Time Lies

I'm still amazed at the discrepancy between how long I thick something will take to do and how long it actually takes. My procrastination problem has always had as an adjunct some rationalization that the task postponed needs quite a bit of time to complete. With every passing day I am proving this an outdated attitude.
    There are still plenty of things on my to-do list that I am pushing away but no longer can I entertain the excuse surrounding time. There is enough time in any day to accomplish any number of things.
    My regular attitude has always been to reserve a particular day for a particular task. If I have to go downtown to buy some art supplies, for example, I would pencil that task in the calendar and reserve that day for that task. It takes an hour to go downtown, buy some paper and come back. I did that today, along with some grocery shopping, tile work, puttying cracks in the floor, visiting a potential client, vacuuming the house, doing some dishes, preparing my supper, goofing off plenty, visiting a friend.
    This new approach has emerged with fatherhood. I can't rightly postpone things that need to be down anymore. One can't change the kids diaper later. One does it now. I've been doing things now.
    So, I bought my art supplies. Soon I'll cut some of the bristol up and begging roughing in some panels, panels that will grow into my next full length graphic novel. It's doing to be a good one, I can feel it. I'm not writing it or drawing sketches or planning anything. I will start drawing and see where that takes me. I will trust the process.

Fashion Chances

I'd sooner wear a hair-wrap than attend a body painting session. I'm good with jodhpurs but not so much with top-knots. Shoes are judged by the foot and the leg and the circumstance. You know as well as I do what to wear to the gravel pit or the picnic. Baseball hats are for a segment of the population I can't relate to. I'd wear a fringed leather jacket or even a fringed suede jacket but the fringes better be long and supple. I'd wear make up if it was already on me but I won't put any on outside of someone wants to put some on me and I say ok. I would say ok and I'd also be ok walking around with some, but not for long. I've thought about skirts but not enough to do anything about it. Kind of like eating insects. Plenty of thought, haven't done much about it.
    I'd travel most places, I think, but won't plan enough to make it happen. I'd plan certain trips to certain places though. I need incentive.
    Maybe I'll gather my energy and build myself a great graphic design studio so I can make art that I like in an easy way and have the tools I need to produce and share it properly. I'd wear comfy clothes while I worked but would try to gather a nice wardrobe for special events. Something along the lines of Han Solo semi-formal. I'm thinking of one of those urban adventurer utility belts. I'd carry around with me a small note book and a pen, my mini-tool, business card and stickers, cash money and keys. One of the pockets would be reserved for ground scores.
    I'm going to look up some of these belts right now so I can imagine myself properly.
    I wish I had a jacket I'd be cool with covering in patches. I've had a wicked 'Follow Me' patch with a sword on it for decades. Never got the nerve up to commit to wearing it. That might have to change as I approach my fifties. I want to be that guy, that guy who never looked as good as he now does. That way, when I crack out the cloak and staff at seventy it will all make sense.

Pop Has Eaten Itself

On the strength of Bird Dog, I was all poised to strike the record button on my portable cassette player when the disc jockey announced that he'd play some Everly Brothers after the break. Turns out it was a song I hadn't heard before, Cathy's Clown. For years all that was played back was my disappointment.
    One song feeds into another. From old mix tapes, song orders are cemented in young ears. It would jar when it wouldn't follow. It's like when two songs that lead quickly into each other, forming a one-two punch of awesome rocknroll are hacked asunder by some FM radio robot, leaving you hanging. We Will Rock You must be followed by We Are The Champions. There is no need to explain.
    I wonder how some of these songs, forty years old now are still somehow around. I wonder if they have any contemporary analogues. Will there survive some listening structure of format that will accommodate today's songs in forty years ? One hit wonders from 1978 still get 3 million hits on YouTube. Will there be a YouTube to host all of today's songs in the future ? And how many mixtures are there ? Playlist after playlist, burnt CD, the revived cassette, the film soundtrack of curated oldies. So much to sift through.
    There's no way of telling which of today's songs some kid will make a tape of. Like the death of saturday morning cartoons, a focused kids culture exploded into distinct VHS habits changing from family to family. Once all kids were hooked into Bugs Bunny, then some kids demanded Winnie The Pooh to be looped endlessly by desperate parents while others sunk into the sickening appeal of Caillou. A generation torn asunder, unwoven, disentangled. Watching space shuttles blow up in the sky. Sampling can only go so far, what could they do but mash-up ?
    And now we have what once was a years work primed for a conceptual showing in an art gallery along with impenetrable text presented as another anonymous GIF tossed off into the slop trough of our collectivity, shared reactively for the moment and then forgotten.
    That stack of vintage art magazines ? Track down the cover artists. Let's see how they did.

Nomination

I was nominated for a Quebecois comic book prize this year. The gala was held in a posh night spot on the other end of town. I felt it was proper form to attend even though I was exhausted from a long day. Taking the metro there, I thought I'd be late but arrived early enough to grab a seat at my publishers table. I was treated to a pint and sat with friends as the short ceremony begun. My sausage sandwich was too spicy and I didn't win the award. I was only a small bit disappointed and decided it best to walk home. The clear night air did me good and I avoided the busier streets. Montreal in the cool spring evening is gorgeous. The trees are all lush, in sharp contrast to a few short weeks ago when all was barren from a long brutal winter.
    I walked home and thought about working harder. The book that won belongs to a friend and is a marvel of intuitive storytelling. It can easily serve as a reminder for me to loosen up a bit more and follow my nose, not be so high strung and determined to make sense. Freak out a bit more, as it were. I also thought on my walk home that perhaps I overvalue my talent. I am prone to thinking how great I am, easily confusing the thoughts I've had with my actual output. This hit home when I started musing upon a street campaign using a particular local motif. A short block later, there it was, stuck to the street signs, some one else had manifested the idea.
    I tend to daydream a whole heck of a lot more than produce. I manifest but not as much as I imagine I do. Too often I have seen ideas I thought of stare back at me, the work of other hands. I must only look at my actual output and not my potential in weighing my worth as an artist. I still haven't bought the paper I need to begin my next book. A book that will be better than the last one. A book that better be. To be better, the artist must relax into the task, create a work from joy and not perceived audience expectation. I think I can do it.

