort mason is a museum of science, art, and human perception

sky mirror allows for an outdoor exploration of "sky blue" or more correctly, the blues of the sky. the related links are also worth investigating :: sky mirror

clouds :: klouds

2010-07-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

visible masses of condensed water vapour floating in the atmosphere

clouds as seen in recent sketchbook pages

DRAWING to a Close :: DRAWN to a New Space

2010-07-16T16:45:00.000-07:00

to july 28, 2010

The Douglas Udell Gallery is proud to participate in VANCOUVER DRAWN: ARTISTS AND DRAWING 2010.

And I am proud to have two drawings included in the exhibition.

vancouver drawn :: artists and drawing 2010

2010-07-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

july 17 to august 7, 2010

The second annual drawing festival begins in vancouver tonite with the opening of The Drawing Room at the Pendulum Gallery, 885 West Georgia. 7:00pm to 9:00pm.

Last year's event was remarkable. Galleries hosted exhibitions and artist talks focused on drawing as an art practice and an art medium. Participants gathered to appreciate drawing as I've never witnessed before. During an artist talk by Ann Kipling, I came to realize how important drawing really is in my own practice.

Go to www.drawnfestival.ca for this year's schedule and list of participating galleries.

Thank you to co-founders Lynn Ruscheinsky and Robert Kardosh, jury members, galleries, volunteers, artists who draw, and all who participate

WEATHER :: the book

2010-07-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

Discovered in a second hand store in Richmond, BC last fall, WEATHER has proved a great find. The illustrations - full colour drawings, 301 in total, are wonderfully clear and quite beautiful. A study of the weather becomes both fun and understandable.

AIR MASSES - CLOUDS - RAINFALL - STORMS - WEATHER MAPS - CLIMATE

WEATHER :: a guide to phenomena and forecasts
by Paul E. Lehr, R. Will Burnett and Herbert S. Zim
illustrated by Harry McNaught
GOLDEN PRESS - NEW YORK - original copyright 1957

thunderstorms

2010-07-10T12:27:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week when I saw this drawing and read the words "The summer routine begins," pairie thunderstorms immediately came to mind. Later while walking along the abandoned railway tracks of Vancouver's olympic line, I smelled the uncut grasses and clover fragrant in the hot afternoon sunshine. Once more, I was back in an Alberta summer.

Tunderstorms, originally from the Times-Picayune (also reproduced at Loyola's Center for Environmental Communications' page on the Ecology of the Mississippi River Delta Region) and found at dailyapple.blogspot.com

cloud portraits

2010-07-03T18:00:00.000-07:00

The sky could be described as an aerial ocean of restless air. Over the city of Vancouver, the constant, “restless” winds move and shape the minute water droplets and ice particles that appear as clouds. The Cloud Portraits series is comprised of drawings that take both personal observation and contemporary weather vocabulary as their source.

Alphabet x5 (language of clouds), 2010

Five Cloud Portraits will be shown in the emerging artist exhibition, EMERGENCE 2010: MIXED METAPHORS, from August 10 to September 11, 2010 with an opening reception on Thursday, August 19, 6:30-8:30, Elliott Louis Gallery. Louise Phillips artist page.

artist project

2010-06-28T19:25:00.000-07:00

translations :: we sort of understand one another
the summer 2010 issue of Front Magazine takes translation as its theme.

pages 10 and 11, the "artist project" shows words once written and then performed by Christian Bok as the sounds first heard and then made visible or translated through drawing by Louise Phillips.

many thanks to Reanna Alder, editor and Karianne Blank, art director

the complete issue can be seen at zinio. more about western front

ECUAD 2010 award winners

2010-06-25T18:56:00.001-07:00

50/50 DRAW: 10 drawings at the ECUAD 2010 Award Winners exhibition, June 24 to July 17, 2010.

Many thanks to the Winsor Gallery for making this exhibition possible.

