Skip to main content

World Cat & World Chair

each: 40" x 30", oil on canvas, 2005, NFS (recycled)

Happy Earth Day!

I did these two paintings live in front of an audience while my friends (in their band at the time, Uncle Seth) played raucous rock music. It was part of a regular event in Kensington Market in Toronto called Pedestrian Sundays, where various streets in the neighbourhood are closed to cars so people can walk, bike, dance, skip, and/or frolic about freely (click that link for much more info).

So my friends set up their gear on the sidewalk underneath Krista's then-apartment above the then-egg-shop on Augusta Ave. and I set up my gear just off to the side. I roughed-in the pencils for these paintings beforehand so I would have some kind of guide and then went at it with the paints while the band played and people watched. It was a lot of fun.


My inspiration for these "live paintings" was the master of live painting, Denny Dent, and I hope to one day try his fantastic approach. As it was, my own live paintings were quite controlled...but still very fun, especially with the loud music right next to me, urging me on. Did I mention that it was a lot of fun?

Being Pedestrian Sunday, I wanted my paintings to reflect my interest in and concern for the global environment, so I chose two images based on sculptures from the Kensington neighbourhood that featured globes (there are other such sculptures decorating Kensington, but these two were the most appropriate).

World Cat's text is a line from the R.E.M. song Can't Get There from Here (from their album Fables of the Reconstruction), and World Chair's text is the opening line from the Midnight Oil song Warakurna (from their album Diesel and Dust).

In keeping with the theme of environmental concern, these two canvases were eventually reused and now are host to two new and different images (but I don't know which new paintings they became).

PS: Yes, Krista and I stencilled a bunch of "David Suzuki for PM" shirts and sold out that weekend.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing  Beverly Hills Cop  on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his  Saturday Night Live  days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining.  Beverly Hi...

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co...

U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-D (1/1400 scale model)

Seven decades after Kirk. I'd been hooked on Star Trek since I was a wee lad in the 1970s, watching reruns of the original series from the '60s, and I enjoyed the movies that came out afterward. When a new series was announced to debut in 1987, I was excited and interested, even though I felt the subtitle "The Next Generation" was cheesy. Nearly 30 years later, I've definitely gotten used to it (but "TNG" is easier to say and type), but I still find it kinda bland. Anyway, the show had fresh new technology and a spanking new design for its main ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise , NCC-1701-D, now the flagship of the Federation. Andrew Probert 's design took some getting used to for me; it had the same basic elements of the original Enterprise  (saucer, neck, cylinder, and two cylindrical engines on pylons), but the shapes and volumes were distributed differently, weirdly. Everything looked squished and soft. The organic look of this new ship had me ...