Tone Poem

It may have been late last night or early this morning when a forgotten phrase re-entered my thoughts. Tone poem is a musical term, I'm not sure if I knew that. I'm shamefully unschooled in proper classical music and its tendencies. A tone poem, I just found out, refers to some piece of music that takes as it's inspiration a poem or a painting, something that once was considered unsuitable to write music around.
    Since my interest in the term came with an ignorance of its meaning, I was free to consider what it may mean to me and my creative process. What a privilege! Instantly I saw an extended mood or tone being explored -in comics, for example. Panel leading to panel, all working out a sense of something rather than a plot. This is done constantly in comics and I have indulged in it as well. It came to me, I will accept, as a reminder to reconsider this approach to making comics.
    Shifting sequential images do not necessarily have to show action. Abstract comics have strung together tableaus of line or form evoking movement or change without showing much else. That's an extreme example. Good ol' regular story telling comics can use multiple landscape scenes or a roving camera eye over details to paint a picture, set a mood, etc.
    I am relishing the idea of slow comics, panels morphing slowly, action taking a back seat. Of course, what one is showcasing better stand up to a plodding movement. Would it work ? Is it gimmicky or wanky ? Maybe tomorrow I'll finally go buy my paper and supplies and start preparing myself for actual work and not whimsical considerations.

Random

Trying to write about art with zero references around you is kind of a dumb way to do things. There are so many nuances lost that even memory of beloved pictures falls short and fails. The scholar, I'm sure, has all the right pages marked clearly with post-its, all the right references lined up in a row.
    Huddle and limp, just tell the world you love something, tell the people there is an idea somewhere in your head.
    The things I love in no particular order: King Kong, the original 1933 film, the first Star Wars movies - they're called something else now but fuck that, The Lord Of The Rings books (the movies make me seethe and or kind of entertain me). How, I cannot imagine, can a director decide to make a 12 hour long movie mostly consisting of ring in hand shots, decide to completely remove the arguably most important part of the trilogy - the scouring of the Shire ? Anyway….I love crappy superhero comics of the seventies but not enough to care who is who in regards to artists, letterers, writers. I love paranormal shit, never got into ghost stories too deep but it's not too late. I love fantasy and science fiction, I love the shape of reported ufos, I love monster sightings but not enough to call myself an expert. The internet clearly shows that there are experts for every niche, and many to boot. I'm a luke warm Fortean.
    I love black and white logos, symbols and charms, type and noise, stamps and seals. I love mystery tongues and wizards, robots and villains, heroes and queens. Horses, tigers, dogs and elves. I love plant life and rock life. I love planes and gods, people and things. I'll keep Britannica open to my favourite page, the one I can rip out and scribble on. I love lost and found paper, old books and puzzling lists. I love the shape of lips and legs, clouds and bricks. I love poetry and songs, paintings and objects.
    I forget what I like, I lose lists like I make them. I love fantasy art. I love words. I love stories and myths, fables and tales, lies and jokes, pranks and hoaxes.
    I read and I forget details. I give the books away, I've forgotten which ones I've read. I don't keep score. I keep score. I'm no scholar, I'm a scholar without an index as of yet. Or a bibliography.

Fantasy Art

As a mid teen I tripped out on the paintings of Boris Vallejo who signed his slick fantasy paintings simply Boris. Any budding fan soon discovered that he and his wife served as models for the paintings, both being what is called in our society, attractive types. Boris himself was athletic and was a few leather and rivet gauntlets away from being a fantasy hero himself.
    The paintings were direct, glossy and tightly rendered. He would play with the usual colour fields as backgrounds and the occasional paisley shaped abstraction acting as body jewellery for his savage warriors queens.
    I knew, of course, of the work of Frank Frazetta, but somehow clicked onto Boris. In hindsight, a hindsight that is now over twenty years old, it is evident that if Boris is for mid-teens, Frazetta is for sophisticated people twice or three times that age. Boris is Menudo to Frazetta's Rolling Stones. Other lame analogies may fit as well, we'll leave them for someone else to pen.
    Frazetta's fantasy paintings, reproduced as prints, book and album covers, lovingly airbrushed on vans and motorcycle gas tanks, are art. Solid, complex, deftly executed pieces of art. He can be as tight as he needs be, but his classic paintings seems thrown chaotically onto the board, almost hastily. Quick dabs of paint, rough almost blurry forms and edges give his work energy and life. They move, they shimmer. The colours are moody and dank, swampy tones for primeval heroics. Boris, on the other hand, is candy clean and well lit. His work got more well lit, more staged as the years went by. I recall getting disappointed in his continued direction. The fantasy painter most akin to Boris at the time was Rowena, her clean line and light of day approach followed directly from Boris. By highlighting his style, Rowena showed me what I missed by siding with Boris while not immersing myself in Frazetta. He work was too staged, his heroics were in the photo room. Frazetta's heroics clearly clashed axes in his own psyche. This stuff was real. It was threatening to a fourteen year old. It was FM rock radio late at night, high on drugs.
   
    I write all this because yesterday the deaths of two great fantasy artists were announced. From the shadow came H.R.Giger, discussed briefly in the previous post. From the faerie realm of baroque phantasmagoria came Patrick Woodroffe. Both these greats and their passing reminded me of my early love for fantasy art, how as a teenager their books enthralled me though I often couldn't afford them. Giger had a cheap edition by Taschen but Woodroffe always eluded me. I looked at his work and marvelled but I never took it home with me. I took home Boris. A few months ago I lucked out on two books by Frazetta, the classic editions I never picked up as a kid.
    The other books that I fear I'll start collecting are the Paper Tiger oversized paperbacks, Roger Dean et al. This house published both Woodroffe and Boris !
    But the main artists who totally captivated my attention from the age of fourteen or so until my late teens were the inimitable Brothers Hildebrandt. From their spot on depictions of Middle Earth to their impossibly pretentious name to their feather in cap coupe of a Star Wars poster, they made me stop and look. I outgrew them though and now poring over their pages, I stop at the early Tolkein work. Urshurak and beyond just left me cold.
    Fantasy art. One of my dear strong early loves. I'll come around some day and try my hand like I did back then.

