One thing this blog has fallen short of during it's existence is provide a definitive overview of my output as an artist, so I've established ashleyandelartwork.blogspot.com to rectify that, and to leave this blog to it's usual current events, whims and commentary.

The new blogspot is a chronological look at nearly everything I've done over the past ten years, from my adolescent explorations right up to concurrent undergoings. Amusingly, this time it's myself I'll be putting under the microscope, and I'm not afraid to be astringent.

Often it is said that an artist can be their very worst critic, something I've kept in mind throughout the archival process. Whether this is true or not is to be determined, I suppose, by your feedback.

Also of note is that this blogspot serves as an online sales gallery, and pieces are displayed with prices.


This is me in high school, 1999. Photo by Jennifer Saleik.

The first entry I've published is about the work created between the years of 1999 to 2001, looking over my last year of high school until I left home. In more severe terms, 'the formative years'.



Ten years isn't that long of a time, I've come to realize, but some of the work I've excavated is stuff I barely recall making. Virtual amnesia doesn't exactly make me feel less geriatric, but then neither does remembrance.

With effort to ward off the Alzheimer's, I present to you what I hope is a fair representation of 'who this Ashley Andel character is, anyway...'

As sad as I am to see the iron whale carcass removed from the corner of Denman and Davie overlooking English Bay, it's an amusing and welcome diversion to come across the site's new sculptural installation of a crowd of towering, chuckling figures by artist Yue Minjun, all in differing poses.



I remember a day in about August that I and a crowd of other delighted people swarmed the figures, the squares of grass still overlapping their bases. Infectious as the silent laughter emanating from the statues, every one of us took turns posing in front of them, taking snapshots and splitting our sides.



However, on the polar opposite side of favor, the City of Vancouver, in time for both the biennale and the Winter Olympics have installed what resembles a mass of crumpled tinfoil at the intersection of Granville and West Georgia. Titled "Artificial Rock #143" by artist Zhan Wang, this shining lump of nothing might have been more at home (read: aesthetically redeeming) if situated in a less conspicuous place, say, somewhere in Stanley Park where it could be a pleasant eye-catch among a cluster of real rocks.

Instead, this shameless meteorite stands poised like a superstar, and indeed it even garners a lot of telephoto lenses despite it's unsightly sort of ambiguity. I can't help but imagine looking down at it from one of the office tower windows, thinking it a bit of cigarette foil dropped on a model.

Last Thursday, I caught up with my friend Riley Broderick who just moved to Vancouver from a long stay in Japan, where he kept wind in his sails by working various modeling jobs.

At his housewarming party, leafing through a pile of his photographs, I suggested we get together for a photo shoot sometime. Riley's photos often feature him in elaborate face paint, and being no stranger to face paint myself I pondered the potential outcome of a shoot; how crazy could it get?



Eventually we made good on the idea, and along with his friend Imi, some of my leftover houndstooth paper (and a little tipple), we set some flashbulbs off.

Painting each other's faces was terribly fun, as was rendering Riley's real beard practically fake. Topping it all off, I slapped my wig on him, leading me to imagine a shoot in which we could dress up like twins.



Shots went on late into the night; so late, in fact that I didn't have the time to wash Riley's work from my face before I scampered off to catch the last train home!



Although I've not yet been shown the photos I posed for (stay tuned), you can see the rest of the photos I took of Riley on my Flickr page here.

An unusual phenomenon has entered my universe over the past while; I've been getting other people to make art more than I've been making it myself. First, it occurred in October at Blim, and this week I held a collage workshop with a North Vancouver elementary school under the theme of 'asymmetric aesthetics'.

The workshop took place over the course of two and a half hours in the early morning with about thirty students ages 5 to 8 approximately, materials provided both by the school and myself. Not unlike the Blim workshop, my materials appeared pale and delicate in comparison to the loud and busy scraps otherwise supplied, which needlessly concerned me at first.