> More about the artists

going west by maurice gee

2010-06-25T17:32:00.001-07:00

a book like I've never seen before...
NZ Book Council video by Anderson M Studio

translations: U plus

2010-06-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

In certain cases it so happens that the original work proves to be 'unfaithful' to its translation. --Jorge Luis Borges

Drawing can be a kind of translation from the seen, heard, felt or otherwise experienced to into visual language.

The drawing U plus, 2 is a translation of Christian Bok's spoken word performances.

northern symphony

2010-05-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

The world premier was absolutely amazing.

The Northern Symphony, inspired by the chew marks of beavers on logs, was preformed by a quartet on polished wooden instruments. The evening had a wonderful symmetry. The gallery was papered with surround sound graphics in a compliation by both beaver(s) and the composer Paul Walde. The music is surprisingly lyrical, a kind of sonic poetry.

Northern Symphony is a multi-component visual art installation that translates the gnawed markings on a tree felled by beavers into cultural forms. These forms include: relief printed wallpaper, a cast architectural frieze, hand-finished gnawed beaver sticks, two dimensional artworks and a digital music score remixed and reconstructed by DJs and experimental musicians. A vintage 1920s outhouse refurbished into a miniature art gallery with a mini-retrospective completes the installation by blurring the lines between inside and outside, the cultural and the natural; the poetic and the literal. full details

May 14 - June 23, 2010 :: malaspina printmakers :: 1555 Duranleau Street, Granville Island, Vancouver BC

DRAW, pencil and ink on paper

2010-05-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

DRAW brings together line, mark making and personal notions of what drawing means within contemporary art practice.

In drawing, the action of mark making sometimes shifts between drawing as an art form and writing as practiced in daily life as a kind of record keeping and communication method.

Drawing can be very much like writing. In both writing and drawing, the pen is drawn across the paper in the construction of visual language. Both text and image are given meaning (or not) by their readers. Both carry the history of their making and their maker.

DRAW, pencil and ink on paper, May 2010 with detail below

beautiful bc clouds

2010-05-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

the clouds were absolutely magical
the photograph serves to capture fleeting beauty

installation and viewer views

2010-05-05T17:50:00.000-07:00

by the 50/50 DRAW installation

Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD) 2010 Graduation Exhibition opening night: a wonderful evening

many thanks to everyone (faculty, volunteers, security staff, fellow students, families, friends and all) who made the event possible

many thanks to those who actively encourage and support the arts

50/50 DRAW: ten drawings wins award

2010-05-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

50/50 DRAW: 10 drawings is chosen for the 2010 Helen Pitt Award.

The 2010 grad jury members are Kathleen Ritter (artist and writer, curator of the Vancouver Art Gallery), Roderick CJ Roodenburg (co-founder of Ion Design, president of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada) and Mark Soo (artist and curator).

50/50 DRAW: the keys

2010-04-29T23:00:00.000-07:00

Of itself, there is nothing remarkable about a 50/50 DRAW ticket. It is a small fragment of ephemera so ordinary that it generally passes through our hands and lives unnoticed. Yet if the same raffle ticket is stuck on a sketchbook page, it brings to mind possible relationships between luck, as in “the luck of the draw,” and drawing within contemporary art practice.

The “50/50 DRAW” series of drawings takes an actual 50/50 DRAW ticket as its source. Visual components of the ticket such as shape, size (1 x 2 inches), text and numbers, border and background are extrapolated and repositioned in an extended exploration of meaning, making and the productive potential of chance.

Key 1 shows 10 extracted elements for each of the 10 drawings (01 to 10). Key 2 shows the randomly numbered grid of 50 "tickets" for each of the drawings. Together the Keys supply the directions for all 10 drawings.

Keywords: fifty/fifty, even split, 50/50 DRAW, half drawn, draw, chance, choice, gamble

drawing as a practice :: artist's book

2010-04-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

a small selection of drawings completed by lphillips22 while attending emily carr university of art + design as a general fine art student from 2007 to 2010

the original mixed media pages were scanned at 300 dpi, complied into a single digital file, output from a high resolution pdf, printed on both sides on white matte paper, trimmed, folded and saddle stitched. text font: andale mono regular. 32 pages with wraparound cover. edition of 3 books, 2010.

day 70

2010-04-21T20:38:00.000-07:00

Vintage math flashcards from A Collection a Day by artist Lisa Congon.

