Pilot 4

My friend Lee Sheppard, along with a couple of his friends, publishes this great illustrated literary pocketbook entitled Pilot... I have some work in the new issue... If you are a creative writer you should go to the website, look around, and if you like what you see, submit... If you are a fan of reading or looking at things, you can purchase copies of the pocketbook on the site as well...

I met Lee about 7 years ago, I got a job at an art supply store when I was in 2nd year in college, and Lee was my supervisor... Since that time we have become friends and he lives just around the corner from my studio... I was trying to think of a story about Lee to post on here, so I decided to post this one, just because its the most embarrassing...

When I was working at the art supply store, close to the time that I got the job, I had a crush on one of the other workers there... I'd get a little nervous when I was taking to her, and I always wanted her to believe I was a little cooler than I actually was... When I was younger I didn't really understand that the best way to approach a girl is to just be yourself... One day right around the time I got the job I was really tired and I wanted a snack, so I locked myself in the bathroom and ate a big bag of Doritos. I must have been there a long time or left some crumbs on the floor, or maybe Lee was outside the door listening to me, but somehow he knew what I was up to... About 15 minutes later I was finished the Doritos and I was talking to the girl, trying to drop subtle little hints that I was awesome, and then mid conversation Lee come up and says: "Did you just lock yourself in the bathroom and eat an entire bag of Doritos?" I was all like: "Ah, no. Why would I do that? That's stupid..." but Lee wouldn't give up, he called me on it until I confessed. And my face was beat red, and then I had no reason to try to convince this girl that I was cool anymore. I don't think Lee realized what he was doing to me... He wasn't even mad at all, he thought it was funny, but back then I got embarrassed way more easy than I do now, and didn't have the best luck with girls... It shouldn't have embarrassed me, but there was something about getting caught feebly lying about it right in front of this girl that made it really pathetic...

Ok, thats not much of a story, but there it is..

Here are some shots of the pocket book... It reprints some of the work that I showed in Berlin, which I have already posted here, so I will not include many pages...




Also, I finished my Road of Knives page... it must seem to people that RoK is what I spend the majority of my time on, but that isn't true... Its just that I like to keep my other drawings a little more underwraps until I am done an entire series, which takes quite a while... In March I'm in an art fair in Paris, I will post a bunch of new drawings then...

This is the first time drawing a landscape I think, so go easy on me... Man, doing stuff for the road of knives is really difficult for me because it is all stuff that I don't have a lot of experience in drawing, but I also hink that if i stick with it, pushing myself into unfamiliar territory will hopefully improve my work overall...

Ok, thanks for reading all of this, I think the Dorito's story is an attempt on posting more content, but all of my stories are kinda boring and kinda pathetic, so maybe I should just stick to images...

rewind pt4

Ok, so this will be the last recap, except for the next recap, which will just be what I have been doing since I got back to Canada. These recaps are wearing me out, cause I'm doing stuff and drawing things that I want to post now...

OK, so during Christmas we went to Rome and then Paris. A couple of days before leaving I came down with the flu, so we didn't get to see much of Rome... Our hotel was 2 bus rides away from the end of the subway line and I didn't have much energy, so I did lots of this:

And shitloads of this:

Here's Carolyn feeling sorry for me:


I was feeling a little better by the last day so we went down to the Ruins for some sightseeing.

I'm on a really weird computer right now, it looks like a dismembered laptop nailed to a wall and it's piggybacking on someone else's network, so its uploading images really strangely.... That last pic is so screwed up, but it also looks kinda neat that way...

I was super excited to see the Colosseum, I watched Gladiator twice in a row before we left Florence to get pumped up for it. I practiced some wrestling moves, I wanted to buy a stuffed lion and slay it to expose my supreme killer instincts to the other tourists. By the time we got there my stomach felt like hell, but I was so excited to be there that I tried my best to ignore it. Here's the face that I would give to my opponent if I were a real Gladiator:

It would fill him with feelings of fear and inferiority to the point where he would know to the deepest depths of his soul that his ultimate doom was upon him. But the Gladiator Face was too much for my sickly body; tensing my muscles that way must have pulled something in my bowels because 5 seconds after this photo was taken, I knew to the deepest depths of my soul that I was about to shit my pants. The washroom was a total mess, feces piled everywhere so I sprinted out of the stadium... Into the washroom of a fancy restaurant, and the day was won.

And thus ended my first legendary appearance in the great Colosseum.

We took an over night train to Paris, and stayed there for a week. I really don't know what to say about this stuff, we had a hotel, we took walks, we drank some alcohol... it was fun! Our pics are very much "couple photos"... just photos of us so we could have them when I went back to Canada, so I won't subject you to too many of them... This one makes it very obvious that Carolyn is way more attractive than I am...

And this is me in line to get into the Louvre.

The lineup was crazy there... If you ever go there, don't wait in line to by a ticket, go to an HMV store and buy one there and you can go through a separate entrance to get in... The lineup is way shorter there but way more intense, like the most multi-cultural mosh pit of all time... I was a little disappointed with the Louvre, I didn't see a single albino Opus Dei member... I broke my glasses during my going away party before leaving Canada, so museums were tough, I could barely get a grasp of what was going on.

Ok, thats it, now lets get on with the art already...

rewind pt2

Ok, so now its October, I did a couple of pieces for the Toronto International Art Fair, then started packing up my studio to convert to hobo mode. I packed up all my belongings, put them in storage, and got ready to fly to Italy to stay with Carolyn for a couple of months... Ok, here are images of the work I did for the fair, and Le Gallery's setup...

Fungi-Mate Piloting Bi-Necked Amphibious Behemoth

Tuba-Nosed Toad in Full Bloom

Those photos are pretty bad, but you get the general idea. Heres a couple of shots of the booth...

Ok, so after the fair, all I really did was pack my stuff, take down my studio, and get my supplies ready for moving out of the country. What else? Doing 'fancy jumps' got me in trouble twice that month. The first time I was wrestling with my buddy Matt in the hallway of my studio, I pushed him into a wall, and made a run for it... I did a little fancy twirly jump to show off, smoked my head on a bolt sticking out of a waterpipe, and bled a lot. It hurt like hell....

The second fancy jump happened at my next door neighbour's place. In October it looked like I may have had a heart complication, I was really freaked out, after a bunch of tests it turned out that I was pretty much ok, but the doctor recommended light jogging. So I bought a track suit and running shoes, and went over to my neighbours place to show off. Excercising is really unlike me, I'm in horrible fucking shape. In the first photo you can see one of my neighbours in the background, he was obviousy jealous of my fancy jumping, so he ripped off my tear-aways mid-jump...

Man, I'm such a gremlin... I even gross myself out in this photo, look at those teeth, they look like they've been filed to a point... I started writing this entry last night, saved it, and now it is the next morning. Looking back, I have no idea why I considered "fancy jumps" noteworthy, but well, there you go...