red-handed

This illo's meant for Chapter 8 of my novella (in progress), but it fits nicely with both the IF theme and New Year's wishes. * * * * * Can you hear me? , mixed media on canvas, 60 x 20 inches (I think). This is C's Christmas present, a painting for the spot over her desk in her office, meant more as a narrative piece than a decorative one. Below are two details. On Christmas Day we walked down to my studio to pick it up. Since she let me take her picture, I also gave her a wee tiger. * * * * * My friend Kristal , who recently ran off to LALA land so she could bump into Robert Downey Jr and wear fabulous buttons. * * * * * The Commonwealth Broadcasting Association sent me a complimentary copy of Commonwealth Short Stories 2007-2008 (the anthology of winning stories sent to radio stations for broadcast across the Commonwealth). The reading of my own story ( Scissors ), by Peter Marinker, was a bit more dramatic than I was expecting (one always hears their own vo

Our tree, which I decorated single-handedly, while C drank late at the local Legion. Happy Christmas!

the cinders and ashes ; mixed media on canvas, 5x7 inches. notwithstandingthemeanness ; mixed media on canvas, 5x7 inches. and dared not ; mixed media on canvas, 5x7 inches. Three more pirates I was going to take to Montreal this weekend, so my sister could sell them at her vendor's table ... that is, until we got over 30 cm of snow . So I stayed home to shovel. A lot . Winter is magic! not so rude and uncivil ; mixed media on canvas, 6x6 inches. When it was too dark to shovel anymore (and there is a point where one just quits , you know?), I did lose two more hours of my life to the Survivor China finale. The girl who should have won it (Amanda) suffered a complete collapse of focus when she weakly/defensively tried to parade both cunning gamesmanship and unbloodied humanity. As a student of the game, she should have known that juries of the victimized are not exactly receptive to tortured nuance. What they do like are people who admit to (or take credit for) everything and apo

very patiently ; mixed media on canvas, 5x7 inches ... This is the first of a few wee ones I'll take to my sister Rachel (of Stella fame) in Montreal, so she can include them on her vendor's table at this sale below (not my artwork, btw) ... And now for something completely different ... x} We had rain here last night, and wind this morning, which made things nice and glazed for the (long) walk in. There are all these little muscles that you forget about, until you spend a good forty minutes navigating ice ... x} Lynn Crosbie had an unfortunate column in the Globe and Mail yesterday – unfortunate in that she went to some lengths to disparage the very existence of (get ready for it) The Two Coreys . Of course it was all couched in horror/disgust at the downmarket monster of reality television in general (and a peculiar loathing for Corey Haim in particular), but the whole thing felt a bit like a highschool essay explaining why Nazis are bad. I'm sure even the two Coreys hav

On the bulletin board in my studio, from top-left moving clockwise: an old (fading now) watercolour of the Three Kings or Wise Men (or Magi , as certain people who believe in ghosts like to say); a wee mixed-media drawing on paper of a man in a long coat with a house on his head; a pen-and-ink self-portrait by my friend Jeannette (currently starving in Japan ) in which she says "By the time you get this I'll already be dead. Just kidding." ; a colour print of a drawing in I did in design school, of a yearning woman against a prairie landscape; a drawing by my nephew Landon, when he was four or five (I think), of King Kong, with an inscription that I probably suck at the computer game of the same name; a sweet note from my friend Connie Pierson, concerning an art trade we did; a drawing on a paper bag, by Jeannette, testifying to an emerging psychosis; a mixed media piece by my brother Jon; a drawing of some nice German boys lost in the woods; another Jeannette piece, thi

I once had a roommate who never unpacked. He set up his box spring and mattress on the floor, dumped his boxes around the room, dug out a pillow and blanket ... and proceeded with the rest of the school year. I bring this up only because it reminds me of the way I'm living right now . We had our upstairs – bedroom and den – painted this week, which was bad enough (because of the roughly million books I had to remove from up there), but then C sprung it on me that they were doing the kitchen as well. Nice! She's very slick with the art of information slide you see, telling you x , and getting you to agree to that, when in fact she's been intending to run with x + 1 all along. Or maybe, as she likes to claim, it just 'happened'. Either way you find yourself in a fait accompli because you're already half-way into whatever it is, and it hardly makes sense to turn around now (like most men, I have a low threshold when it comes to giving up and just turning into a