ALTERNATIVE COMICS AT TORONTO COMICCON

HEY APATHY! Alternative Comics at Toronto Comic Con!

 

It has been over a week since I last found time to scribe my ridiculous notions in this little journal. Fortunately the lapse was not the result of any fit of malaise nor the result of any injury but rather induced by an excited distraction. I spent the better part of last week. the entire weekend and then some working on two simultaneous exhibitions. Having unintentionally double booked showings this past Sat.- Sun. my father and I split the chores and attended separate shows. He took the fine art up to Ottawa while I attended the Toronto Comic Con Fan Appreciation event at the Metro Toronto Convention center. 

 

The comic festival was awesome and I met hundreds of people while performing a 4 x 8 foot live ink drawing (shown above). It was really fun to share my alternative comics philosophies in a venues primarily dominated by the mainstream. The live painting was highly regarded especially by the younger audiences as I made a bunch of new short friends who kept coming back to check my progress. The painting featured a giant city of gears propelled by a whirlwind of all sorts of crazy people. Like all of my performances, the drawing was heavily influenced by the surroundings and the city was transformed into a monstrous mecha-creature. But do not fret for the skies are quickly filling with various super-heroes soaring towards the beast and ready to save the day! The entire drawing took two days to complete and was done simultaneous with constant story-telling and discussions making the experience one I'll never forget.

The second day of the show was particularly busy as a result of the incredible Fan Appreciation promotion. The Comic con charged a $10 admission fee but in return each person received a $10 voucher good at any of the comic book retail booths. I thought this was great especially in comparison to most conventions which cost over $20 just to get in. The place was packed right until closing and I was happy to see several old friends from Queen West as well as many, many new ones.  

Toronto Comic Con!

Me and Venus Cat getting ready for the weekend shows.

While I was working away at the Convention Centre my Dad was doing the same up in Ottawa at an Outdoor Exhibition. His show went really well and he had tonnes of stories. It was really wild to hear him talking about all the different people that he'd met. He sounded very much like I do when I've just finished a good show and I am really happy that the experience was as enlightening for him. Thanks for your help Dad way above and beyond anything I ever expected. We won the emerging artist award at the festival and my father managed to move a number of ink drawings as well as merchandise. 

visit www.heyapathy-comics-art.com

ALTERNATIVE COMICS Street Art Chronology 2005-06 part 4

HEY APATHY! Alternative Comics EYEBALL CITY

Believe it or not the 2005 season never actually came to a close for me. The winter was mild by all comparison and virtually non-existent by Canadian standards. I had moved up and out of various shared accommodations and rented a large studio apartment in Kensington Market. Though the summer had been a lucrative one I had no real plans for continued business or exhibition during the winter season and found my self continually hitting the streets all the way through to the spring. The weather stayed above 5 degrees Celsius, dry, windless and sunny so I bundled up good and remained one of few vendors on the beat. Despite the long months made of short brisk days, I continued to earn enough to keep the ship afloat.

I had a lot of help through out that season as many repeat patrons purchased work primarily for my benefit. One incredible patron returned on a weekly basis purchasing 10 sketches a week until he’d collected a full hundred. The street life was unusual and the tourism and shopping was scarce and I ended up fraternizing with various street people. It was a totally different world out there yet a worthwhile adventure as I braved the cold weather and learned more things than I’d hoped. I actually saw the sun get lower in the sky and by judging the length of the shadows I knew when it had risen again to lengthen the days. There is something strange and meditative about spending an entire year observing the world from a single location. I experienced a truly unique vantage of the metropolis’ cycles. A February came and slowly passed by my pens finally froze and I was forced to scribble with markers. However at the onset of March and close to my submission, the temperature starting rising and it was as if winter hadn’t come at all.

The early spring brought about a seasonally impressive March Break and the streets were filled once again with large crowds. During the holiday I started performing again and set forth to create 3 large scale ink murals. The first drawing I made featured the ominous EYEBALL CITY featuring the gear themes with an optically twist. I had already hypothesized the metropolis as a giant machine propelled by all of it’s denizens only now it was centrifugally spinning around the eyeball of consciousness, a psychedelic representation of human hope and shared dreams.