Shadow Visions

Visionary art is a label that has been bandied about these last few years and tends to get stuck to folks painting psychedelic blow-outs, ayahuasca visions, elaborate symbolic cosmographies and the like. Most of these visions are light-driven. The artist has ostensibly seen through the veils separating this world from the greater unseen one and has come back to report on their discovery via affordably priced giclée prints on canvas or sometimes lenticular blinkety-blinkies. Alex Grey, of course, is the name most often associated with this movement.
    Digital artists too using high resolution fractal software also create moving visions, allowing the viewer to tunnel into other-worldy realms. These visionary artworks so far discussed reach for a realm many yearn for, a realm of the light, angelic superstructures, shamanic bestiaries and cosmic unification porn. They are also undoubtedly related to the large and still growing body of fantasy art, from the paperback cover, the comic book, the airbrushed van to the album cover, the scratch built kit, fan art and beyond.
    Fantasy art has always embraced the mystical vision, the world beyond ours. It has also always shown us something other than the light of good vibes. There is a flip side to these visions. There are artists, rarely called visionary but are undeniably so, that choose to paint the shadow side of the cosmic dream. Nightmares, visceral architecture of body parts, spinal landscapes, creatures horrific and vast, the bad trip.
    H.P. Lovecraft sowed many seeds of unspeakable cosmic horror and set the stage for artists to bask in shadow. Heavy Metal album art often showcased the fantastical, Death Metal album art went to town, playing in the guts.
    Recently the world lost a visionary artist of great caliber. H.R. Giger played out nightmares of bio-mechanics on every scale. Vast cathedrals of terror or isolated bodies bound by bone and cable. His visions fused the body and the machine, not some quaint steam era machine but the living machinery of alien wizardry. Part fetish wank painting, part study of much-used operative function, part landscape, all nightmare. Beautiful, lush, infinite, original nightmare. Bravo maestro, you saw and you executed your visions perfectly, true visions that resonate strongly with many viewers. You will be missed.

Me, Myself & I

Little bearded heads, simply drawn, speaking text, unpanelled, 6 or more to a page, narrating action that isn't seen, memoir, opinion. Subtle differences in the shape of the face and expression of the features moves the reader's eye along. The text is without balloon, loose next to the drawing, short bursts. The shape of the face can change radically, the head can reference these changes in the text, formalist experiments that are easy to read. The head can refer to other cartoons, other characters can burst in and talk back to the head. Other characters can blaze a trail ahead of the bearded head and tell other tales.
    Two bunny creatures, names withheld for the time being speak in snippets and solo words, rife with inside jokes and wry nods to each other. They engage in a half telepathic dialogue, finishing each other's sentences, riffing and making word plays. They are simple contour drawings, text spoken by each critter directly above. They form sentences rather than panels, sometimes they are living in discrete spaces, two heads a panel, four panels a page, maybe more.
    A finely rendered little ceremonial magician embarks on a quest. Detailed pencil work, replete with smudging and erasing as graphic tools, four panels to a page, each panel originally drawn at four by six inches. The world this character lives in is a small town, plenty of greenery, parks and old brick walls. His home has many rooms, hard wood floors and ritual objects. Furniture is zen hippie. Unlike the other two proposals above,
he has two books to his credit, one full length graphic novel the other a collection of shorts.
    Do I here 'stop inventing', ie: instead of launching into unknown territory, I make my next graphic novel using characters and a cartoon universe that already exists in print, reinforcing the brand, as you'd say. The temptation to somehow weave all proposals into one work sounds good in theory (maybe) but may also be a disaster in reality. Better the straightforward production, low on razzle dazzle and high in storytelling.
    I apologize for using this forum to outline and clarify my intentions regarding graphic novel projects. It is useful for me to do so. This is a journal of sorts, and I'm writing simply to maintain the habit and by chance, maybe hone my skills. This next big project in comics is much on my mind and I need to clarify my many conflicting thoughts about it. Scribbled notes aren't cutting it anymore, I have many of those. This process of writing about what I may do puts my thoughts in order, one after the other. I'm banking that at night, while I sleep, the proper decision will surface.

My first full length graphic novel was published by a house unfamiliar with the form and unfamiliar with how to sell it. Granted, it was a silent book and possibly quite oblique for people who don't make a point of reading comics. The book that followed it employed the same character and was a small run of three hundred copies. It was a collection of shorts that possibly didn't have enough breathing room between them and so came off crowded and possibly confusing. My very first comic book which came out years earlier than both of the ones mentioned above was a collection of radically different strips that may have made a groovy wtf reading experience but also didn't give the reader enough of any one thing.
    This upcoming and so far hypothetical fourth book cannot be doomed to obliquity. It would be good if it was easily read, simply enjoyed and provoked wonder enough to be reread. I am forced to admit that by over planning I get anxious and that if I simply trust the process and begin the final work straight away, a decent enough story will emerge. My one recurring issue is that I am starting to think that text in the body of the book may enable a wider audience. I am not convinced that silent books by my hand are not dismissed as too difficult to read or to 'get'. In my experience, many folks don't 'get' my work whereas the very few really 'get' it. For what's it's worth, I'd like more getting to happen.
    I have a possible publisher lined up and I'd like to provide something that they will feel confident is a book they can reasonably sell. Anything too inaccessible I may as well publish myself in a tiny run rather than blow a chance at wider distribution with something that doesn't sell or is limited to a small audience. At the same time of course, I am incapable of making a teen soap drama.
    Thanks to anyone who actually read this over long and fully naval gazing post. I am becoming overly self conscious about how often the word 'I' pops up in these missives.

Art Advice

Three pieces of art advice that I have gotten over the years stick with me, surface from time to time. The most recent one, received at an artist residency around seven years ago from a visiting curator has proved pivotal to my practice since then. The first two, received from my brother maybe ten or fifteen years earlier helped me get through the intervening years.
    He looked at a drawing I was working on and simply said, 'use more black'. I repeated this to a friend or two for a laugh and they carried the wisdom around, inserting it into any remotely relevant conversation. I indeed started using more black and I found the advice fruitful. Too much space left untouched can leave a drawing free floating. Fear of blocking in white space with ink can stop a young artist from just going for it - fill that page, thicken those lines, shade like you mean it, like you don't care if something goes overboard, you can always make another one. The advice of course pertained to a specific drawing. The advice became abstracted and took on other finer meanings. It meant, roughly, work it. Or finish it, or make it more of itself. Another piece advice that my brother gave me has been told elsewhere, was issued when I was down after not getting a mainstream job drawing editorial cartoons. It was a 'use more black' tailored just for me. Brother John said, 'Bill', he calls me Bill not Billy, 'you can freak out better than most people can freak out, so … freak out'. I've been freaking out better since.
    The result of freaking out led me to continue feverishly a program of rampant experimentation begun in early adolescence. This then led to the third piece of advice, given to me by someone who hardly knew me personally and only knew the art that I made during the seven week residency. He told me, simply, 'stop inventing'. This threw me for a loop as I have always prided myself on what I perceived as versatility. The curator showed me the flip side to that. He was suggesting that instead of constantly churning out new ideas I may want to hunker down and refine a select direction. This would lead to a better grasp on my overarching themes and a honing of my skills. I don't think I've stopped inventing but I certainly keep the advice in mind. I often find myself spinning a whole new look instead of refining one that has served me well in the past. Since that day I have made a conscious effort to understand my various tendencies, to group traits and relate them in a cohesive manner.
    I have continued to invent but have become much more proficient at contextualizing, refining and understanding the art that I make.
    Thanks guys.

