The Naked Silo

approx. 8' x 3 1/2', oil on drywall, 2010 Some time in late summer, while hanging out at Chesterfields, the co-owner and chef of the now defunct (as of December 2012) Picton café, mentioned that wall space was available in the café for a mural if I was interested. At the time, there was only one large mural (in the same room I eventually painted in) by local artist Brandy Gale which is very cool, vibrant, colourful, and just the thing to sit near and admire while sipping coffee and/or munching on Chesterfields' famous chocolate chip cookies. I said I'd be (and now I am) happy to be in such good company. Weeks passed before a window of opportunity opened that would give me sufficient time to paint my mural. By then, another sort-of-mural was installed by Andrew McLuhan along an entranceway: a nifty sequence of ones and zeros --binary code for something I'm assuming only Andrew knows the answer to. Having picked my wall, I pored through my photo ref for a su...

Ink & digital, 2005 I'm not religious, but I do enjoy many of the cultural traditions associated with this time of year (seeing family and friends, eating, drinking, laughing), and I thought it'd be fun to make my own Christmas cards for to send out to friends and family. Of course, it had to be fun and festive, and I wanted to acknowledge my own Macedonian heritage (and my previous year's card was religious enough), so I dressed up a snow-woman in traditional Macedonian garb (complete with handkerchief for her to twirl while dancing an oro ) and included the words "Sreken Bozik" ("Merry Christmas," basically) in Cyrillic . The border is made up of traditional patterns in fabrics that I assembled in Photoshop, and the snowflakes are clipart!

BB Mono 1 18" x 14", oil on canvas, 2010,  private collection BB Mono 3 18" x 14", oil on canvas, 2010,  private collection After doing a few of versions of the birdies all lined up  (including one in which I inverted the colours because I wanted a very blue background), I decided to make a few paintings of the birdies on their own, and on smaller canvases. The first one in this new series was done during Paint the County back in July. I really liked how that single bird turned out, with it's high-gloss reflections, that I wanted to capture that in these newer ones. However, unless another commission for these guys comes up, I am now finished painting these toy birds. Bonus Preparatory Image:

fig. 18a. The Creeper, by Krista Dalby. What began as an innocent venture to re-create Casey from CBC's Mr. Dressup ended up also providing us with the twisted-awesome-creepy-wonderful puppet called The Creeper. Krista took my clay sculpt of Casey's head and created two paper maché heads from it (see fig. 6 ), reserving one for herself. Then, soon enough, with some fun fur, beads (for his ambiguously-mammalian-possibly-marsupial pelt), long-fingered hands, and Gollum-like paint job, she'd created The Creeper. fig. 18b.  The stuff of nightmares. Sleep well, kids!

24" x 36", oil on canvas, 2001, private collection Where do I start with this one? I've had a love/hate relationship with this painting since I "finished" it (or "abandoned" it, as some would say), and had considered recycling the canvas about a dozen times over the years. There's a lot to like: the dark, warm, slightly-out-of-focus background; the wine glass with that tasty glint; the highlights in Ashley's hair. But the hands are weird and the paint is too chunky with clumsy transitions/gradations in her face. Still, that hard edge light on her face and shoulder really helps to push her forward from the dark bookshelf, creating an appealing separation of planes. It's a keeper. The title once again refers to the fact that I used Coca-Cola in the wine glass because I didn't have any wine at the time of the photo shoot. This is one of nine paintings I've currently got hanging (until the end of January) in a lovely Fre...

11" x 15", watercolour, 1998, private collection I wanted to take a little break from all the figurative paintings I'd been doing during Operation: Water Storm (briefly mentioned here ), but I also wanted to create a still life that was untraditional and kind of contemporary (no bowls-of-fruit or vases-of-flowers), while not obviously against the grain (whatever that might have been). I've always enjoyed the bold red design of Coke cans and I happened to have a bottle of V8 on hand, so red became the basis of my composition. Add a couple of mason jars of strawberry jam, a couple of apples (Red Delicious (of course) and a Granny Smith (for cheeky contrast)), a matrix background, and ta-da! I really like the deep, dark red of the jam, but the Coke cans, although interesting --and I'm quite happy with the result-- were very tedious and finicky.