The second large illustration depicted the grotesque CITY MONSTER, an enormous creature made up of all the cars, wires, building and people personifying the power the urban atrocities. I remember blasting the John Coltrane Village Vanguard records while painting when a father and son stopped to watch while the rest of their family was shopping. The Dad was leaning on a rail near my display when I heard him say to his son “This street is cool!” They both had a glow about them which told me how much they were enjoying the experience so I looked up and down the road to see what they meant. There wasn’t anything anywhere, no people, no vendors just me, the monster, and Mr. Coltrane.

The third drawing of the spring holiday was supposed to be something I’d decided on but have since totally forgot. As I stood up to attack the big. piece of paper before a gathering crowd my knee struck my ink container sending a black pool across the page. Without hesitation I jumped into the ink stained mess and started scratching away. The image ended up being another CITY MONSTER vomiting up a black tar. The accidental inspiration proved inspirationally gratifying and the drawing was sold later out of my studio at a high end gallery price to someone who had witnessed my salvaging of the nearly ruined performance drawing. Each of these three monster comics murals measured 10 x 10 feet and were drawn with black India ink, brushes and bamboo. The first two creations took three days each to complete while the third accidental drawing was done in a day. I’ll never forget all the people I met and especially the endless sea of young vacationing students. That March Break Holiday was incredible and incredibly busy as it was the only one during my entire lifetime to be blessed with such fine weather. continued tomorrow

 

more at http://www.heyapathy-comics-art.com/

ALTERNATIVE COMICS A Street Art Chronology 5 years of Concrete

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 )

Alternative Comics THE STREET ART EXPERIMENT

HEY APATHY! Alternative Comics Street Art

Early Monster Comics Street Art displays

THE RED HOOD (lasted two days bfore it was covered with ink)

Flicker Flicker the screen gow thicker. My mind's eye virbates  lost, and each of my senses is tossed. Today I learned how to html white bacground on my website and have spent a short 14 hours fixing up the pages. Anyways the site looks a lot better but my brain is frizzled.  Good news is I've been accepted into both the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition and the Metro Toronto Comic Convention. Got the news today so things are only going to keep getting busier. I posted these street pics in celebration of this years good fortunes (the Ontario Arts Council Grant, the Toy Design, T.O.A.E. and Comic cons) to remind me how far I've come and to pester me knowing how far I've yet to go.

 

Check out http://www.heyapathy-comics-art.com/monster-comics-street-art.html to see some extensive postings I finished today.

ALTERNATIVE COMICS STREET ART PAINTING PERFORMANCE

HEY APATHY! ALTERNATIVE COMICS STREET ART PERFORMANCE

HEY APATHY! The City is a giant gear propelled by all the different and crazy people moving through it. In order to investigate the monstrous metropolis and it's diverse and absurd denizens, I started setting up large black and white street art displays in downtown Toronto. By exhibiting and experimenting in public, I was able to learn many things about architecture and others having talked to thousands of people from all over the world and of all walks of life.  This video is a time lapse documentation of a typical day in my life on the streets. The 10 x 12 foot ink mural features an iconographic City of Gears and was made in 3.5 hours. Time lapse Photographed by Craig Boyko. 

Close-up of finished CITY of GEARS street mural. During the busy and seasonable summer weather, I often would often set up on the concrete and get to work. In 2007 I made 27 of these giant performance drawings but have since been spending more time on comics and animations.

See more at http://www.heyapathy-comics-art.com/

ALTERNATIVE COMICS Wizard World Review!

HEY APATHY! Alternative Comics at Wizard World

So this past weekend Toronto was host to the Wizard World Comics Convention and I decided to take part in the festivities by exhibiting my own unusual brand of monster comics and art. I have been a huge fan of finely written strips and graphic novels for as long as I can remember and used to attend these events as young fan boy. My first exhibitions on the circuit of the weird were way back in 2002 and 2003 after which I sort of took an extended hiatus from picture books to show my ink drawings in art galleries and as a street performer. Recent circumstances, brought about primarily by age, led me to return to my first true love and restart developing my comic book artworks. Since those days as a wee-one it has always been a dream of mine to complete an entire graphic novel so that's what I am going to do. My first step in the process was to return to the cons and present the initial chapters, books zero, one and two, at Wizard World.