Children possess optimal intuition and risk, which makes for some truly daring experimentation that usually tempers and tames itself with age; think children's illustrators like Eric Carle, whose work is child-like, but merely that. Only children can come up with honest perplexities, unlike the surrealists and such, can ask questions like 'what does perplexity mean, anyways' or 'why are horse's eyes on their brains'?



I walked into the classroom, and all of the students were sitting before me in a semi-circle, and I doubt I'd ever felt as nervous in my life. Three of my pieces were passed around as we chatted about using fun, resourceful methods to create something. In more simplified terms I answer their questions, basically letting them know that I 'believe in thematic ambiguity' and that 'the viewer's point of view or interpretation should always be considered as valid as the artist's in the grand scheme of things'.

Gradually, I became more comfortable as it became clear that the kids were excited to have me, telling me how the pieces being passed around looked like 'birds, carriages, sea life, fountains and spiders'.



We soon got down to task. In three groups of about ten, we sat cutting and pasting away at newsprint lined tables. In the flash of only a half hour, a girl just aside practically plagiarizes me (above), and uniquely, a boy makes a three dimensional face out of graph paper that resembles the reaper (below).



It's absolutely astounding how precise their compositional skills are. For instance, in the picture below, one girl knew exactly where she wanted everything, as determined by her very trilateral placement of the pink and blue. The polka dots augment it all like little bows.



The sensitivity to thin dispersal is apparent, many children opting for clusters of things in space.



There's a wink of graphic design about the lavender eye motif below.



A collection began to accumulate on and around the window sill. I was starting to get suspicious that the placement of everything was done on purpose, as the pictures with a lot of white were back-dropped by frost, as the earthier tones rested against the potted plants.



For some reason, it took a while before the children realized that they were allowed to use the Letraset I had placed on the table, and when they did I didn't have to insist the abstract use of it, and when certain letters weren't available, they altered existing ones accordingly.



Letters and numbers were used as noses, mouths and eyes. A boy tugged my shirt, showed me a scattered cloud of them and said it was a picture of 'a person who didn't know what to say' (above).



Inexplicably, other texts found their way into the visual soup, as cut-up accounts of famous composers encircled this camouflaged crab (below), and some of the language arts assignments were gleefully torn apart (above).



Art Linkletter and Bill Cosby probably made it most explicit on the TV show 'Kids Say The Darndest Things' that kids can throw some real curve balls; here is what they introduced to me as a 'wheelchair dancer' and a 'Chinese Mexican'.



One doesn't have to teach a child to be instinctive when they make a picture, because that's all it is to them: the making of a picture. Children don't call it modern or postmodern, nor cerebral or satire; without adulthood's brackets yet in firm hold, these adorable images dehumanized as child's play are far too oftentimes relegated to the toy box.



As for me, unlike everyone else had the luxury of working on this picture of an 'underwater rose garden' for an hour and a half (above in detail, and at top of entry), and right now I don't find it half as interesting. Granted, it is very charming in all it's restraint, but what sort of validity does something like 'restraint' constitute anyway?

The love of rule and order is an acquired taste, and it's something not to be without, but more often than not it's a humbling thing to look over at what the kids have been up to. It would be all 'Aesop' of me to end off here with some sort of moral, but it is pretty irresistible: you can teach an old dog new tricks so long as the said dog doesn't belittle the puppies.

A month-long artist's residency at the creative space known as Blim is offered up with some stipulations: first, you have your initial art show, but also you have to make a window display (seen above). Third, you have to curate a film of your choice, fourth you must host a workshop and fifth, they have to make T shirts of your art to commemorate the time you spent in the space.

If you're a shameless self-promotionist, a dreamy magpie minded art case, or in my case both of these things, the demands that Blim imposes to a simple showing of canvas is hardly absorbed with a blow, in fact the delivery of these offerings was so initially apologetic that I wondered who or what sort of beast came and took terrible advantage of them beforehand.