To date, no 50/50 DRAW tickets.

celebrating the graduating class of 2010

2010-04-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

now online, the 2010 Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD) catalogue.

50/50 DRAW: 10 drawings

2010-04-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

Of itself, there is nothing remarkable about a 50/50 DRAW ticket. It is a small fragment of ephemera so ordinary that it generally passes through our hands and lives unnoticed. Yet if the same raffle ticket is stuck on a sketchbook page, it brings to mind possible relationships between luck, as in “the luck of the draw,” and drawing within contemporary art practice.

The “50/50 DRAW" series of drawings takes an actual 50/50 DRAW ticket as its source. Visual components of the ticket such as shape, size (1 x 2 inches), text and numbers, border and background are extrapolated and repositioned in an extended exploration of meaning, making and the productive potential of chance.

The series, now "50/50 DRAW: 10 drawings", was completed late Friday afternoon, April 16 and will be shown in the 2010 ECUAD Graduation Exhibition.

Keywords: fifty/fifty, even split, 50/50 DRAW, half drawn, draw, chance, choice, gamble

Drawing is transformative.

2010-04-16T09:23:00.000-07:00

The English word “drawing” denotes pulling (as in “dragging”), and connotes revelation, unveiling and uncovering: drawing a playing card or pistol, for example. A “draw” is also a lottery, a process in which the participant must choose – without foreknowledge – from a number of possibilities, few of which will prove valuable. And there is also drawing as the extraction of something essential, as water from a well or, more gruesomely, the viscera of a condemned man. “Drawing” is a primal, fundamental concept, an activity intimately connected with the raw terms of life as it is lived. – James Lawrence, Richard Serra Drawings: Work that comes out of work

fifty 50/50 DRAW-ings.

2010-04-14T21:17:00.000-07:00

In honour of the date, April fourteenth: page number 14 and drawing number 000014 is the post of the day.
..............
the artist's book fifty 50/50 DRAW-ings., is a contemplation of 50/50 DRAW as an even split of the drawn and undrawn.
..............
comprised of fifty pages each with a printed red border and a sequential number in black. each page is finished with an original ink drawing
..............
letterpress printing by David Clifford of Black Stone Press. drawings by Louise Phillips. page size 3.25" x 4.5" limited edition of five. april 2010 • vancouver

50/50 DRAW: the book

2010-04-14T08:26:00.000-07:00

50/50 DRAW is a small consideration of the number fifty and chance; consisting of sixteen pages, laser jet print on cromatica translucent and lynx opaque papers, phamplet stitched in an edition of fifteen books with variable covers each bearing a single fifty-fifty draw ticket.
artist book • Louise Phillips • april 2010 • vancouver
3.25" x 4.5", $15.50 each, to order and for more information, please email paperlouise@gmail.com

the sensory delights of text

2010-04-07T21:36:00.001-07:00

I'm pleased to announce that my friend and fellow book maker, Gabriella Solti, has won third prize in the Alcuin Society annual book competition in the limited edition category with her book "The Sensory Delights of Text." Two photographs of the book along with her thoughts on the visual beauty of text. Congratulations, Gabriella!

We often place a heightened importance on the content of texts, giving a status of superiority to the ideas in them while neglecting their materiality, the physicality of their creation and their pictorial beauty. We celebrate text and language as the primary means of communication, as the depository of knowledge and ideas; but do we honour their cerebral character to the detriment of their sensory qualities?

