Spilt Ink: New Projects, False Starts and Failed Attempts

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This page is specifically not to do with my own (for sale) artwork, published books or travel paintings ... Instead, here are some overviews and oddities, including commissioned illustration jobs for other people, in reverse chronological order and ending with relics from the 1970s. I did some work in the Fall of 2024 on a proposed book with Paul Buhle on the history of Surrealism – 2024 being the centenary of the founding of the movement in Paris by André Breton and others. It went sideways... here's why IMO. Art for a second historical novel by Michael Dupuis, The Woman Reporter and the Halifax Explosion, published in 2024. He has my illustrations on his website. Art for The Bund, 2023, a graphic history of the remarkable secular-Jewish labour and cultural movement in the Russian Empire of the 19th and early 20th centuries – Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Russia itself.  Monsieur Maillardville, a story for young adults by Marie-Laure Chevrier about a man named Johnny Dicaire who was a key member of the Québec-French enclave of Maillardville in the Coquitlam suburb of Vancouver. Published in French and English in 2021. Michael Dupuis' historical novel on the Winnipeg General Strike, published in 2020 with commissioned illustrations by me. An interesting way to present a novel and bring the characters to life. Lowering Simon Fraser, a 2019 conceptual art project with New Zealand artist Maddie Leach. 2017 article in Amphora magazine about my career, which opens as a pdf. Notes from the Long Paddock, a book project about Australian architecture and the similarities and differences with the North American landscape that almost got published. Explaining Australia – a book project that was abandoned in 2009.   Van Ordinaire, an unpublishable book about owning and travelling in a vintage VW bus, 1998ish. Cartoons for daily newspapers in Vancouver and Victoria 1979–80. Cartoons and drawings at BCIT, 1976-81.