Before Work

I've always had a problem with what can be called branding. I like a lot of different things and have had a hard time corralling all those things into the same personality, or more accurately, into the marketing of that same personality. My artistic tendencies are varied, I'm at peace with all my takes and all my interests but the art world, it is said, needs things cut and dried.
    So I like making little books and I also like making larger ones. I have also been driven to understand the necessity for solid narrative. My complaint would be that I have a desire to incorporate all my interests in one and the same art project. How do I make a book that relies upon narrative yet also incorporates a myriad different styles and techniques ? There is the rub.
    This artificial problem only exist in the planning phase of any larger project. Once the work gets under way, things fall into place and what the story demand, the story gets. In the planning phase a veritable buffet of options buffets me about - there must be an abstract sequence, there must be some text, there must be full classic cartoon style for a few pages, there must be collage, there must be free form, there must be must be's. The list goes on and I stand paralysed, in front of reams of cheap paper scratched with half-starts, notes, sketches, thumbnails.
    This happens each time and signals the fact that I have to really start working on the project. I dream big, fold outs and cut aways. I want every facet to be fully represented. This is an ego game. I'm proud of myself. I like that I explore divergent tendencies in the visual arts. I want props for this. I want to make work that is unassailable. What I want is meaningless of course if the work never gets off the ground because I dream too big to accommodate a daily work routine.
    I see a pilgrim, moving through landscapes, shifting landscapes. I see interactions with creatures and magic. I see language games and psychological puzzles. I see formal structures deteriorate into shambles of noise and abstraction. I see abstraction build itself up into cohesive meaning. I see redemption through a willingness to engage with mystery. I see all these things and I feel like snapping my pencils.
    The only way any of these visions, this one overarching vision, will be manifested is if I get the good paper for the final copy, sharpen my pencils, treat myself to some new smudge stick or eraser, consolidate my notes into one pile and just dive in by drawing a panel. One random panel, probably of my character walking. Another panel will follow it and soon enough the notes will be forgotten and I will be on my way.
    I forget each time that I must trust my process. My process, roughly put, is devised between anxious planning and straight forward work. The work itself always, and I mean always, shows me the way. It shows me how to incorporate my love for gibberish or chakras, for lost details and shifting t-shirts. Before I know it, when I'm actually working, all my loves and all my desires make a cameo or even get featured outright. I'm in the storm before the calm, when ideas are whizzing about threatening to take themselves elsewhere, to some other artist who will honour them. I have to trust that they will come around when needed, that i simply have to get my paper cut to the size I need and start drawing a little character about to embark on a massive journey.

Drawing Bunnies

I started drawing bunnies because I was trying to cheer up a friend who had a bad case of the blues. These first bunnies were actually animal shapes with smiley faces in them, hovering around the head. I got a kick out of them myself because up until that point I was mostly drawing erotic fruit, guts and psychedelic bullshit. When I was ten I would proudly draw big nosed cartoon characters. I would practise Daffy Duck as a pre-teen. As I got older, I got more pretentious and it was all gothic eyeballs and stewed intestines.
    In my early twenties, when I drew a funny animal cartoon it was all angst, sweat drops and panicked expressions on the little critters. In hindsight my friend suffering from depression helped turn me around. I let my art be as light as I could be at times. I wasn't a heavy dude but I drew heavy nightmares and visions. The creatures were twisted organic structures bound with straps, existing in a possibly positive space but serving more as gross-out material than anything else. I loved the supple forms of mangos and pears with labial folds and tumescent piping. Fun stuff, alien porn.
    The bunnies, called Glees, trotted in and said, hey bozo, chillax. They pointed their fingers at humanity and mocked us. They mocked me. They turned, like Bugs before them, into tricksters, aligned Chaotic Good with a wicked helping of Chaotic Neutral or just downright Neutral. They took the piss out. Nervy The Dog, a character I created that featured in maybe two stories total, was a stress case freaking out over everything. The bunnies couldn't care less. They were easy going and happy. Happy, gleeful. They were also easy to draw. When I drew human faces, they invariably were streaked with a thousand lines of weariness, shadows and spots - again with the heavy. The bunnies were smooth as the sexy fruit without the naughty bits poking through. Fast and easy, and cheerful.
    I used them in paintings and comics, I had them embroidered, I cut-out tin can collages, I made papier maché bunnies. If I was faced with a new medium I would cut my teeth with a bunny. I knew the design well enough to try it out in any material.
    Of course people thought I had a thing for rabbits. Couldn't give a damn about rabbits. I'm more of a squid or great cat guy. Rabbits and hares are amazing animals of course, like all animals, but I never had a soft spot for them. The very first drawing I did that led to the bunnies actually was a blocky chunk with Mickey Mouse ears. The bunnies I draw today, still called bunnies, look often like mice or dogs or bears or some creature with big ears. My aunt calls the creatures I draw 'bear cubs', she says it in Greek though and I like it. When I first heard her describe them that way a tiny voice almost came up to correct her but it was squashed dead by a greater voice saying, hey that's good.
    I'm not going to start rebranding now, the damned things are bunnies. My wanky side has described them in interviews as not cartoons of rabbits but cartoons of cartoon bunnies. Meta enough for that bong of yours ? In any case the basic bunny form is now a vessel, a vehicle, a platform, a support for any of my scribbling tendencies - unbroken curved lines, sleek and flowing, gestural asemic scratchings, blended gradations, psychedelic auric fade-outs, whatever I want. I can draw a mess of eyeballs and intestines, even some genitalia for god's sake and throw a couple of ears on top and voilà, bunny.
    There were some recent years when I felt like Leonard Nimoy fighting off his Spockhood. I kept the bunnies at a distance, they made cameos in comics but not in any serious art (yes, I know how that sounds, I'm a cartoonist, even a graphic novelist). I am still tired of civilians who think that widely varying cartoon bunnies look like mine, or that they liked that TV show I never worked on. Cartoon bunny taxonomy is vast, and it's pearls before swine if I have so explain the difference between a Garfield and a Heathcliff, let alone Krazy and Bill.
    Last year or so, for a lark and to decorate a new snack bar with lots of toys as decor, I banged out a slew of bunny paintings using cheap dollar store paints and repurposed canvas. It was a blast. I've always been aware of artists who never once stopped presenting their stupid cartoon characters as subjects for painting. I took a detour into douchebag land with all that implies about pride and seriousness. I'm back again, reclaiming my art as, you guessed it, mine. I was never on the career track towards the Tate anyway. I'm not doing coke with a curator unless they are also a friend. And every bit of wisdom I have read regarding art most always states something about following your heart, being true to yourself, doing what you love.
    I love the way these critters stare at me with their huge smiles. I love how they judge me and keep me on my toes. If I'm not careful, they may start breeding like rabbits and take over my life.
   