Stuff II: Gumby's Perspective , approx 18" x 15"(?), watercolour, 1988, private collection It was in late November, 1988(!) when I first explored the realm of watercolour painting in my high school art class. Mostly, and obviously, I was experimenting with the behaviour of the paint itself and not too worried about making anything representational --except for the little Gumby down in the bottom right. Why Gumby? Why not? This painting also features my first use of the stained glass-like abstract motif that a friend at the time dubbed " matrix ." I got hooked on watercolours while making the  gradations in the various panels. I remember thinking how active  and alive the paint was. I still find it exciting to work with a medium that wants to do its own thing but doesn't mind being directed; it feel co-operative, collaborative...almost dance-like. This feeling is amplified when I use watercolours on Yupo. The bizarre name for this piece was sug...

12" x 22", watercolour, 1998, private collection This was done during 1998 when I'd set myself the goal of painting one picture per week (I had some extra time at the end of the year and I ended up making 63 in total). This exercise was very beneficial to my development as a watercolourist (I had yet to get into oils...or inks, for that matter) and as a conceptualist. Practice is a good thing, but I didn't want to be merely doing the same thing over and over (although, maybe it looked like that to some people), so I had to come up with new ideas for images. I collect words –words or phrases that can be interesting titles for paintings (or anything) get jotted down in my sketchbooks regularly, and, if they don't get used, I usually transfer them to the next book. One of my sketchbooks has a page that contains a list of mostly one-word titles and has four sketches for potential paintings on it and this is one of them. That sketch, and the one later in the...

36" x 24", oil on canvas, 2010,  private collection This is a painting of my darling Krista. I initially used the photo ref of her in another painting with a statue of a lion in the bottom right, but the lion was the only good thing about it, so I recycled the canvas (I don't know what new painting it became). But I really liked that pose of hers, so I decided to try again a few years later. I don't know why I didn't use the lion again. Instead, I've included the alchemical symbol for honey. Because she's my honey...and I like ancient symbols. The background is once again my "matrix" motif. This time, to further play up the stained glass aspect, I gave Krista a nice halo. If you get really close to the actual painting you can see the orange base coat quite clearly. I really like the lighting in this. This painting, and nine others (a few watercolours, a few oils; some old, some new), was in the  Fall Expressions   group show at   Gal...

24" x 36", oil on canvas, 2010 This is one of the small handful* of paintings I've had time to complete since moving to Prince Edward County with Krista to begin our new life and set up Small Pond Arts . In the summer we found a few abandoned nests and more than a few eggshells. We set up a few of the shells in a beautiful nest and I took a picture of Krista holding our reconstruction. This ended up a little more realistic in colouration than I'd planned, but I'm quite happy with it. I especially like all that dark negative space on the right. This painting, and nine others (a few watercolours, a few oils; some old, some new), was in the  Fall Expressions group show at Gallery ArtPlus in Belleville which ran from 28 October to 27 November. The opening reception was Thursday 4 November from 6-8PM. *pun intended

40" x 30", oil on canvas, 2005 This is my grandmother on my father's side at her home in the small village of Nospal in Macedonia. She's stringing up peppers to be hung and dried (like the ones on the wall) for later use as seasoning in the amazing dishes she'll make. The photo my dad took that this painting is based upon was taken during his trip there about ten years ago. She was a very hard worker all her life even up until her death in 2004 and I'm happy to have been able to include her among my weirdly-diverse paintings in my show at  Dinkel's in Belleville. Dinkel's 44 Bridge Street, East, Belleville, Ontario