October is the harvest month, a time savored by people in the same way a dying hornet seems more ready with it's sting. Pagan, gluttonous, supposedly thankful, a last hurrah before the coming of All Saint's Day; and consequently November's bow to the lackluster. In a sense, I spent my Thanksgiving at Blim, only not on Thanksgiving Day, but at the show's casual opening over a whimsical assortment of red wine, sumptuous maki rolls, Earl Grey tea and Jelly Bellies shared by a desirably calm shuffle of about 25 visitors.



One of those visitors was Liza J. Lee (above), who wrote an article about the show for her site artistrun.org (see end of entry for link).

Eventually, the Blimited edition Ashley Andel T shirts were brought out by Yuriko (Blim's proprietor), and to my dismay the image had been printed upside down!





Questioning Yuriko on the matter, she felt the design augmented one's breasts too much when screened right-side-up, which I believe was unanimously felt as preposterous by the end of the evening.



With note on the penchant of miniature delicacies my shows of late seem to be acquiring, I bring a baker's dozen tiny cheesecakes to the collage workshop, which garnered a mere two participants despite a lot of interest; though considering the $60 head charge Blim charged for materials and cover, attendance was expectedly thin, and much cheesecake was gorged.

Modestly, I entitled the evening an "Obsessive-constructive introspection", in which participants should "anticipate making their very own 'fake Ashley Andel' piece utilizing materials either from or very much like the ones used in the show of canvases". My preposterous write up continues: "as a congregation, we might sift through the chaotic depths that make up our insurmountable reservations in attempt to make brashness out of bashfulness. What might be a 'journey to the interior', tongue-in-cheek, of course".




Two ladies by the name of Sioux and Michelle came to make some pictures with me for four hours time, and where I brought a fair amount of my own material along, Yuriko provided just as much or more of her own, which was hilarious because of how pale my stuff was in comparison to how bright and ridiculous her stuff was. Here was a toyish 'clash of the Titans' over Lilliputian pastries and 'Mod Podge' (a newly acquired finish I found recently) with two strangers and their paid $60 for 'day care'!







I say 'money for day care' precariously because I don't want to come off patronizing, but it's always fascinating to sit down with other adults to forget the more complicated devices we all use and get back to basics, if not even in my 'make a fake' regime, poised like a meek dagger over Blim's brasher tidbits; oh no! Could it be possible that the maker of a show called 'Brash Play' could be overcome with someone else's colours?



One clear advantage Yuriko has over me here is her contribution of wood panel boxes, which I'm ashamed to say I've never worked with before. We take to these like food, only strangely enough from where we're sitting, the very same place the 'would-be Thanksgiving' took place only two weeks before, we're almost taking on an act of mental excretion at the table, which is funny.

The Blim experience thus far has been a consumption of the cute, which my 'Reticent Work' feels very much at home with. This workshop is, as I recall it to be, a very unique and direct sort of visual response from a visitor's personal point of view.

Here's what Sioux, Michelle and I made:



"J-girl" by Michelle.



Something writhing and scary by Sioux.



Another one by Sioux. Note the interplay of my green graph paper with Yuriko's holographic and animal print origami paper!



"Be Me Moe Woo", by Michelle. This one's on a wood panel, as well as the one above.



Another one by Sioux, also on wood panel.



These two are the one's I did. I was very pleased with how the 'Mod Podge' bonds paper to wood, making it indelible even to harsh scratchings with an implement. I'll be using these again in the very near future.


This was the first workshop I've ever hosted, and it was actually more like an afternoon tea that favored potted glues and pretty tissues just as well as the confections I'm happy to report. In fact, this whimsical cache of 'kawaii' on/off Main Street provides more than enough confection all in all, if you'll include all the spectacle, adornment and cross-over that Blim caters to. It's like a magical broom-closet in an old brick building that you can step in to play with all manner of brashness and craft.

And what further woeful manifestations have all the trial and tribulations of this abducting, arresting establishment to which I applied to burdened me with? What nightmares ensue from the kindergartening of thirtysomethings, the upside-downing of a ballerina? Well, after I screened Takagi Masakatsu's 'Journal for People' for the film night, I was handed three right-side-up T shirts and $50 for hosting the workshop. Woe is me.