My Father's Garage

Growing up, the garage was my Dad's domain. It still is, though the house has changed and I no longer live with him. In the garage was/is a work bench of some sort, countless small cubbies and jars and drawers filled with the tools of his trade. When I was young my father worked as a cabinet maker before starting his own business running a diner. He's quite handy and would see to the home improvements himself, even larger tasks like cutting a hole in the kitchen floor and building a rounded pine spiral staircase to a now existing basement.
    His drawers full of washers, nuts and bolts, screws and nails, his assortment of tools, his odds and ends inspired me. Where he would put things together, I enjoyed taking things apart. Not with the view of understanding how they worked, usually they were broken things in the first place. I simply enjoyed the piecemeal pastime of slowly taking things apart, my dad's set of mini screwdrivers in hand.
    I would take apart the old clock radio and keep whatever piece I liked. My brother and I were avid scale model makers, so bits of plastic were often the very air we breathed - joined by Testors model cement. Putting models together, taking radios apart, I dealt in fiddly things. Small details, small hands. The parts from long broken models, or the secondary optional pieces were saved for future projects. We already were aware of scratch building and knew that a good model maker had an array of parts to choose from. My relationship with small pieces of junk is informed by this background - my father's garage, model making and taking things apart. Finding things would become the fourth horseman.
    My father's garage, it occurred to me many years later, was what I was ritualizing when I would collect rusted washers and pin them to my jean jacket. Whereas he saw these components as being useful - and knew how to use them, I abstracted them into fetish objects. I took his tools and hardware and turned them into sacred hippie relics, tied up in buckskin pouches, dangling from my closet door handle. He of course made fun of me, seeing me sitting cross legged in my teenaged bedroom, an assortment of seashells, stones, rusted metal, bone and plastic arrayed in front of me as I strung them into necklaces or fashioned velvet pouches to carry them in. I sewed many pouches in my day, and made many pieces of jewellery -part hippie, part urban decay. My father would poke his head in and comment if I was having fun playing with my la-la. Verbatim. My La-La, should be capitalized. Of course I took offense, but knew better to make a big deal of it and just deflected what I could.
    How does a hard working man, whose hands are gnarled tree roots that can easily break me in half, make sense of his long haired son weaving strands of macrame around his wrists, surrounded by pictures of Jesus, Mary and Gandalf ? How can he not make fun of that ? How could anyone not ?
    So today, I am a collector of small objects. I place them in jars, I'm making art from them. I've learned a thing or two about being handy in the real life way and am astounded that some of my forty your old male friends don't know how to put up a shelf. I've learned about home repair, not on a grand scale, but enough to not be too intimidated by renovations. I've taken over my dad's garage, the one he set up in the shop I now run. I've made it mine but have kept tons of his components. I use them. I use the tools. I have a foot in each country, my father's and my own.
   

Accretions, Breakthroughs, Collections

For the last several days I have been going through my various jars of small found pieces, organized by material - wood, plastic, metal. Some jars are mixed, if the piece I am hoping to keep somehow straddles worlds, or if the metal, plastic or wood jar was full. Beads, single earrings, snapped leather strands, glass knob, seashell, toy wheel - such things go into a jar invisibly marked miscellaneous.
    I have many jars, three devoted to colourful plastic parts. The jars started out as charming vintage ones, from pickles or some such, labels and all. These got scarce quickly and mason jars came into the picture. Mason jars are timeless, even the new ones have some old world charm about them. The plastic I keep can be the inner bits of a box of floss, a lost Kinder toy piece, a small doll shoe, a Spirograph wheel, a small tube from some pen, mostly toy details and obscure industrial components. I've always taken things apart, the ritual counterpart of seeing my father actually make things, his collections meant to be used.
    I've kept my old macrame bracelets, the pull strings from long gone hoodies, bathroom chain, rusted washers, dried rubber bands from date stamps, clock parts, half a dried lime, broken keychains. I've kept crap like this all my life. In the last two years or so, as a response to this growing collection of mayhem and the anxiety it can cause, I started on the dubious campaign of organizing it. Jars proved useful in that my collections took on discrete identities and were quite beautiful seen through glass. I even exhibited them in an art show centered around collecting and it's shadow side, hoarding.
    Now, with the jar trick, I was able to identify what it was that I collect. I collect collections. I have numerous ill-defined ones. Once a jar is full, I can more easily decide if that particular collection merits a second jar. Shall I start picking up more bits of shaped wood to fill a second jar or can I cap it at one ? One, it is ! This way, I can nip it in the bud. Sorry alluring bit of wood, you will stay where I first spotted you, in a discarded shoebox full of junk drawer cast offs left on the sidewalk on moving day, beside the fridge contents and the bedbug bureau.
    Since I've taken to organizing my collections, I've become better at leaving things behind. Not only that but I've also taken to using the parts to create something new, which may have been the purpose of starting to collect in the first place. I found, with being overwhelmed with actual real-life tasks and jobs, that I had neglected to book an exhibit for the gallery for a rapidly approaching month. Quickly, and with the support of my trusty girl-friday, I came up with the idea of mounting an exhibit of the accidental clusters that accumulate within certain quarters of the shop. Before I knew it, I pulled out a treasured found collection, one I thought would remain intact forever. It came from a friends basement, the detritus left behind by previous tenants. It came from an old Greek man, It was the bottom half of a two litre carton of milk stuffed with thin straight coloured seven inch lengths of bendable wire, jutting out like a rainbow obsessive nightmare. Pure potentiality. Of course, it was a perfect ready-made, something I was looking forward to counting as part of my art.
    I found myself pulling a length out and twisting it around some odds and ends. I added to it, antique fake leaves, my teenaged jewellery, rusted metal, spools of thread, toy parts, fishing lures. In a flurry one afternoon I cobbled together several of these fetishes, meant to hang on a bent nail from a stark white wall. I was using my junk. I was unabashedly dipping into thirty year old archives of once treasured objects and fashioning something new from them. Better still, I allowed my partner access to this stash so she too could make art from it.
    This might sound like no big deal to those of you who purchase wall units and glass and metal furniture, laminations of movie posters to go over the love seat. But to collectors of small found objects, who struggle with why they do what they do, this is a big deal. I've turned a serious corner. And to boot, I'm making art that I'm seriously excited by, art that waited years if not decades to manifest.