30" x 40", oil on canvas, 2001 This was one of 15 of my paintings on display at Dinkel's in Belleville as part of the Quinte Arts Council's Art in the Community project. The show was quite diverse as there were other paintings from my Interiors series, my Green Chair series, and a few one-shots in the restaurant. The show ran until 29 October. This painting is a "tilt down" of this painting . The light source at the top here is a floor lamp I specifically positioned to light the far room --something I didn't do in the picture I linked to, therefore my needing to come up with a solution, so I put Ashley in the background. Sometimes I don't see things until the picture is developed. But I can almost always "fix it in post." The light source at the bottom of the stairs is a bunch of tea lights --the same ones (and the only things) I used to light the scene in this painting . The objects above the candles are some shoes of the ladie...

11" x 17", watercolour, 1997 Red looks really weird in jpegs and on the Internet in general, so this painting (as most do) looks much better in person. I wanted to play up the vengeful expression on her face by making the black and red areas flat, but the red ended up looking kinda like velvet, which is a pretty cool conceptual contrast if you think about it. The gun is actually a water pistol I've owned for many years and it showed up later in this painting  (and maybe a few others --I don't even remember anymore).

22" x 15", watercolour, 2001, private collection I made this double portrait of Alfred Hitchcock by combining two B&W photos (from magazines) of the master director. I flipped the one showing his very famous profile (it actually had a bird atop his head!) so that the main portrait (which I colourized) could "peek" out from inside it. I wanted the background to be grey and moody, sort of evoking his films, and the foreground bright and celebratory (and, I suppose, idolizing him, what with the golden halo), paying tribute to this master of cinema. My favourite Hitchcock film: Vertigo .

This year, Picton, Ontario was one of the dozens of cities and towns around the world playing host to the 23rd annual International Festival of the Stick , and Small Pond Arts was where it was based. We set up a Museum of the Stick in our barn and my contributions this year were three drawings of musician Tony Levin playing the Chapman Stick . To further the pun, I used lipstick, which I found to be similar to oil pastels, but much creamier. I used nearly an entire stick for just three drawings. Lipstick Levin (1, 2, 3) 17" x 14", NYC Retro Red Lipstick on Bristol board, 2010 The Museum of the Stick at Small Pond will be up for a few more months for those not fortunate enough to be able to make it out to Stickfest on 12 September.

When I was invited to participate in the Sommerfest group show at the Blizzmax gallery by Peter and Alice Mennacher about a month ago, I was happy to take part in yet another art show in Prince Edward County a mere five months after moving here. They're a great couple and really appreciate art in a way I hadn't seen in Toronto's galleries. Their gallery and studio space is quite nice, as you can barely see in these extremely blurry photos I took at the opening last Sunday evening: My paintings are the two seen in the bottom right photo --and are also posted below: The Sacred and the Propane , 40" x 30", oil on canvas, 2008 That's my dad barbecuing some kebapi while a ghost cow (?) looks on (supervises?). Butcher , 24" x 40", oil on canvas, 2008, private collection The second painting was supposed to be accompanied by the one below, but it sold from my own gallery before it was time to deliver the pictures to Blizzmax. ...

From CountyLive : "Close to 20 artists...set up their easels to “Paint The County” Saturday, July 31st in an inaugural event initiated by Arts on Main and sponsored by Black Prince Winery and the Prince Edward County Arts Council. All artists will be easily recognized as they paint in various locations wearing Paint the County T-shirt. All the artwork...will be at Black Prince Winery for a silent auction which ends on Aug. 1st at 4 pm.  All proceeds from the artwork, as well as $2 from all wine sold during the two days will go to the PEC Alternatives for Women." A couple of weeks ago, the participating artists got together at the Black Prince to have our locations randomly selected. I got the Edward building and had a great time painting there from 10-4. My setup in front of The Edward. We didn't necessarily have to paint what we were assigned to; we could paint anything we wanted to and bring prepped pieces. I had started a new series of five birdies (the s...