Hospitality to a hostile degree? The firing squad before November that pelts you with mini marshmallows? I'm at rest in a field of leaky poppies if that's the case this Remembrance day! God Bless Blim.


You can read Liza J. Lee's article about the show here.

Today marks precisely my first year of life as a Vancouverite, and is also the kick-off for my first two official shows in residence, subsequently my first shows outside of Edmonton. The first of which I'll talk about is set up at Blim, a compact, flamboyantly utilitarian arts and crafts space located at Main and East 17th avenue.

It comes as a great privilege to set up at Blim, as I remember first happening upon it vacationing here five years ago, back when Blim was located on Pender street, just adjacent the infamous Pigeon Park. I saw a set of bands play in a gigantic whitewashed cubby hole set in the middle of a room lined down one side with windows. Brightly coloured staplers and florescent extension cords were strewn about everywhere, and I never forgot about the space.

"Blim was an imaginary land I had when I was young", I recall proprietor Yuriko Iga saying to me back then, and with the hanging of 'Reticent Work', which is a showcase of my lighter, more delicate stuff, I get a chance to explore this tweeish sort of place more closely in it's since transplanted new location as October's wallflower; a resident reticent!



As this month's resident artist, in addition to having a show of work, I get to silkscreen some Blimited edition A.A. T shirts, which will be up for sale (I'll keep you updated on the prices once we start churning 'em out). Yuriko really liked my Schlemmer/Rodchenko bobbin lace ballerina drawing, and that's the image that's been chosen. Stay tuned.




In addition to that, I'll have Blim's window display at my disposal. Over the past two weeks I've really been playing around, painting almost anything that strikes my whim. Blue paint found it's way on to a toy bobby cap and pair of aviators to produce the 'promo shot' that starts this entry off, a store-fixture torso, and not to mention countless cardboard rings and especially some chunkily checkered lace curtain, both in blue and greenish-gold.






All of this stuff (excluding the policeman!) will be featured out front as props for the window, though I worry I might have gone overboard with it all to make fanfare for feathers. Oh well; what's to argue if it's pleasant to look at?



I almost forgot to mention that Blim invited me to host a film night, for which I've chosen an album of short videos by Takagi Masakatsu called 'Journal for People'. Takagi's work is unique because not only does it remind you of painting, it blurs the boundaries between sound and vision in a way that MTV could never conceive of. The film night, or 'Flim night', will take place on Friday, October 30th. Admission is a $5 to $10 donation.

Here's a video Takagi did called 'Salida Del Sol', which is one of the videos to be featured that evening. It's one of the most moving things I've ever seen.







The second show I've put up is the portrait show "It isn't easy to admit that you're lonely", which you can see at Tattoo Collective, 1015 Granville Street. Having pieces up in a tattoo parlour is a definite first for me, and probably not a venture I'd normally seek out, but having a friend involved with the endeavour changes things a little, and having this show up in such a place is fitting, because it's not so much a show of girls, but a show of the trace of girls. It's as if all of the subjects have suddenly been rendered into parlour-walled clip art, which I somehow enjoy.







How admirable tattoo artists are, despite my lack of care for their overall aesthetic; their nerve of keeping so confidant, almost defiant of how indelible and consequential a mistake could be. How miraculous that someone could dare to use living skin as their medium, and yet how horrible! What if someone was actually impulsive enough to get one of the girls inked up on their biceps? The thought of someone having my art work on their skin is enough to make my flesh crawl in more ways than one.



Oh, and while we're on the topic of flesh, here's a first draft acetate drawing I made of some muscles for a canvas in progress.

To shamelessly recap here, my first year in Vancouver was set with the initial goal of having some new canvases made in a stable apartment suite, and perhaps one show to warm the locals up to my particular brand of idiocy, but looking back upon it now, it seems my goals have been supplanted.


