HEY APATHY! Alternative Comics Street Art
Although most of my time these days is spent working on the Ontario Arts Council Animation I am still making a hobby out of building my website. Maybe a week ago now I posted some index pages regarding a chronological account of my experiences and developments as a street artist. While I am still hitting the city on special occasions I am no longer working the sidewalks full-time and thought it would be a good idea to sum up that experiment which ran from 2004 until 2008. During those five seasons, including one entire winter, I exhibited and created my artworks live on Queen Street West, downtown Toronto. I met thousands of people and learned many weird things. So in order to kill two creatures with one story, my daily journals over the next few days will attempt to recollect, in an essay type format, all those unusual years I wasted working outdoors so I can breath life into my index pages currently haunted by dead-links.
STREET ART 2004 or HOW THE H--- Did I END UP HERE?
I first started experimenting with my monsters comics street art in the spring of 2004. At that time I had a small display of nihilistic ink scribbles depicting man as creepy creatures and images of war. During that first season I travelled around the city on a crazy little BMX with all of my equipment packed in a small tool kit. The experience was particular and extremely unusual as I started to mingle with the strange world of strangers i the streets. Although I’d still a long way to go, the presentations began inciting a unique exchange of discourse between myself and a diverse range of unsuspecting pedestrians. The inclusion of these then new public interventions was unconsciously inspired by a combination of artistic influences, personnel experiences with gallery dealers, a growing interest in the public forum and ultimately through a certain surreal and intuitive necessity.
As a younger student studying at the Ontario College of Art and Design I discovered the underground comic book works of Robert Crumb. I had been a long time fan of comics and as I grew out of adolescence had started leaning more towards alternative streams. In my second semester at the college I was scribbling out little horror stories using less and less preliminary drawings attempting to work directly with my refillable RAPIDOGRAPH pens. Sufficed to say as I delved deeper into academic studies my opinions towards the world were also growing bleaker by the article and work began taking on a more satirical edge. It was at this time, during an all night drawing session, that I happened across a bizarre documentary on TVO. Although telepathically familiar with the work as in is part of our collective uncommon knowledge, this was the first time I actually witnessed the world of R. Crumb. I felt as though I’d found a kindred spirit and was absolutely blown away by his psychedelic drawings and verse. I took particular interest in his ability to capture and document true to life occurrences primarily born of his experiences on the streets. Crumb had spent many years exhibiting his drawings as a street artist and this method struck me as a very important means of research. Although Crumbs public processes obviously affected and inspired me, it wasn’t until several years later that I found myself selling art on the streets. I did however stop working with preliminary sketches entirely after observing the masterful and instantaneous technique used by Mr. Crumb.
In openly citing Crumb as a major inspiration I do not mean to infer that I’d taken to any aspirations of following the footprints of most demented idol for in the years that followed I ended up on a very different oath. By January 2001 I had completely forsaken the practice of drawing comics in favour of developing large scale ink drawings intended for the gallery setting. For 3 years I worked exclusively with hand carved bamboo pens and black India ink, creating mural sized abstractions of metropolitan life. By the summer of 2003 I’d completed 2 major drawing installations both of which featured hundreds of artworks used to completely transform the gallery space These massive surreal landscapes gained me a lot of recognition from Torontonian collectors and dealers alike. I won several awards, was featured on the cover of NOW Magazine, and was making a decent living by my third year of art college. However as a result of this early success I encountered numerous strange obstacles and found myself perpetually exposed to distasteful events... to be continued tomorrow
Monster Comics Concrete Early 2005 ( I don't actually have any pictures from 2004 )
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