Jana painting

We received a wonderful gift from Jana Kutarna today: a painting that she did a number of years ago from a series of "portraits" of people's stuffed toys. This pink character, who might have used to have had a name but I forget it, was borrowed from us when William was very young. 

staying home and catching up

William had the day off school so naturally he slept in until noon and I made him do homework all afternoon. I was writing mostly, but also helped procure some stuff for him to do some rudimentary printmaking with (a used rolling pin and some flat foam pads). Stayed up late and caught up on Riverdale and Big Bang. We've been behind on tv for three weeks. He found some time to draw on his new project, but the detail is getting increasingly intricate so this page has taken him all week.

Painting pointers

William got some more pointers from Donovon about his new painting. While the source image (a photo I took many years ago) is mostly about the rust, William made it more about the form and is refusing to use any range of colours but to work in only two per painting.

AGR and David Dreher

Loving the new work at the AGR by David Dreher. Margaret reminded William and I to attend their AGM before his talk this week as we are members and they might need quorum. This was William's first meeting of this nature, voting and all. We'll likely do it again in a couple of weeks for the Filmpool. Anyway, it was interesting to hear his talk and answers to questions, especially William's, as I found that as much as I like his work, I didn't agree with his own interpretations of it. I asked him about these issues afterwards (such has his feeling that the curtains around the images in these paintings indicates that they will be revealing a truth, and something about the skull and flowers over the woman's head in the image above) and we had a great friendly open conversation. 

Quick and Dirty pop up artists

The Quick and Dirty talks this month involved a handful of artists commissioned to do the pop up downtown series this summer.  Heather Cline will have paintings of downtown areas which will feature new audio recordings related to people in those areas. Audio would be heard through connecting to a link on your phone. Jeff Meldrum will be working with disco-ball planets, a surprising coincidence as Berny has also been investigating small planets as an art venture. Connections in the future? Belinda Harrow explained her printed cloth forms and how she makes concrete forms with images on them. It was really cool to see what she is doing. Rachel Rozanski was not there but did her talk as a recording. Todd Gronsdahl, whom I'd never met before, is doing some interesting stuff around a strange fictitious history of Saskatchewan that I'd like to hear more about. Evening ended early. 

William painting

The other day I took William as my sister's substitute to paining class. Went really well. His painting was not only better than mine, but he did two paintings both more interesting than the one he'd handed in for class earlier in the day.
 

Calgary day 3

On the third and last day of our really short Calgary trip, Michelle was up and about, having recovered from her full day long migraine yesterday. She and I talked at length about migraines again, this time with the added idea of reasons why I might have begun to get one last night. It seems that both her and I have encountered the problem that a migraine might be triggered by thinking about migraines. That means that, perhaps with other conditions being in place, that the presence of someone else in the area having a migraine and the idea of that migraine being unavoidable, that this could be a migraine trigger. I'm starting to look for corroboration of this but have not yet found any.

Before leaving town we did some art supply shopping and had coffee with Erik.