drawings & watercolour paintings
Pencil sketch; 5 × 8 ¼″ Moleskine sketch album (120 gsm paper).
This pencil sketch is of an abandoned house next to the Village Office in Port Elgin, New Brunswick. There are so many beautiful houses like this around, but they won’t be for long.
Our knowledge, which we set so much store by, helps us mostly to further our exploitations, to extract from the environment what we value, and to destroy that which, in our present state of ignorance, seems to have no utility.
—Eliot Porter in Maine
Mainly drawn on throw-away newsprint, about 18×24″, they’re just simple exercises, having no merit as art. In keeping with that, these reproductions were hastily shot on an iPhone with available lighting with no effort made even to remove folds, wrinkles or avoid shadows. But for me, they’re a snapshot of what I was doing, in another life, twenty years ago.
This painting was made from a collage of black-and-white photos (and a couple for colour reference) I’d taken in the winter of 1992–93 on the Nova Scotia side of the border, between Fort Lawrence and Ahmerst. About 16 × 6 ½″ on 300 gsm Arches Cold Press watercolour paper.
This March, 1990, sketch was done on location with a blue, felt-tip pen of some sort, on paper that’s clearly full of acid given how much it’s yellowed (probably generic typing or note paper). Probably a Pilot Fineliner. Measures about 6 ½ × 2 ½″.