The End of The World

Here are a couple of uncompleted projects I started last winter. I was saving posting anything about them until I brought them to completion but now is a very appropriate time to let them out since they are inspired by the end of the Mayan calender that is going to happen this Friday Dec. 21st. If I don't post them now maybe I never will (because the world will end). They have to do with all the red wing black birds that were falling dead out of the sky by the hundreds in different places around the world like Sweden and the US (look it up). Those who know me, know of my obsession with dead birds and the apocalypse. When I head about all these birds dying a.) I couldn't believe I hadn't heard about it before and that it wasn't headline news (only headline news makes it to my ears usually) and b.) it felt like confirmation to me that something crazy is going to happen.

This was a sketch for a mural I was supposed to do in Vancouver on a plywood construction wall. It fell through. 

I expanded upon the mural idea that never happened and made this image to screen print onto some tote bags that I sewed by hand (with a sewing machine). The print was a failure because the system I was using wasn't into how finely detailed my lines are. I had big plans for those tote bags, it was heart breaking. 

There were two dead birds on the rooftop outside my window. Uh oh. Upon closer examination I noticed there was a 3rd completely disintegrated bird carcass. I'm trying to figure out what it means. 

Old School

I was looking through some old photos and I found this drawing. It was my original idea sketch for what later became the last screen print I did at Concordia in 2010. It's crazy to see how much my drawing has improved, and even how much it improved in the two years between the original sketch and the final print.

2008

2010

This is the shoulder cat that started it all.
This kid was walking around the St. Laurent street festival in Montreal at the end of August a million years ago (actually maybe 9 years ago), and impressed the hell out of me. His cat was just hanging out on his shoulder and he would feed it from there. Look how bad ass that cat looks! I've wanted one ever since.
Shoulder cat.

Los Pajaros

My Papa has had a bunch of weird, surreal, real experiences with birds at significant moments in his life. Going with my theme of recreating moments never actually captured for people on their birthday cards, I made this drawing.

It's a story Papa told me about when he was in his 20s and working at my Grandma's store in Toronto. He found a key to a door in the backyard of the store that he was previously unable to open. He found an overgrown area with really tall grass so he cleared out a space to do Tai Chi and unwind on his breaks back in the days he first started getting into Tai Chi and meditation. It got him through some tough times hating retail. One day he decided to do 200 donyus (a Tai Chi move) in a row. A very difficult feat, it's hard to even do 50. Just as he finished the 200th donyu, there was a loud noise and then smack on the ground between his feet, landed a white pigeon. It wasn't going anywhere so Papa picked it up and held it in his arms for a long time, it looked him in the eye, until he finally had to put it up on the wall because he had to go to work. Years later when he was deciding to close the store, more weird bird stuff happened, we're talking dead birds this time. Papa realized the first bird was trying to tell him to get out of doing retail but he didn't know how to read the sign at the time. True story.

This was interesting for me to learn less than a year ago since I have quite an obsession with birds especially in my art and since I've definitely been paying more attention to them (it helps that I live on a park with a lake and tons of bird species) and using them even more.