I just had a few old sketchbooks sent out to here from Calgary and was really overwelmed by the sheer density contained in these thick volumes. Literally falling apart from wear, these were some of the better ones from the turn of the century and old art school days when i was alot more intouch with a wider range of expression. All kinds of material, medium, color, textures, collages, old lyrics, photos, color swatches, poems, typing, stories, phone numbers, notes and thousands of raw doodles from when i was supposed to be paying more attention in class to things that were being taught. This was a trait that can be traced all the way back to elementary school where i drew incessantly in binders and scribblers, a habit taken from being out on the road with just paper and pencils as an infant. i have always hated the phosphorescent lit prisons designed for washing the human mind. This activity was obviously unpopular with teachers and later on they just gave up on discipline and i began filling the entire page with real and imaginal experimentions in line and form with a few scholasic notes thrown to the compostions to pass the next grade. The compulsion followed me into the work force as i can't think of a job where i couldnt find at least a few minutes here or there to draw in some notebook or tlll receipt. Crouching between mountains of tires in a factory, in the machine drone of the assembly line, the lead sheets of a call center. When asked about my work i either become cryptic, vague, sardonic, or overly intellectual. Not to confuse or to pretend there is some grand meaning or theme running through my work, the truth is i just dont know. It is just about drawing things that look cool to me. It is trying to name the unamable, a finger pointing at the moon is still just a finger and the moon is still the moon. It is really just intuitive and judging by some of the old stinkers that form the majority of these older books not always the best intuition. Like hindsight being 20/20 the work i do now may look lame in 10 years, but oh well, some of them turn out ok, like this one i drew with a brush ink pen of Shun my old college chum sitting behind me in the lecture hall for the ACAD 200 class where i really should have been paying attention to more of the marketing of art, but hey hindsight its 20/20, i had to learn that game on my own and there is no end to that game because like art there are no rules. I like this drawing because it really pulls together the visual philosophy that drives my work ten years later: black and white, classic, quick, clear, immediate, honest, with a hint of the age in which we are today alive.
