The difference in these pages is not just the obvious difference in time spent, but rather that the most recent sketchbook has become a project in itself. These drawings aren't steps leading to a painting but the continued exploration of an experiment with image and text that is now 3 years and 7 sketchbooks long. I should have titled this Raw vs. Cooking as sketchbook 8 in this series will be simmering soon.

What is really at risk in the territory of the new is the carefully constructed sense of self we have glued together through heroic acts of cross hatching and death defying leaps of colour mixing. Is the value of the work measured by how clearly it resembles it's source or how cool the style is? We have only to post the images to receive a congratulatory thumbs up.

But what if you were also interested in growing the person that makes the work, to turn the equation around and not see the work as you, but rather see you as the work. Risk, exploration and constant growth would make some sense then.

So, I was happy to see that the 23 year old in the sketchbook was all about asking questions of the work and not looking for answers from well-meaning friends.  

I don't know when the Colgate factory was added to the streetscape, but I tried to convince myself that the towering, belching and foaming factory was not unlike the Swiss Alps I saw surrounding Lausanne in Switzerland, when I was backpacking through Europe.

The stacks from the factory dropped phosphates all over our gardens and one summer I grew sunflowers and they sprouted to insane proportions. Some days mounds of foam would spill out of the loading docks and blow down the street like bubbly tumbleweeds.

It's over 20 years ago that I lived on that street, the factory was torn down when the jobs went south to the US. A new townhouse development is planned on the land and the old rowhouses are just 1901 facades sitting infront of highly polished new hardwood floors, granite countertops and jacuzzi tubs.

Toronto is always changing and the city has torn down much of it's 19th century heritage, but I don't think the belching heap of industrial mess that was the Colgate factory is missed. I guess we like the idea that where we work and where we live should be separate.

Looking at my drawing today, it reminds me to look for the beauty in the everyday. It may not be here tomorrow.

Many of the stories, the black humour and the frustrated outrage I shared with friends over the years are no longer relevant. Brad Holland gave an incredibly rousing speech at the 1999 ICON Conference about how everyone is an artist (including hair stylists) EXCEPT illustrators. We roared our approval and today the argument is also no longer relevant. The old lines are blurred by new realities.

Another illustrator at the 2003 ICON Conference thought I was crazy to suggest that Illustration needed an organization like the AIGA, because he said," illustrators are like hotdog cart owners. Coming together won't help us sell more hotdogs." That is an old picture of illustration.

NEW Illustration is without labels, categories or limits. Illustration is the mortar between the bricks one day, the bricks themselves another day and finally an urgent message spray painted across the wall.

Illustrators today live in a much more porous world. The barriers and hierarchies died with the single job title and the one job for life workplace. In a creative economy the changeable nature of illustration- it is a noun, verb and adjective, is no longer a failing of character but rather the strength of multiple approaches.

The things that have stayed the same, the fear of a blank page/screen, the challenge of conceptual ideas, the frustration with fees will always be the same. What has changed is the insatiable market for visual materials through the web and in entertainment has created great opportunities for artists willing to embrace new ways of communicating visually.

I always knew illustration was more than just a bag of visual tricks, tics and techniques. Today more than ever what we do as illustrators is not only relevant but essential.

It is interesting to me as a question as well. After art college and studies in Italy, I was 'figure' tired. Upon my return to Toronto from Europe, I began a series of pieces exploring buildings, spaces and objects. In my illustrations, at the time, I used the figure more as a graphic shape carved into taut compositions. I was living my life fully asleep and my work at the time was split between bad art and even worse illustration.

My life changed and I moved into a loft in a horrible neighbourhood (where I actually first met the English teacher) and the first Gulf War was happening. I also was offered a single 3 hour drawing course at Sheridan College in Art Fundamentals. Teaching drawing forced me to return to drawing, and the Gulf War was my first subject. I began painting clenched fists with black ink. I used whatever I could dip into the ink to draw with and I was hooked.

Drawing was back in my hands but it would never be the same as it had been. I also returned to drawing from life and this lead to a whole new approach in my art and illustration. 

How did I answer the English teacher? I didn't say anything, I drew him a picture.

Audiobooks also let you do something else instead of sitting your ass down crushed beneath an 800 page book, but this multitasking thing we are all doing more of is actually not something we humans are very good at.