 

Me at my booth reloading the HEY APATHY! comics bin on Sunday Morning

The show was amazing and not entirely unlike those art exhibitions I have been frequenting over the past few years except that the animosity, professional jealously and out and out pretentiousness is traded for introverted weirdoes, costumed curiosities and hyper-active children of all ages. I met Darth Vador, the Predator, Captain America, Wolverine, Jean Grey, Spidey, Burlesque Dancers, Cobra Commander and more anime characters than I could possibly name. The fans come to exhibit as much as the exhibitors! I guess one of the major attractions is the tax-free reduced prices on all of our favourite comics and toys but the real draw is the dress up. My next door neighbour was a creepy clown named Mullet who is not only the star of his own book but has a series of hilarious (and hilariously no-budget) comedy films on the internet. The energy was overwhelming and unbelievable. I have been suffering from superhero withdrawal since leaving the festival, why isn't the Green Lantern walking down College Street?

Mr. Mullet my new friend and neighbouring exhibitor at the Convention

I also ran into an old friend Tyrone at the Con who was sporting a little monster named Kyrian (sorry if I spelled that wrong). I'm guessing the future freak was about 1 and half old. Congratulations Tyrone and Alana. Tyrone is also an amazing comics artist and was promoting his guerrilla printing company which specializes in small and independent press publication.

 

a shot of the floor duing set up (Damn I was too busy to get the floor full of freaks which is what it's really all about!!!)

 

I had some concerns about the event because of an overwhelming amount of bad online press but was more than pleasantly surprised by the awesome show. If you've never been to one of these things you'd be wise to check it out. I can't wait until the Fan Expo later on this summer. Anyways I hardly got any drawing done at the show because I was too busy telling stories and also to my delight meeting new and strange folk. Probably about a 30 -70 % split on people familiar with my art and an all new audience. It was great to see all my friends from the street performance days and really amazing to discover new ones at the Wizard World. Overall a complete success and incredibly amazing, astonishing, and uncanny show!

Future Comics legend Blackbeard getting ready to duel with a Creepy Consumer of people's bodies,minds, and souls...

Artist's Resume

Another attempt to explain my self,  anonymous nihilistic metropolis (left) and the crazy City of Gears!  (right)

HEY APATHY! Is an ongoing artistic investigation into the dynamic relationship between functioning of the metropolis and the individuals of which it is composed. Using a multi-media amalgamation of popular culture and fine artworks including drawings, comics, animations, and performances, the project expresses a stern, yet optimistic warning towards our future. Primarily concerned with creating a visual vocabulary simultaneously intellectually provocative and accessible to viewers of all ages, the drawings utilize cartoon like imagery to incite dialogue regarding topics of great concern. The social significance of this anthropological exploration will be examined through a brief analysis of the projects overall development, current practices, and near future.

 

The entire body of HEY APATHY! artworks reads like an unconscious narrative inquiry into the identity of the metropolis. In the earliest drawings the city is announced as an ominous gear propelled by an endless sea of faceless denizens. At that time (2001) I was working out of the seclusion of a suburban basement and envisioned the urban landscape as a conglomeration of misdirected commercial and superficial ideologies. In order to better understand the phenomena in question, I hypothesized an unconventional interview in which an exploration of the lives, motivations, and goals of others would aid in my epistemological quest. I have since initiated this interview through a perpetually public process including gallery & festival exhibitions, wall murals and street interventions. Through this constant and aggressive public immersion, I have engaged in unparalleled interactions with peoples from all over the world and of all walks of life. The artworks are created, exhibited, and discussed entirely in front of live audiences presenting a unique, unusual, and uncompromising approach to artistic communication. In more recent artworks the city remains as a giant gear, only now it is all the unique individuals, not anonymous cogs, who fuel the machine.