And Baby Makes Writing And Drawing Happen

This is the fifty-sixth instalment of a daily writing practice. I started with the intention of doing it for one month. I'm now nearing two. It was been a good thing. Sometimes I have no idea what to write about but to date I have yet to skip a day. This exercise has allowed me to hone a skill long desired but generally dormant. I've wanted to do this for a long time but never made the time for it, never showed up to the office, so to speak. Now I am showing up and even doing some work.
    Six months ago my son was born. I never really imagined that being a parent would be part of my life but alas, it is so. This parenthood has forced me to face several pressing issues in my life, one being my penchant for putting things off until the boiling point. With a baby one can't really change the diaper later or make some toast for your hard working partner later. One gets out of bed and jumps into action at a moment's notice. One does things now in groggy states, in wakeful states, no matter.
    When I embarked on a daily writing habit, I wasn't sure what would happen. Several things did. The first thing I noticed was a severe release of pressure. Anxiety long slow-cooking in me and raging out at inopportune times was slowly dissipating. I was not fully released from it's grips of course but I was palpably helping myself. I was doing something good for me that didn't involve hedonism. I found that I was organizing my thoughts and feelings. I was expressing myself, first with memoir and later with personal essay. I reached into my memories and dragged old stories out, nothing earth shaking, nothing dramatic. It felt good, though. It was still a release. I'm sharing the occasional link on social networks and am getting the very occasional page hit or compliment. This is practice. If I pull off a year, I'll have more than enough raw material for some sort of book. If I don't have a book, I'll have a bunch of stuff I wrote.
    Two weeks ago I decided to add another small task to my already over full plate. I started a daily drawing routine. I would cut some four by six inch piece of card and draw a cartoon bunny on it with pencil. I would use a smudge stick to render it. When the drawing was finished I'd stamp my name on the back side, sign it and scribble the year. Then I'd slip it into a plastic collectors bag meant for manga books. I've sold two of these things for forty dollars each. This feels like I've already written about this. I cannot real whether I have or not and the last thing I'll do is slog through previous blog posts to see if I have.
    The drawing is keeping my hand limber. Bunnies are easy and fun to draw and come in a variety of moods and styles. It's all pencil so far, which I enjoy. It's less committal than ink and lends itself to fast techniques of shading.
    So I have a baby, a business that I am not neglecting, a new writing routine and now a daily drawing one. I don't go out as much anymore, I certainly am not drinking or getting high anymore. I have time, I have energy. I'm trying to work towers a plan that will continue to change my life for the better. So far so good.

Collecting

I've made peace with the fact that I am a collector. I am eternally grateful that the things I collect have near zero market value. Also, that for the most part, they are small things. I collect paper. I collect scraps of paper. Small printed details, drawings, kids art, water blurred garage sale posters, odd bits of ephemera, poetry leaflets, doubly exposed found photos, 1970s craft magazines, battered vintage books on prehistoric life and outer space. There are many groups and sub groups, many that have no discernible theme except in my eye. I collect minuscule scraps of paper, some half the size of a postage stamp. I get these plasticized like identity cards. I have a hundred of them. I also collect the occasional label drawn on and stuck by street artists. I harvest the ones half hanging loose. I smooth them down flat on a piece of card and write the street and the month and the year I find them.
    I used to collect the odd designs printed on the bottoms of cardboard boxes. When I worked in warehouses I would find some strange logos and motifs. I got to thinking that many of these signs represented nothing more than the cadres of buddies who worked in box factories. I used to collect comics. I can't bother picking them up anymore. Of course if I happen upon some copies of old Boris Karloff Presents or Ka-Zar Lord Of The Hidden Jungle for a buck or two, I'll pick them up, I'm not crazy.
    My rule, loose and sloppy, about collecting is that I am not a completist and that I don't have to collect it. I'm getting good at letting things go. For a year or two i collected wooden spoons. Then one day thrifting I just didn't bother buying some spoons I found. And then the spark fizzled. I tell the story of scouring all the bookstores in my hometown for examples of concrete poetry. I'm adept at pulling avant-garde periodicals from the messy shelves of good will shops. Invariably that white spine belongs to a book published by a small Canadian press in 1973. I can spot them a mile away. The second hand bookshops in Montréal, though, very rarely have what I'm looking for in the poetry department. On a recent visit to Toronto, I checked out a very well curated bookshop and asked my usual question - 'got anything by way of concrete or visual poetry, photocopy art, mail-art, text manipulations, that sort of thing ?' Instead of getting a blank stare or some tepid attempt to sell me Apollinaire, the clerk brought out a huge stack of exactly the material I look for. At that point it became, how much money would I want to spend. I bought a fine volume for thirty dollars and haven't cared much for the stuff since.
    Scarcity or the hunt is key. Milling about flea markets with unlimited funds is not collecting, it's shopping. Most of what I collect is tied to finding. And what I most like to find are things I didn't know I was looking for. Some Hassidic kids homework sheets, a stained flyer, a printed glitch, the dedication page of a mangled old book. What I want resonates with an unknown history. It has texture and life. It doesn't come by the dozen. It's oblique and hints at mystery.
    The stuff I collect fits in file folders, shoe boxes, stacks. It gets sorted through often and rearranged. It gets confused with art. It get's exhibited, shown, flaunted. It may even get sold. One thing for sure, it's not going to weigh down my kid and it's not going to line my coffin.