“The Sensory Delights of Text” is a selection from my collection of manuscripts of artists and scholars. Each has its own visual attraction, unusual placement on the page, odd rhythm, and often striking peculiarity. Their sequence in the book highlights and strengthens their sensory qualities. In my own personal engagement with these manuscripts, driven by my aesthetic, the materiality and pictorial beauty of texts can be just as exciting as the thoughts they may contain.

life drawing in black and white

2010-03-26T20:47:00.000-07:00

strong lighting makes for high contrast.

pencil, black ink on white paper

F L O W E R

2010-03-20T19:18:00.001-07:00

although these sketchbook pages were done a couple years ago, the sky for a while today had a very similar look

the potential of Chance

2010-03-16T23:01:00.000-07:00

Michael Byron writes about Chance in his article “Korsmit* and Chance”

In order to harness the creative potential of Chance a rigorous set of procedural steps must be established in order to have pure Chance appear. If one strays from the established equation and, there are many Chance will respond to, the result is mere subjectivity.

* artist George Korsmit, The Netherlands

BOLDNESS. 47 BOOKS.

2010-03-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

yesterday I was asked what I valued the most about going back to school. this found poem is perhaps the best visual answer: determination or the boldness that critical thinking through education fosters. the tea stain echos the hours spent with tea and assigned readings as scholarly companions.

sketch book page, 24 02 2010

2010-02-26T11:53:00.000-08:00

as an ongoing part of my art practice, I collect and assemble fragments of print culture

this page from a sketch book includes found materials and a drawing

in this small work I see echos of past and current investigations into line and surface texture

my vancouver

2010-02-13T11:15:00.000-08:00

Fir SPRUCE PINE

vancouver collage

2010-02-13T11:09:00.000-08:00

thinking about
"my" vancouver
during the
2010 olympics

objects of beauty

2010-01-14T19:00:00.000-08:00

a page from my sketchbook

found vintage admission and raffle tickets

be excited.

2010-01-06T18:26:00.000-08:00

we all should be excited.

The fusion of experiential art, Fluxus, drawing, radio, Mexican food, the future, the past, science, make believe, diagrams, and critical theory together with intimacy, poeticism, science fiction in art practice provides the potential for the unexpected.

I'm excited.

Artist Erin Marranca is building a kit with step-by-step instructions for how to accomplish the impossible. I have been privelidged to attend a special work-in-progress preview and can only say that I believe it will be worth seeing at it's official unveiling scheduled for May 2010. the how-to kit

image above: a sample of Erin Marranca's secret and preliminary work in the moleskin series

found.

2010-01-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

oh, so lovely penguin engraving from the 1890s for 95 cents = a find

found at RubyDog's Art House, 623 Kingsway, Vancouver, B.C. 604-873-2825
www.rubydogonline.com

any time

2010-01-05T22:40:00.000-08:00

white in Vancouver as seen by Rolf Erni

rubberboot design 1885

2010-01-04T10:08:00.001-08:00

in acknowledgement of ongoing winter rains and in appreciation of dry feet... the humble rubber boot

design. e.b. preston. rubber boot or shoe, no. 16,208. patented aug. 1885. inventor: e. bruce preston

for this printable vintage image and many others go to vintage printable

letterpress is cool

2010-01-02T21:41:00.000-08:00

still from Mike Dacey's letterpress coasters video as shot by Stebs, more projects by Mike Dacey at Repeat Press

seen from the bus

2009-12-30T10:05:00.000-08:00

today I remembered a summer photo that reminds me, ever so slightly, of both snowflake shapes and lace dollies

modus press

2009-12-24T09:19:00.000-08:00

sock monkey loungin' letterpress greeting card

the studio of Modus Paperie & Press celebrates the elegant and simple beauty of historic letterpress printing

modus press and online shop

the christmas cards of artists

2009-12-23T10:38:00.001-08:00

Dan Flavin, famous for creating sculptures with fluorescent lights, sent this Christmas card to artist Andrew Bucci in 1962.
see more: Smithsonian Magazine

oh christmas tree!

2009-12-22T19:59:00.000-08:00

Date: 09 10 05, Set: 001, Zone 7, Colour CMYK, Title: fir, spruce, PINE ST 00 / Fir St 1800, SPRUCE ST 2300, pine [photographic colour inkjet print], Site: shot on location in vancouver
lphillips22, ••••••, 0031277

an atlas of radical cartography

2009-03-13T09:04:00.000-07:00

From South to North by Lize Mogel
New artist's book: an-atlas-of-radical-cartography

the lovely early morning fog of january*

2009-02-05T22:12:00.000-08:00

* Fog is sadly rumoured to be the possible cause of the continued haziness in regards to the status of the collage artist known as P. L. Phillips and her early retirement from art practice. However as more details are confirmed in the ongoing investigations regarding LIMONEIRA copyrights as well as any further developements will be posted as made available.

could this be true?!!!

