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.