I do love words but I live on pictures and these posts are as much about me drawing some conclusions as they are about just drawing.

Words are tricky, they lead us down twisting paths, bristling with half cooked intentions nestled in a sticky sauce of meaning. Words appear to say what they mean but they help us to hide and run ducking our heads behind tropes and shrubs.

Pictures are different. They are intentioned through design and colour to have an intrinsic meaning. Less slippery slope than words but not completely a picnic in the park. My aim in these posts is to explore the MAKING of pictures and the MEANING of pictures, as they can not be separated.

And this returns me to the audiobook, made with all the same words as a book but lacking the visual, tangible form that gives words meaning to me.

Photos and HD video are now becoming standard on phones and the growth of tablets will contribute to new ways of communicating. Drowning in hi-res pictures of every angle of our world, a simply drawn visual message might just be the most novel old idea ever. At least the rates of carpal tunnel syndrome would go down. 

Recently, I was following a thread about math education in the U.S. and the debate about how best to teach it and I found the following essay. (link)

Brooklyn math teacher Paul Lockhart in 2008 wrote ‘A Mathematician’s Lament’, an angry diatribe aimed at the system of mathematics education used in elementary and high schools.

“… if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child's natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn't possibly do as good a job as is currently being done — I simply wouldn't have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.”

He introduces his essay with a fictive ‘nightmare’ scenario involving music and then art as if they were taught as math is presently taught. He repeats the same story for music then art and I suspect his purpose is to link math to art and music as art ‘forms’. Lockhart believes math is ‘the purest of the arts’ and despite his passionate argument, the proof he provides is unconvincing and narrow.

I do agree with Lockhart’s opinions about math education, but I have my own lament to put forth about art education. This evening, my 12 year old son was working on a project that is forcing him to use a brush and paint, which he assured me he HATED. I watched as he scrabbled the brush in various directions to create a garbled mess of a line. He ranted at the brush and I encouraged him to keep going. Next, using it like his beloved ballpoint pen, he scraped it sideways creating a stuttered, broken line—definitely not what he wanted.

He HATES the brush because it isn’t a pen or a coloured pencil. If we take the colour mixing and paint viscosity out of the equation, we are left with the brush and the hand. The brush is a paint delivery device and one brush does not do it all. He actually started with a synthetic w/c brush and it was horrible, depositing the tempera paint in 2 gloppy ridges with a translucent middle. Switching to a flat bristle, the forked ends of the bristle acted as a trowel to load the line with paint—much better. Now the hand was more difficult. He draws with pens and pencils and uses a lot of pressure, which when you substitute a brush into this—no happiness ensues. So I showed him how to PULL the brush to help unload the paint in an even layer. But it is difficult to move the hand to keep the brush perpendicular to the line painted when you feel the familiar tug of the pen and the opposite movement of the hand.

Learning to use a brush is tough, but if we can learn to balance on 2 thin tires, gripping handlebars with white knuckles while pedaling like mad. Then maybe all we need is proof that this 'new thing' will actually take us somewhere.

ORA reminds us that we are not a series of known discreet parts, despite our ability to name each muscle and sinew. We are organic, breathing, bleeding, living bodies. What moves beneath our skin, behind our eyes,and crawls up the hairs on the backs of our necks is what we are on this earth to draw. Not some codified, numbered, named series of objects that are bereft of any breath, mystery or the slightest whiff of life.

As I think more about how drawing is a tool to connect us to everything that we experience, I can't help but look at the user experience of a recent tool that I am using as much as my sketchbook--the iPad. There is no doubt that this new tool is a genius at media consumption, but the same problem happens with the iPad as with our highly polished drawings. The tool answers how we experience the content rather than allowing us to discover content through the use of the tool.   

App content so far has been obvious and underwhelming in actually stretching the idea of what tablets could be. That is until today when I downloaded the first 3 of the proposed 10 apps from Biophilia.

Biophilia is Bjork's latest project and it combines science, music, art, games, and deep user engagement. I think the iPad has just grown up--Bjork has opened the content of her work to be experienced in meaningful ways through the medium of the iPad. It is as if Biophilia was waiting for the iPad to happen and the iPad was created so that we could experience Biophilia.