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.

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.

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.

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.

  

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.

Well, now I'm Terry's landlord. Funny how things work out. It's one more good reason to come to the gallery and check things out in person. He does great work and has a great selection of coats , handbags, belts and more. Between the two of us, our hours of operation will be expanded. I'll post something as soon as we've got it figured out.  I'm looking forward to a new look at Roach Tackle Gallery and some prosperous times to come. Welcome Terry!

This title appealed to me because I love mixed tapes. I loved making mixed tapes and I loved making the covers for mixed tapes.  My older brother Don was a big influence on this love. He had a huge collection of mixed tapes with great home-made covers. One of my favourites was This Ain't No Party, This Ain't No Disco....It's A Head Cleaner! I once made a tape of all these songs with space and doomsday references like Bowie's Heros and The Stone's Sympathy For The Devil interspersed with clips from Orson Welle's War Of The World radio program. The cover had a picture of a display of lipsticks arranged like missiles. I called it Apackoflips Now. I loved that tape. Another one had a picture of these men doing a synchronized drill with folding lawn chairs being tossed to each other. I called that one If I Had A Rocket Lawn Chair. One day whilke walking my kids to school I seen a small box that was filled with mixed tapes. Of course I took them home. Since the only working tape deck that we own is in our van, the only chance I got to listen to these was when I was driving someplace. Most of the tapes were dance mixes of this and that. Lots of eighties stuff. I would listen to about 5  minutes of each before tossing it onto the floor. But then, one tape doesn't start out with the Pet Shop Boys or New Order. No it's actually a letter written from a young man to his friend. This guy was working on a cruise ship someplace as a d.j. and was telling his buddy all about this glamourous life on the high seas. Oh the romance! This guy was far from modest. I was captivated by this tape! And then I found another one. This one was written from England where our hero had taken shore leave with his new girlfriend. In this cassette letter, this guy bemoans the fact that his girlfriend doesn't really understand him and all that he is going through. He details all the wonderous discoveries that travel has laid before his feet. Such as his inability to buy French's Mustard in England. At one point he is making the tape in a drunken state, whispering into the microphone because he is in bed with his girlfriend and doesn't want to wake her. Those were funny tapes. I should have made covers for them.

The best mixed tape story I have, though, was from the time I was living in Banff. I had made a few tapes and put Scotch whiskey ads on the covers and called them Scotch Tape I and Scotch Tape II. I did something different for Scotch Tape III. I went to the Banff Library and found the Halifax phone book. I turned to the 'M' pages and ripped out a random page with lots of MacDonalds, Mac Dougalls etc. And that was the cover. I'd play this tape at the restaurant where I worked. One day one of my co-workers picks uy the tape and says "Hey my parents name and address are on this cover."  True story.

I didn't really like Love Is A Mixed Tape (though he does mention the song Save It Fellator, by the English Beat). The next book I read was Black Postcards by Dean Wareham.  It detailed the history of  his band, Luna. In detail. I really don't know why people would want to know what a particular hotel in Brussells was like back in the 80's ( then again, why would anybody be interested in what I read over the Christmas holidays? I do have a point to all of this. Which doesn't really explain why anyone would be interested in it. But it's good to have a point.) But the writer does talk about songwriting and the making of songs. The third book was called Things The Grandchildren Should Know, by Mark Oliver Everett. Good Book. A good read about someone who just had to make music. In this book and in Black Postcards, the writers talk about the little recording studios that thy literally had in their closets and how much time they would spend making songs. Neither of these two guys had more than a basic training in music. But they had to make music. And it was the closet reference tht caught my attention. It was a big deal for them to be able to make music in a bigger way. They came out of the closet.

And I'm coming out of the closet, too. I am a songwriter. I write songs. As a 45 year old it feels strange to admit that. It's like saying I partake in modern dance in my spare time. And coming out of the songwriting closet on a blog (that as far as I know, nobody reads) is only slightly more daring than shouting out to the Grand Canyon. During  the off- season.  But it shouldn't be daring or embarrassing. Songs get written all the time. Everyday. And songwriters aren't chosen like the next Dalai Lama: a spiritual quest that highlights the individuals who have been touched by God. Maybe some songwriters are. And I didn't say that I'm a good songwriter. I just write songs. Heck, 20 years ago almost everyone I knew would have laughed at the notion of people paying me real money for my artwork.

Then it was Christmas morning. I will never forget the sight of that little town spread out from under the imitation Christmas tree and all over the livingroom floor. It was even more amazing when all the houses were together to form a couple of streets with the gas station and church!

Eventually, I outgrew playing with toy cars (it took a very long time) and the town was pretty hard to store. My parents had given it away, probably with my blessing.  And now I want it back. The very best thing about it was all the little bushes and hedges that my dad had carved and glued onto the lawns and all the houses were not old fashioned but actually looked like the neighbourhood that I grew up in. Houses made in the late 60's and early 70's. I would love to have that little town back or even one of the houses. If any of this rings a bell to anyone out there, please drop me a line. I'd love to hear what you know. 

But in my mind I wanted to start Christmas on Christmas Day. I think it used to be like that for a lot of people. The tree would go up on Christmas Eve and all the visiting would happen on that day and after. It was a period of celebration, of religious ceremony, of family togetherness. That is the way I would like it to be. To hear a Christmas carol in a coffee shop on December 28th. To hear a Merry Christmas on December 30th. Christmas is too big an event, too important a time of year to have a build up of months and then have it slam into a brick wall of finality on Boxing Day. Let it linger. Christmas is the beginning of the year in some Christian churches. Ordinary time ends as Advent begins. Let it linger. Spread out the magic like a big net and see what you catch inside. See what sticks. Merry Christmas.