Collages

Revelation 1985

Time is money 1975

Pharaoh 1980

Venus 2009

I've made many collages over the years. One can juxtapose images, and experiment with pattern or form, and play with colour harmonies and contrasts. Content, form, and colour do affect each other, I think. I'm in two minds about titles. They tend to be corny, but also suggest a meaning. They may even impose an interpretation, because many viewers want to know what the artist "had in mind", or "what the pictures means".

I'm not sure what I had in mind for "Revelation". It's actually half a collage which I thought was too large and complicated. so I cut it apart. The other half included a portrait of Freud. So there's a clue. Maybe artworks should be labelled and numbered, the way most music is.

Update: 2025-07-29: I use markers and/or or water colour on some of my collages. which I suppose should be labelled "Collage and mixed media".

Art blog link

http://blog.drawn.ca/

Try it, you'll like it. ;-)

Politics: What else is new?

     The Harper government is being noticed. It's not only Bill C-19, renamed the "Protecting Children from Internet Predator's Act", but in fact a blatant attempt to enable spying by the government on us, the citizens who employ it. Now a Boing-Boing contributor has noticed another Harper government attempt to control the spread of information that we, the taxpayers, have paid for. Here's Boing-Boing's note. I guess the Harper government worries that the more we know, the less we will believe Harper government propaganda. As if that were possible.
     Have a good sleep.

Art Trading Cards

In Loomis  & Tooles, when it still was Loomis & Tooles, I found a packet of 2-1/2 x 3-1/2 inch blank cards, labelled "Art Trading cards". The image above is one of the first I made. Mixed media: gel and felt pen. Search on "artist trading cards" for more information. They're fun to do. The small size pretty well forces you to make a simple design. I've also made small collages, such as this one:

The small circles are hole-punch confetti. I tend to doodle, then fill in the spaces with gel pen, like this:

I like gel pens because they cover well. Since they're aimed at children, they come in bright colours, or odd metallic tints. If you want to trade cards, e-mail me at wolfmac.sympatico.ca

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Movie review)

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Premiere, CBC, Sunday 12 February 2012) A nice little movie, of the type that has "Canadian" written all over it. Think Anne of Green Gables, The Wind at My Back, Lives of Girls and Women, Who Has seen the Wind, and so on.
     But Stephen Leacock it ain't, despite the copious use of dialogue from his book, and allusions to several of his best-known pieces from Literary Lapses etc, Blending facts from Leacock's life with loose adaptations of two of the Sunshine stories, it gives us what is now a typically Canadian coming-of-age and life-changing-insights story that our film-makers are so adept at creating. It's well-done: we spent an enjoyable two hours including commercials (which have their own bizarre charm.)
     There's an issue of truth-in-advertising here. I don't think the movie should have borrowed Leacock's title. It's too far removed from the original. Call it Mariposa Stories, or something similar that will warn the viewer that it's not Leacock's work. Malcolm MacRury imposed his own story on the material, which in itself not a bad idea. But did he have to revise the characters and their relationships so far from the originals in Sunshine Sketches? I don't think so. There was no need, for example, to make Peter Pupkin's inamorata the Reverend Drone's daughter instead of Judge Pepperleigh's.
      Leacock's Sunshine Sketches has an acidly dark subtext, which MacRury used as an opportunity for surreal farce. This, too, is fine as far as it goes, but it weakens the satire. Or maybe not: Canadian politics have often descended into farce, and recently have taken on more than a tinge of the surreal.
     Bottom line: a well-done movie, worth watching, but not an adaptation of Sunshine Sketches. It has the feel of a series pilot. **-1/2

Wild Turkeys (Music Review)

The Wild Turkeys are a country band located in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. They call their variation "swamp stomp country", but it sounds more bluegrass to me. Their concert on 11 February in Blind River was fun. Young (Sheldon Jääskeläinen appears to be under 30, he plays a mean fiddle) and energetic, they do a good show. Their hollers are quite funny. Only downside: their pieces all have pretty much the same tempo and licks, which gets a bit wearing after a while. Devin Alexander on bass guitar did a good cover of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, and Jay Case on guitar did a creditable blues. So they do have the versatility that would raise their show from very good (***) to excellent (****).

They have pages on MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/thewildturkeys) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Wild-Turkeys/23002227647).

Update 2026-05-08: The band's last Facebook post was in 2013, so I guess it's defunct. There's another band with same name that has a YouTube presence.

Link to classic art, altered

Art works altered to include a science fiction theme or motif. Fun.

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/01/art-history-through-sci-fi-colored-glasses