Tools Of The Trade

Along with the image of a cavorting chess board, disorienting poor existing creatures like ourselves come a few other images in the same category. The chess board, as seen earlier, divides the plane into white and black tiles, each colour representing one of two possible perspectives. Then they come together and form a lattice they hint at grey, the third path. This chessboard, when seen through the fish eye lens of dream, cannot help but tilt and quiver. The strategy game men play in the park is a far cry from this cosmic farce. This playing board speaks of unknown and ever changing rules. One quickly forgets what side one is on. Which are my playing pieces? which my opponents ? My opponent looks a lot like me. Why are there Monopoly playing pieces on a chessboard ?
    Some situations in life call for drastic measures. Sometimes, on the battle field, when faced with non-stop absurdity of the highest order the options for response are limited. Either on slumps to the floor, starts drooling and thrubbing ones lips with a forefinger or one takes action. The action in this case is to quickly make a Napoleon hat from scratch. If one is adept at shaping aether, all the better ! Fashion yourself a hat, this token will bestow power. If all you have is cardboard and tape, get cracking but I will say, your imagination is quicker and doesn't lead you into the dead ends craft time can land you. The hat, often seen in the loony bins of funny pages, is a shamanic item that will lead you through chaos mostly intact. It will allow you to stand up tall, take charge of the situation irregardless of whether or not you are a natural born leader of men.
    The next things you'll need are a clipboard to take down notes and a pointing stick. The stick will allow you to isolate details that strike you as absurd. Aha! you shout, that thing is melting and/or dancing. Take a note of it. These tools will help you analyze your environment thus gaining control over it. Remember, the battle field, the game board, the mean streets, the drawing room….all these places are stand ins for the fun house, that shape shifting ground that can topple you as soon as set you on your way.
    The last image that will help the weary traveler in these rolling lands in a clear understanding of the origins of language. It is imperative that the black and white of the chess board are understood to also represent the twin parents of spoken tongues - the laugh and the cry. These two primal modes of expression twist together tightly and within that nexus is the fruit that ripens into all spoken communication. Heed this. You can switch easily from one to the other if you understand this key. As you take things too lightly you can add a dash of gravity. If you're sobbing through the jungles you can add a sprinkle of levity. What's funnier than a monkey lost in the forest, especially if that monkey thinks it's a man ?
    I offer these dream images to you, dear reader, in the hopes that you see what a silly place this is. It is of course heart rending and at times joyous. It can be both, damnably so. One must be equipped to tramp through these wilds. A hat to cover your head and lend you authority, a notepad to document the madness, a stick to notice things with, an expansive understanding that the roots of language can change your moods. Onwards !

Guess What ?

Certainty is a crutch. Knowledge is false comfort. Being informed is one of the biggest wastes of energy one can participate in. Go ahead, read the news, see if I care. Oh damn it, I do care. I care about our collective search for meaning, I care that you think keeping up on the press releases from our owners is a good and important pursuit. I care because I have compassion. The news junkie is akin to the Moonie, hanging on the every last word from his master. Of course, I'm not in the deprogramming business, so every man for himself.
    I've been in a cult already. I know that sweet flavour of group mind. It's real. It's also short lasting and in the long run no one can say if the pros outweigh the cons. Having done my short tour of duty in a group project, a group intent on worshiping the elementals and celebrating feast day after feast day, I am better equipped to realize that I partake of belief systems. I know that I just may believe certain things. Knowledge of what my faith may be, mind you, is false comfort. It is also widely inaccurate in that everything constantly shifts. Some pet opinion of mine is dashed to bits with a new article read. Just like changing shirts as some old bastard said of belief. Switch it up.
    The sorriest fools I've encountered are the one's with faith unrecognized. They puff and preen regarding the latest finding, doled out to them from sanctioned sources of course. Sceptical about any questionable thing except their own news sources. This happens time and again. If you are going to be sceptical, go for the whole thing, old friend. Question everything, not only the straw men your favourite podcasts have already selected. Question what and who you are, why you eat what you eat, why you feel how you feel, always and often. Question your brand loyalty, even if their reputation is based on quality and low low prices both. There is a catch somewhere.
    How is it that one can recoil from pundits and authors and honoured guests of Oprah yet swallow whole lines fed by governmental agencies. The mind boggles.
    It's not that I side with the legendary Hashishin and the wry motto hijacked by video-gamed slaves, 'nothing is true, everything is permitted'. No, not so. Lots of things are true. Even some contradictory things. Permissiveness I leave to the society at hand, without having any inclination to agree. We are, to a one, searching for meaning in our lives. Even the cynics and the materialists, even the ones who dismiss meaning and it's search as wastes of time. Even them. They too search. They may search for it in endless fouled up relationships, in extended grudges with best selling authors, in the collecting of immaterial details surrounding television serials. You do it, you think it, you feel it, chalk it up to your humanity. No one can shake that search. Cold grave or waving dead relatives welcoming you into the light, same thing. God, no god, moot point, same thing. Paradox all, paradox always. There is no escape. The thing is the thing. We are one, we are splintered fragments. There is no difference. Pull out all the logic stops, draw charts proving my words empty and I'll laugh if I have the time to honour how you have wasted yours.
    What do I believe ? Who's asking ? And why would you care ? Follow me around and gauge my deeds. Crunch the numbers and conduct severe meta-analysis. There is a creature out there who tricks. There are liars and there are storytellers. There are magicians and wizards. There are cobblers who hoard diamonds under the floorboards, still others who heal the poor souls who come to get some shoes repaired. The cosmos is made of a warp and woof, a black and white tiled checkerboard floor like the stodgy Masons dance on. This fabric wobbles and careens. Upon, within and through it exist all manner of realities, enjoying all grades of existence. That there monster is only sixty-four percent real, that table closer to ninety-eight. Of course, it all depends on where you are standing and who you really are. Stop it, my head hurts. Now, it's yours, is it ? We'll see about that.
    The trickster lives in a place between places. The world axis may determine the land that is ours but others still creep about the borderland. Two is not the biggest number around. Who among you relish ambiguity ? Come then, we'll sit at the same table and tell jokes at the expense of those who think they know what's going on.

