The Next Step in the Series

What I found when I looked back over the black and white images of the last year, was the subtle patterns of the shoe prints and how these suggested two dimensional magic. The textures and intensities create exquisite design patterns and sometimes suggested landscapes. When I poured over them, I recognized that some of the images were begging for a foreground to their background to create a more literal story.

Painting small additions onto these backgrounds provided new three and four dimensional qualities.  I started focusing in on all the areas AROUND the shoe prints and realized that often the real and dramatic story was being told there, not just in the strong designs of the shoes themselves. The new atmospheric emphasis began to deepen the stories being suggested by the literal images.

To Giclee or Not to Giclee, (Increasingly that IS a question).

I am just in the beginning stages of turning work into high-end giclee art prints in a limited series. These quality prints have many advantages over framed originals. They can be shipped fairly inexpensively inside a cardboard tube anywhere in the world. They are cheaper to purchase and have really fine production values on high quality art paper. And…..they can be any size, from say 8 by 10 inches to 4 feet by 6 feet or larger. This printing machine is a genius. It can print on canvas, cotton and other great materials. I am super excited too, from an educational point of view, to learn more about which images need to stay small, which ones want to be stretched a bit, and which ones are dying to be life size.

The majesty of colour is well documented. There is something though about black and white imagery that reaches back into the recesses of our memory. There is an immediate and simply dynamic that gets right to the facts of the matter. We can’t live without colour, but we can’t think or choose without black and white.

Here’s the full collection

   Evidence of Walking 2018

EVIDENCE OF WALKING
A New Series of Images in Black & White

BIRTH OF THE CONCEPT: A couple of Christmas’s ago Vancouver was hit by a number of ice and snow storms. The streets and sidewalks were literally canvases built by layer upon layer of shoe treads embedded in the ice, signs of people, dogs and a few skunks and coyotes moving about in all directions.

I photographed dozens of these small film noirs and got to the point where I said to Max (the dog) “we are both going to freeze to death out here so let’s just capture abstract works that Matisse would approve of”. They were all over the place. Based on these photos I started collecting dozens of shoes at 2nd hand stores, ones with aesthetic sole designs. These soles became stamps that could be covered with acrylic paint.

Suddenly all kinds of ideas and metaphors about taking action, walking, finding a path, leaving behind a light footprint on the earth…. started to shape images that appeared. I could see that some of the images and their abstractions could work on very large canvases. One of these images came from a love of Calder’s mobiles as I imagined how Calder would playfully turn the Milky Way into a mobile.

So the images you see here are soon headed for a larger format. I remain committed to seeing where this idea of leaving traces behind as we move takes me. The Japanese language may be unique in having a word for the experience we have when we see the wake from a ship even though the ship itself has disappeared behind an island. Giacometti, particularly in his large free- standing figures wanted to capture what was left in the memory after you turned away from a friend. His bronzes became goldfish thin, very tall figures as if his memory had compressed them for better preservation.