Tuesday 16 July 2013

East Broadway - The Start of Something New!

For some time now my work has focused on the theme of urbanity, life within a city, urban decay and the various other components that make up the Vancouver concrete farmland.

This is the basic ink drawing with first washes of paint. I knew from the start I would be working with a nice rich blue.


I am currently exploring a particular facet of this city, something I had started in the past but never built a large focus around - street signs and street posts. Here is one of my on-site photographs I took while exploring the subject:


The first one of these that I painted was for a charity gala event last year called H'Arts for the Homeless. For that event I created my work "No Left Turns". It was a lot of fun and what I realized is that I am very intrigued by their appearance and presentation. It turned out really well:


There are a lot of pretty generic streetsigns-on-posts out there, but there are others that are composed and clustered in such interesting ways that they merit a particular artistic attention. In addition to the interesting shapes and angles that they form, there is the addition of stickers and graffiti that create a uniqueness that can't be replicated. I've started to paint in some of those stickers here:


That is what I find most interesting about these objects - at face value they are so common, so irrelevant and similar. At further investigation, however, they provide their own flavour.


I am currently producing more street signs from different neighborhoods. This is an ongoing project and not ready to view just yet, but I'm finding that various neighborhoods have very particular and unique characteristics as well, separating them from one another even more.

The final image that these cool objects creates is quite pleasing, I'm happy with this first one and ready for more:




2 comments:

  1. I "met" you at Car Free Days on Main. Loved your art...and love to see what you're working on. It's great.

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  2. Thanks friend! I like to share what I'm doing with good, nice people :)

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