 

As a result of my public experiments, the project has assimilated various multi-media presentation techniques. Facilitated by the necessity to communicate inclusively , HEY APATHY! incorporates animations, comics, fashion, and fine art. While the original drawings maintain the craftsmanship and exclusivity associated with the gallery setting, the accessible artworks and merchandising have permitted a wide spread dialogue capable of connecting with vast and varied audiences. In my current practice I am developing an online forum in which my public process and performances can be regularly documented and shared on a global scale. Using live streaming, social networks, and web comics, I intend to extend my intervention and exhibition processes in accordance with modern communications. Similar to my street performances, the online project will feature full disclosure of all creative processes including daily sketches, forums, and stories, weekly live paintings, and annual fine art exhibitions . The ultimate goal being the expansion of the alternative expressions I’ve presented on a small scale in the streets and galleries, to include a global audience. The internet exploration has the potential to invite masses of unassuming viewers into the positive, challenging and stimulating dialogue known as HEY APATHY!

Alternative Comics Artist Statements

I've been doing a fair bit of writing this week trying to put together a brief proposal for my submissions packages. As I've mentioned in this blog a few times, most applications ask for a 500 word essay explaining one's artistic practice and relevance of the project. So I have to find a way to explain my convoluted self. It has been a long and neurotic 10 years since I started HeY APAthy! and summing it up in words (a so few none the less) is not as easy as it would be to draw it. After all that is what I do, draw things. Anyways I'm going to post another draft here today and am accepting and open (begging?) to input, editing , criticism and so on. But first here's a pretty picture to warm you up for the reading...

HEY APATHY! endless hordes of faceless denizens (Left 2001) HEY APATHY! The struggle between the individual and the machine (Right 2009) see more pics like this on the  HEY APATHY! epilogue webpage.

 

HEY APATHY! Is an ongoing artistic investigation of the metropolis, people, and the macrocosmic ramifications of our individual routines. In the earliest artworks (2001) the city is announced as a giant gear propelled by an endless sea of faceless denizens. At that time I was working out of the seclusion of a suburban basement studio and envisioned the urban landscape as a nihilistic conglomeration of misdirected commercial and superficial ideologies. Upon completion of the first series I decided to externalize my inquires and research the lives, motivations and goals of others. In order to better understand the phenomena in question, it would be necessary to conduct an unconventional interview with the habitants of the downtown core. Forsaking the introverted nature of the artist’s studio, I have since persisted in surveying the city by means of perpetual public intervention processes including outdoor murals, public exhibitions, live painting, story telling, and street performances, thus permitting unparalleled interactions with peoples from all over the world and of all walks of life. In more recent artworks the city is still explained as a giant gear, only now it is all the different kinds of people, not anonymous hordes, who fuel the machine.

The public immersion of the HEY APATHY! project has proven to be most inspirational and extremely influential to my creative practice. Intent on presenting a stern yet optimistic warning towards our future, I have perpetually adjusted my presentation and processes enabling me to connect with vast and varied audiences. The street and public performances facilitated the necessity to produce multi-media and accessible artworks including animations, video, fashion designs, and print publications. While the original works maintain the craftsmanship and intricacy associated with high art, the complete line of films and merchandise has proven invaluable in my attempts to communicate on a broad scale. Through the assimilation of both popular culture and fine art vocabularies HEY APATHY! discusses topics of great concern simultaneously intellectually provocative as well as accessible to viewers of all ages. One of my primary goals as a creator is to introduce younger audiences to an alternative stream of thought, mixing the streets with the gallery and vice versa.

In my current practice I am working more and more with online technology and social networking in order to breach the limitations of my public interventions. In hopes of extending the intimate dialogue initiated on the streets, I plan to amalgamate all facets of my artistic practice into a multi-dimensional and interactive online presence. Using live streaming, instant messaging, web comics, video games, and animations, I intend to intervene online in a similar, yet incomparably widespread, manner to that of my public performance. My drawing regiment includes daily sketches and stories, weekly drawings, and annual animations and exhibitions. The entire HEY APTHY! Experiment reads like an unconscious narrative slowly revealing the identity of the metropolis, and by means of modern communication techniques, I intend to extend the investigation an incite a dialogue that could not be achieved otherwise.

live painting performance see more at http://www.heyapathy-comics-art.com/

"YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE!" a dialogue in the city...