2009-01-19T14:14:00.000-08:00

Could the 2008 International Collage Association award winner for “paint C”, P. L. Phillips in fact be the very same “PAULA” whose name and design are both registered trade marks of well known LIMONEIRA of Santa Paula, California?

Our judges do not believe the highly revered winner P. L. Phillips is possible of any actions that would discredit the International Collage Association but it is with regret that we must announce an ongoing investigation is now under way.

* ALL AWARDS AS OF JANUARY 17, 2009 ARE NOW ON HOLD. *

ICA sincerely regrets the necessity of these actions.

el paraguas

2009-01-09T12:08:00.000-08:00

essential equipment for vancouver walkers!

mexican figuritas
(postcard image)

when the snow was young

2009-01-03T15:02:00.000-08:00

once
so
very
lovely!

what I discovered in 2008

2009-01-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

well, maybe not a big discovery -- and why did it take me so long? very useful anyway!

when making oatmeal, cornmeal, couscous or any grain type food like a porridge, add the dry grain to the water in the pot BEFORE heating to end up with way less lumps, especially if then stirred while cooking. way better than the traditional method of adding grain/oat flakes to boiling water

thanks to Denise who always asks thoughtful questions and is herself a gourmand

about drawing

2008-12-31T09:12:00.000-08:00

For the new year, some words spoken by Australian critic Robert Hughes, in an address at the Royal Academy in 2004

"... there has been a tragic depreciation in the traditional skills of painting and drawing, the nuts and bolts of the profession. In part it has been caused by the assumption that it's photography and its cognate media - film and TV - that tell the most truth about the visual.

It's not true. The camera, if it's lucky, may tell a different truth to drawing - but not a truer one. Drawing brings us into a different, a deeper and more fully experienced relation to the object. A good drawing says: "not so fast, buster". We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game. This was not a problem when the Academy was founded, because in 1769 such media were embryonic or non-existent. A quarter of a millennium later, things are different. But drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies - the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about - is apparently immortal. "

the complete text

Henri Matisse - The Snail

2008-12-29T19:58:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Anonymous! The comment about the similarity between "Autumn Colours" by
P. L. Phillips and "The Snail" collage by Henri Matisse is most perceptive. To read about "The Snail" please go to The Tate Gallery.

best wishes

2008-12-23T10:51:00.000-08:00

.

phonetic alphabet
+ international flag code
+ international morse code

.

international collage association announcement

2008-12-23T10:09:00.000-08:00

the long awaited International Collage Association award winner
for "paint C" category announced today, December 20, 2008, is
P. L. Phillips

Our judges' comments: Ms Phillips is best known for her international reputation as a sender and receiver of postcards, even postal workers have been known to comment on the sheer volume of postcards that make their way to her mailbox. However, we are proud to acknowledge her more recent contributions to collage art, as clearly evidenced in "Autumn Colours" (above).

Her creativity and resourcefulness are indeed worthy of recognition. Just as a further remark, as a Canadian entry it is interesting to note the use of both official languages.

We would like to thank everyone who entered this year's competition and send special congratulations to Ms Phillips. In keeping with ICA traditions, a private award ceremony will be held later this year to honour our winner.

read today

2008-12-14T15:09:00.000-08:00

.

There is always voice enough to an attentive listener.

.
random notes
literary remains of François Delsarte
delsarte system of oratory

shopping in holiday colours

2008-12-09T22:13:00.000-08:00

dustpan :: broom

2008-12-02T15:36:00.000-08:00

seen and enjoyed at emily carr university
:)

fat cat in the sun

2008-11-05T22:48:00.000-08:00

watching him watching me