Favourite Mistakes

Every February, I try to take a look through the studio to see what has been buried or left behind and forgotten about. It always surprises me that I can find enough to have a sale. This year I found something special. In a container that housed some paper I was looking for, was a number of my Butcher Paper paintings. I'm so glad I found these because it brought back an important lesson to me. The reason I started painting on butcher paper was because my sister was working in a deli department of a grocery store and asked me if I could use some rolls of meat wrap. Because it was free, I said "Of course, I can use that!" I attempted a few paintings and the results were not very good. I crumpled them up and threw them away. A few days later, I looked in the trash can and took out one of the paintings and uncrumpled it. It was still a bad painting, but I had discovered that crumpling the paper gave it a pretty unique effect. I tried painting on the meat wrap again with much better results. And the lesson that came to mind was that if I hadn't have made a mistake, I would never have crumpled the paper up and I would never have discovered the unique process that make the paintings better. Sometime's what seems like a waste of time, is just a different route. I have to give myself permission to take chances and make mistakes, to get lost on unfamiliar roads.

So, for a limited time this February, these Butcher Paper paintings from 14 years ago will be on sale with other assorted finds from the vault in the basement of the studio. Come on in and have a peak and tell me about some wonderful mistakes.

Onroute

Good friend Maclean and I went to Ottawa last weekend to present our wares at the New Art Show that took place in a lovely little park in the Glebe. We rented a van, packed it with art and hit the road. Now, being of Cape Breton lineage, it is quite natural to head east in warm weather and I have many a fond memory of vacations down east. When I was a kid,  my family didn't eat out alot, so a road trip brought the chance to stop off the highway once in a while and sit in a restaurant and order off a menu.

Now up and down Highway 401 there are shiny new rest stops that are now called ONroute. A very clever name with the abbreviation for Ontario front and center. The first one that I stopped at was near London back in January. Nice. Then on this trip we stopped at one just outside of Bowmanville. Nice. Exactly as nice as the one near London. And then there was the one near Gananoque on the return trip. Exactly as nice as every other Onroute. This made me sad.  A great  thing about road trips is the milestones that stick in your memory and let you look further down the road for what you remember on the last go by. Seeing the olympic Stadium in Montreal, the giant Potato near the great St. John River. But what is the point in marking your progress with something that is exactly the same as something  you saw a few hours ago? I bet they are saving a bit of money by making sure that whenever we go into one of these rest stops, I can find the Tim's without even looking up from my Blackberry. This would probably be very handy for all the blind people who are driviing down the road, too. Although I'm not blind, I might venture a guess that the visual impaired don't mind a little variety, too.

A Friday In May

At the moment, the ball game is on the radio. The volume is set at just the right level that I can hear the crowd noises and I have to stop and concentrate to get any details of the game. I was thinking about baseball today when I was out and around the city. It was the strangest thing that made me think about baseball, too. Everywhere I went today I saw people stop what they were doing and play with their cell phones, texting or calling. They would bend over their hand held device and stare intently at the tiny screen. What made me think of baseball was this very old photo I had seen in a book I own.

The book is a catalogue from an auction of baseball memorabilia collected by a man called Barry Halpern, who was a minority owner of the New York Yankees. This catalogue is massive. It was the largest auction ever held by Sotheby's, with over 2500 lots to be up for bid and it took a few days to carry out. One of the hundreds of photos that were up for auction was one showing a crowd of people on a downtown street in 1919 Chicago. Thousands of people were staring up at the side of a building. What held their attention was what was called a Player Board. These display boards showed a ball diamond and the score board of a particular baseball game, in this case, the World Series. The players names for both teams were on either side of the diamond and there was an area that showed each pitch and the count of the batter. This was before the advent of radio and  was the only way to get up to the minute results. When I first saw this photo, I wondered if the crowd was silent or was there a lot of chatter and cheering.  It reminded me of a crowded bar I was in when the Blue Jays won their first World Series. What a great night that was! An incredible feeling of community and togetherness.

When I see people so involved with their cellphones, always connected, always needing to be plugged in, I wonder if we are more solitary in that connectedness. We don't really have to get together to find out what is news. We are our own individual broadcasting networks, with Facebook and Twitter. We can reach more people, more friends and family, faster than we could ever have imagined 25 years ago, yet more and more, we do it in a solitary way.

Thrills

My family and I just returned from a vacation. An honest to goodness vacation, complete with theme parks and fireworks and swimming pools. We took in our fair share of rollercoasters and other rides and it got me thinking about thrills. Speed, heights and danger combined in such a way to fool our minds and bodies that something could happen that we don't really want to happen. I used to go on the occasional rollercoaster and my jaw would clamp shut and my hands would clamp tightly onto anything within reach. Then I learned that if I screamed, it would help ease the panic (and I was always frightened of vomiting through my clenched teeth). Unfortunately, my screaming was just a steady stream of swear words. Now, I am usually riding a rollercoaster with one of my children and the swearing would be frowned upon. So now, I just laugh and scream in a regular G-rated way.

Another part of our vacation was going to a dinner theatre at this horse show coliseum. It involved a story told through horse riding tricks and a princess and a genie. It was okay. The kids liked it. One part, though, was about the Native Americans spiritual bond with the horse. A beautiful women came out on a painted stallion and did some riding tricks to some song that featured Navaho chanting (I think). At one part of this particular performance, the rider let the horse run full tilt around the coliseum. I mean full tilt. And that  was beautiful. That  was thrilling! The same feeling hit me in the chest that hit me when I was on Space Mountain or Thunder Mountain. Watching that beautiful animal fly! What a thrill! I wanted it to keep running and running and running. I wonder what it must have felt like to be on that ride.

Sunfish and Bobbers

  

When I think of fishing, I think of bobbers. If I had to conjure up one simple image that would represent the whole experience of fishing, it would be the simple circle with a little square on top. Maybe there is such a drawing in a cave somewhere in France. And when I think of the pureness of that experience, I think of fishing for sunfish. Fly fishermen can talk about their brand of fishing as an art, pared down to the basics of form and content, the matching of wits and patience...blah, blah, blah (I'm just yanking your chain) but I would like to honour the sunfish and the bobber.

 When I was a kid, my dad, my brother and I along with my uncles and cousins would go to a pond near Lake Erie called St. Williams.  This would be the opening of Trout Season in southern Ontario. It always opened on the last weekend of April. Midnight On Saturday. We would have already been there for a few hours, having staked out our spot and set up our little campfire, lawn chairs, coleman stove. There would be guitars and harmonicas and a cooler or two filled with refreshnments. But no one was allowed to fish until the stroke of midnight. No one was allowed to fish for trout, that is. But I would have my worm in the water near the shore where the sunfish were already making their nests.  I couldn't play guitar and I couldn't drink beer, but I was young enough to catch sunfish. And it wasn' the law that you had to be a little kid to catch sunfish. No, it was just looked down on when you were at a trout pond and there were noble trout to be caught. Anyone could catch a sunfish. I always found sunfish to be a beautiful fish, with their flashes of blue and bright orange bellies. And they seemed to be put on the earth as a consolation prize. To be caught when nothing else could be caught. Sunfish are in the water to reassure us that , yup there's fish in there. Talk about a noble fish!

And as for bobbers, well. I love them. They will always hold a sacred spot in my tackle box.

In the studio are 25 new paintings that celebrate the Sunfish and Bobber. They will be hanging till the end of April and are in a nice range of sizes.  They are perfect for anyone who has ever watched a young child at the end of a dock or the edge of the water spend hours matching wits with the glorious sunfish, using the unflappable bobber.