The My In Myth

In Mister Feher's grade ten math class I experienced something that would forever change my life. It was an otherwise normal day, the teacher regaling us with the enthusiasm he derived from mathematics. We were teenagers with better things on our minds than functions. The teacher himself was a bit on an odd duck. Proper, turtle necked, eye glasses Carl Sagan would wear if that makes sense, Carl Sagan's hair around the facial equivalent of Hush Puppies. Always some kind of wry semi-smile. His signature was signed, on important documents like test deferrals or late notes, via a fine rubber stamp bearing his name in a light cursive. He enunciated clearly.
    I was sitting there, spacing out or trying to understand the topic, one of the two, when I wrote something out in my exercise book. I don't think I still have this Ur document but I have it's near descendants. I wrote four capital letters, block form. A B A C. Not those letters, I'm simply showing the repetition and relative sequence. I wrote this un-word, this geometric arrangement, each letter having no curves or diagonals. Nice vertical or horizontal lines only. X and Y axes. Maybe I was picking something up from the lessons after all.
    Nonetheless, I wrote these four letters down in my book and the world stopped.
    I wrote down this code, this gibberish, this … name. My eyes widened, my breathe suspended for an instant. The world stopped. I was flushed with meaning completely unknown. I was in class, I couldn't exactly turn to my mates and say, "It came to me ! It came ! A magic word ! A secret name !" Nope, couldn't do that. Still can't do that. Not allowed.
    Here I was, some fifteen year old kid and I stumble upon a sequence of letters that opens a door to the mysteries. I took this name home, this cypher. I tried a two letter suffix, an add-on. Nothing. I kept it as is, all caps. I drew a picture and realized it was only good to associate this new name with this new style of drawing. I still added my civilian name. I was not convinced that this ABAC was my name. I still don't think it really is, even though I used it in art and eventually in scads of global correspondence art, signing and yes, rubber stamping, the name on postcards, envelopes, letters, poems, collages and drawings mailed to artists around the world. The stacks of mail I received were addressed to this name. Years later I attempted the awkward process of conflating the two names, my magic one and my real one, transitioning to get my affairs in order and have only one name that represents this artist, the name I go by today, the one my folks gave me.
    I searched for the meaning of this secret name, one half could be construed as Hebrew. But my tetragrammaton wasn't in the angel dictionaries. The stoner junior cabalist I knew wrote out what each letter or it's Hebraic equivalent might mean in gematrical values. Tables of correspondences followed. Elements, animals, minerals. It wasn't Enochian. No entity revealed to John Dee came close enough to sporting this name. It may be as yet unrevealed Atlantean but I've never been able to commit to full time space cadet, I'm still too shy for that kind of thing. What would my cynical friends, some no where near as cynical as I am, say if I cracked out the lavender robes and started channeling entities? I know I shouldn't care but sadly I do. Maybe I'll save this crazy shit for my old age. Hopefully I'll still have my wits about me to take the plunge in earnest.
    Of course I had dreams where I saw the word. One time it was tattooed on the back of a male First Nations person, another time hidden in plain sight amid the text in an antique Shakespearean folio. The internet has given me English and foreign acronyms, it means 'relative' in one language, and describes a carved domestic item in another. All in all, it remains more mine than anything else. That strange elation that came over me in class kept my imagination busy for years. It has, of course, faded into the background of my life but is an essential part of my personal mythology. My origin story. I sometimes think that my capacity to encourage and develop a personal myth is mostly responsible for the good cheer I enjoy. I have given myself meaning, regardless of any objective standard that may exist. No one can call me out on it, no one can whistle bullshit in my direction. These are my sacred things, these are the details that prod me towards wonder. I spin yarn in my own service, I spin yarn into gold and you can keep your baby. I'm still trying to figure out how to spend my earnings, I'll get old and hopefully wise trying. I may end up on the street corner, staff in hand, amethyst headband, beard Darwinian in it's glory, twinkling eyes to those that walk among us but are still afraid to describe themselves as magical.
    It's important to pay attention in math class. To something you feel if not the lessons.

Text As Art

My relationship with text as art has one of it's origins in science fiction and fantasy movies and literature. I was smitten by the various tongues of Middle-Earth, not enough to learn Quenya or Sindarin but enough to marvel at the fluidity of the script and to mimic it with my junior calligraphy set.
    As my interest in SF&F deepened and crossed paths with the psychedelic experiments of Rick Griffin and other sixties poster artists, I took to writing out my cosmological models using an altered Latin alphabet in an English stilted and grandiose. Think Temple Ov Psychick Youth with more hobbity hippie in it. My infatuation with medieval alchemical diagrams and Invisible College communiqués added a pinch of poignancy to the punch.
    I loved the mystery of a language that couldn't be read. I also enjoyed the act of writing devoid of any obligation towards meaning. Perhaps filling pages of meaningless script acted as a stand in for wanting to realize actual finished narrative. It would be years later when I accidentally stumbled via invitation into the international movement of Asemic Writing, a practise of scripting out gibberish, gestural mark making and pretty much anything that looked like language but wasn't.
    In hindsight there are two distinct early origin points that I must reference. One was my struggle and ultimate inability to competently use the Hellenic Alphabet. As a young hyphenated Canadian, I went to and soon after dropped out of Greek school. The ubiquitous presence of material lying around the house that I couldn't access surely informed my later love of mysterious scripts. The other origin point was a particular memory of sitting on the floor between the stacks of our small high school library, possibly in grade nine, and leafing through a book on talismans and amulets. The stark black and white graphic quality of round arcana struck me. These little drawn blobs were beautiful. They spoke everything and nothing, eggs you cannot crack but also can't help rolling in your palms never wanting them broken.
    As a young person of maybe twelve or thirteen I would draw any number of things. Heroes and monsters, Don Martin swipes from Mad Magazine, rock band logos on my pencil case and these things that I referred to as 'designs'. I still am a bit amazed that I had the presence of mind or even intelligence to answer the question of 'what is that?' with 'it's a design'. Pointe Finale, no further explanation forthcoming. Simple as that. No idea where I got the concept. These designs were abstracted forms, organic and graphic, rounded, succulent, obsessively contoured. They evolved into a sort of art that I would make that after the age of fifteen I would reserve and sign with a special pen name that resonated with meaning for me. I would never even consider signing a cartoon with this name. It was for stuff that evidently came from some other planet. Conversely, my new secret name allowed me to draw things radically different than what I usually drew.
    As I grew older I nurtured my love for logotypes and I still treasure books of these designs. It all finds it's denominator in stark black and white. I never had time for books showcasing the 'new' logotypes of the eighties and nineties, replete with drop shadows, gradations and even -gasp- full colour. Atrocity. Bad design.
    High contrast black and white, that was for me. Science Fiction & Fantasy. My mother tongue. Alchemy and sigils. Psychedelia. Logos. Asemic writing. These all coalesced in me with my discovery of the photocopy machine as art tool. Xerography changed everything for me. Photocopying my drawings for friends' band posters led me to experiment with static noise, enlarging and reducing images, rummaging through the waste paper bins, keeping and endowing scraps of graphic noise with a special status akin to poetry. The thing is that I kept this stuff to myself, I kept a collection of these eight and a half by eleven abstractions. The flyers I would design would rarely feature these photocopy effects. I was timid.
    When I found myself accidentally wading through the constant give and take of mail-art in the late eighties and early nineties I also found that I reserved that special nom de plume for my postal activities. Mail-art introduced me to the arcane seals and stamps of exotic liminal locales like Zaumland as well as the hard graphic visuals of the industrial music subculture. I also found that the poems, unreadable and arcane, that I was making via photocopy were readily shared with a greater world but kept away from my local art making. I was split in two, Billy in Montreal who drew erotic squashes, psychedelic doodles and hyper bunnies … and this other person, an entity that sent out and in turn received mysterious languages in the mail box.