Live Painting at Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition

This photographic sequence represents a day in the life of the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. An gigantic annual art show held at Toronto's Nathan Philips Square. The deadline for applying to this years event is coming up pretty soon and I came across these photos from last year. The show is an extensive venture, from set up at sunrise to three days of painting and story telling. As equally exciting as it is exhausting, the T.O.A.E. always feels like a roller coaster ride full of twists and turns. I never know who or how many people I'll meet nor am I able to predict the amount of hard work that the show always requires. I did my first public exhibition at the T.O.A.E. way back in 2002, and although I get better at performing each year, it never gets any easier! Check out more performance painting at www.heyapathy-comics-art.com/PERFORMANCE-ART-PUBLIC.html

PICTURES 1) setting up the 10x 20 portable gallery walls 2) early afternoon crowds start pouring through city hall 3) start the live painting 4) about an hour later finished the live painting 5) telling stories and narrating the comic pages!!!

INDEPENDENT & ALTERNATIVE COMICS!

HEY APATHY HEADS! I'm going to be performing live paintings and showing some new works & comics at the Wizard World Comic Convention http://www.wizardworld.com/home-toronto.html at the end of March! I haven't done any of these comic shows for awhile and am really excited to go back. Ever since I was a pint sized fan-boy buying evil dead and eraser head t-shirts I have always looked forward to hitting the comic cons. I exhibited at a couple of events in 2002-03 but sort of got sidetracked by the street performances after that. The outdoor interventions were amazing for many reasons, although producing comics was not one of them.As it stands things have come full circle and here I am headed back to the Comic circuit, my first and true love. It almost seems absurd to me now that I ended up as a performing artist exhibiting in galleries and producing work for places such as the A.G.O. and the HUDSON's Bay Company when all I ever really wanted to do was draw strange tales and Samurai comics. Well that's what I'm doing these days and I am pretty hyped up about getting the books out to all my freakishly bizarre friends and extraterrestrial fans at the comic con. See you all in March!

Life of a Canadian Artist

SUBMISSIONS!SUBMISSIONS!SUBMISSION. Today was a day of buearocratic paperwork. Alas the life of an artist is not all killing monsters and blowing up buildings. Sometimes us creative folk actually have to do work. Especially those of us without representation, so it goes. Fortunetly for me my organizational skills are starting to come together and I've much experience in the feild. The result being that these proposals get easier each time ( and subsequently increasingly profitable). This is a particularily busy time for the paper work as a number of the events I take part in annually have deadlines falling between Feb 15 - March 1. I sent a few things out over the web today including my Nuit Blanche application. Last year I did a live street painting & musical performance on Queen West. This year I'm going to try and get you guys to do all the work as I hope to install and conduct a sort of open canvas workshop in the same location. Truth be told I sick of drawing pictures and if I can get someone else to do it all the better! Just kidding. Actually the most exciting part of all my public performances and interventions has always been the interaction between my self, my art, and the audience. I thought it might be interesting to try and break the boundaries between artist & viewer through a more interactive performance this year. It will defenitely be interesting and very likey quite messy. Here are some samples of the kind of work I have to put into these proposals.

Floor plan foor a 10 x 20 ft. Multi-media Public installation:



The proposals also require visual support material of past projects. This one's from the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition:

CANADIAN ART, THEATRE & LIVE PERFORMANCE!

HEY APATHY! Here are the first pics in my "life of an artist" blog. I've got two little amateur press publications going on in here. The first, which I haven't updated in a while, is my "ONLINECOMICBOOK" journal. That title is dedicated to a behind the scenes or directors commentary if you please, of all my comic book experimentation's. That blog is only going to list the HEY APATHY! comic book pages, revealing the motivations, inspirations, and secret codes behind the sequential artworks regarding the city of gears. I'm posting all my comics chronologically starting with some strange stories from 1999 on twitter and am using the blog to attempt to justify myself (my imaginary psychiatrist's orders...) The online comic also includes new autobiographical pages in order to contextualize and tie all the short adventures together. The last posting was in June 2009, but I am going to start up again full-force next week. The last eight months or so were spent trapped inside a computer in a near futile attempt to create a build-you-own style website. Now that the site is reasonably complete I can actually get back to work on the mythos. check out the first volume on my website.

