With blog-worthy content running at a veritable trickle, I had an excess of blessed studio time in which to experiment with a few unanswered questions. One of those being, can I feasibly adapt my work to a traditional bookmark format just because of a random call for submissions? Perhaps it’s a lingering affection for Barrie as The Place Where I Get Sloshed With My Mates, but for the MacLaren Art Centre, the answer seemed to be hey, why not?
From left to right: Croak (Lord Cowper’s Musicale); Ride (Emperor Franz Joseph Really Wants a Pony); and Plague (A Gloomy Alley), 2009.
I’d resisted numerous calls for bookmark art in the past - and amazingly, they are numerous - but the rather dim epiphany that I work with books as raw material forced me to rethink my position. And ultimately, I found that working with isolated images cropped to a narrow frame allowed me to reconsider my foregone conclusions about grouping book pages in serial forms that unfold a repetition over as many as 71 drawings (that rat up there will now be #72). The ability to ask that question in itself made the process of dropping down this particular rabbit-hole was well worth the time.
If anything, this may mark (hah hah) a shift in my approach to book-based interventions that allows for the unresolved question left open by a single vignette that’s been reduced to either its most essential or else its most marginal element. In the case of Croak (Lord Crowper’s Musicale), for example, I chose to focus on the least active figure in an illustrated group of musicians and somewhat crassly chopped off the glowing female pianist at her wrists. Once that decision was made, dropping in a slimy green(-eyed?) monster was downright logical.
Speaking of logic, a search through my existing archive of disassembled books also revealed a wonderful two-page spread entitled ‘The Man in the Red Shirt.’ Anyone familiar with my sci-fi nerdiness and recent preoccupations can probably guess where I plan to take that one.
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