This new diary is going to document all the other aspects of my artistic endeavors. Not only do I create comic books, but I am actually an active investigator, performer, fine artist ( whatever that is) and amateur musician. In this blog I am going to try and document the 3 dimensional aspects of my life as a Canadian Artist. Not to say that anything I do is actually interesting or even of the slightest importance, I just enjoy writing and figure the more I practice the better I'll get. This author/auteur aspiration actually started out on the streets where I discovered that the explanation of my work seemed to effect the audience equal to and often more than the visuals or drawings themselves. I am now attempting to translate the spoken word aspect of my performances into paragraph form on the new website/graphic novel and have come to realize that it is no easy task. Anyways bare with me as I attempt to replace my ers, ands, ands ums, with subsequently, incongruously, and quite possibly a number of of other sagacious verbal abnormalities.

LIVE PAINTING & THEATRE at the PASSE MURAILLE

Here's some pics of me painting at the PASSE MURAILLE live theatre for the performing arts this past Tuesday Feb. 9/2010. The theatre had a cocktail party, silent auction and live dance/play performance fundraiser in which I was asked to perform and donate my artwork in support of the amazing venue. I was set up in the main lobby and got to work on this little cartoon landscape around 6:30. The entire painting was finished in just under an hour and auctioned off to a patron named Jane after a modest but fruitful bidding war. I had actually met Jane a few years back while painting out in the wild (Queen Street West) and instantly recognized her. Jane was very excited to have found me and said she had been looking for me on the streets but feared she would never see me again. I'm glad the painting got a loving home.

Almost Finished! The auction, and painting was from 6:30-7:30

The amazing thing about doing these performance artworks is the fact that I actually get to interact with people, sharing opinions and ideas in a manner unobtainable in the studio or gallery setting. I always find that although many people could take it or leave it, those who actually approach me end up getting (and giving) a somewhat mystical experience and exchange. One of the onlookers, whom I had never met before, was absolutely amazed at my creative process and told me that "it is the theatre, music, and arts that make the rest of the world bearable" I don't think I've ever received such a high compliment in all of my days.




Another fellow called me a "fake" and attempted to accuse me of being a Kieth herring impersonator. I told him that Herring's artwork and approach were extremely influential to my minimalist performance pieces and that I truly respected and honoured the lineage but hoped to always add my own brand of Gothic metropolitan pessimism to the paintings. His shoulders relaxed and he replied " Yeah it's fun, but effective". I call this "talking zen" and truly thrive on changing skeptical opinions about not only what I do but about life in general. I promise you HEY APATHY! is much more than a parody, it is a means of communication, education, interaction and of hope.




As well as the praise and degradation, I also find the providence of experience in live painting unlike anything I have ever known or studied. The ability of the paintings to connect with peoples of all ages and of all walks of life is incredible. I have sold t-shirts to homeless derelicts and been a guest at some of the worlds most revered dinner tables as a result of my mentally unbalanced campaign. The Passe Muraille event was a rather ritzy one and everyone wall dressed to kill and the scent of perfume drowned out that of the champagne. I always end up meeting and associating with the servers, the performers, and the honoured guests and never feel out of place or class regardless of the spotlight or otherwise. The laughing lady in the red (first photo) is Olivia Chow, former Toronto city councilor and member of parliament. She came up to me after the auction to congratulate me on the piece and was rather amazed at how quickly I was able to produce the work. The man in the snazzy coat is Chris Bell (second picture), a member of the board of directors at the theatre and a true patron of the arts in his own right. Chris has been an integral contributor to the HEY APATHY! project for many years as he financed my first website as well as the amazing Wollesely street mural ). Chris also saved my a- before the show. I was running late and made a few mistakes in preparing my supplies for the event but fortunately Chris was more than willing to provide the necessary transportation to get me & my paints to the show on time. We had to put some paints, a stretcher, easel and paper into his classy convertible but Chris was more than willing to take the risk. Luckily nothing was spilt or damaged inside his beautiful automobile. THANKS CHRIS, Jane, Aviva, and all the other folks who made the Gala a roaring success!