Blim events "Reticent work":

Opening: Friday October 9th, 8-11 free admission.
Flim night, "Journal for People" by Takagi Masakatsu Friday October 30th, 8pm $5-$10 donation.
Gallery also open during 'The Drift'.
Hours of operation: Monday to Thursday 2-10pm, Friday-Saturday 12-6, Sunday 12-4.
(604) 872-8180

Tattoo Collective "It isn't easy to admit that you're lonely":
Business hours Sunday-Tuesday 11am to 7pm, Wednesday-Saturday 10 am to 10pm.
1015 Granville street, (604) 568-5757

* Also, not mentioned in this post is the appearance of 'Pachinko dilemma' (shown above) at PacificThorn's space at 110 East Hastings for the post-Olio Festival showcase. Viewings of this and many other works by other artists can be arranged by appointment by calling (604) 839 3670.

Shows up for the duration of October. Prices listed at venues.

En route to work this morning, a tiny headline in today's issue of '24 Hours' caught my attention, proclaiming that the controversial (and charismatic) anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens, famous for his traveling 'Body Worlds' show of postured human cadavers, is creating an exhibit of plasticized bodies in the act of coitus. Further online research into this unearthed all the expected outrage, with phrases like 'cadaver porn' being tossed about and, intriguingly, a report that the King of Pop himself was to be plastinated by the infamous Dr. Gunther.

One thing is apparent: two bodies, male and female, were recently displayed in a 'reverse cowgirl' position for von Hagens' "Cycle of Life" exhibit in Berlin to many crowds of gnashing teeth, once again opening up those same old moral debates in a fresh new suit. Personally, I can't help but fence-sit on the topic like a wary lifeguard (imagine a lifeguard watching over a bunch of rubberized corpses!), but what interests me are all the brittle tethers a display like this rips through; all the raw truth and harsh realities that deter people away from both sex and death are artfully displayed by someone who, in his grim fedora, almost resembles Joseph Beuys.



It comes as no surprise that the tiny article caught my eye, considering this rather morbid assortment of source material accumulating on my living room floor (above), and that my next batch of work is to be made up of sexually charged death imagery. So far, I've used myself as the model both to re-examine who I am (the artist as art) and to theatrically illustrate a sort of danse macabre that beautifully contemplates the ugly sides of love and sex. All tongue in cheek, of course.



Another thing I'm automatically reminded of when I see von Hagens' work is Joel-Peter Witkin's photography (above), and how it has irked but nonetheless moved me with it's overtly liberal arrangement, how in death could the two old men know that they'd be two decapitated heads kissing for art? The key word that's made obvious by it's absence is 'consent', and somehow I doubt that Witkin had consent from the deceased to be placed this way. Which is fascinating in itself.



Dr. Gunther von Hagens does have written consent from his stiffs, he boasts, but his suspicious sort of celebrity renders that fact nearly moot, his public as taut as the nerves that he preserves. It's the wonky morals that make this stuff interesting, and despite von Hagens' claims that his displays are purely instructional, they also inadvertently conjure up a musk of salacity.

I suppose that the subjects of love, sex and death are as tired and tried as an old camel, but how else am I supposed to alleviate myself from nine months of painting brightly coloured squares? With the coming of the season, it's time to try on my Francis Bacon shoes.

Three drunken tarts board the SkyTrain at Granvile station giggling, oblivious to the deflated looking middle ager only a pane of glass away.



Staring at my feet as the train departs, my gaze drifts over to the feet of others.



As the girls start to topple and writhe, the old man scratches his ear.

Every time I ride the SkyTrain, I can't help but notice how each passenger occupies their space, and the airs that they give off. I'm also fascinated with the near intimate proximities we can get with strangers. An old Chinese woman with a bag full of bottles nestles up beside a girl with white knee highs and a tennis racquet, or a boy with acne and earbuds can be staring face to face with an old man sucking on a chicken bone.

The SkyTrain is full of conflicting stories all rubbing up against each other, subjecting me to the same emotional acrobatics rapid fire news reports put me through. When my inner Walter Mitty crops up, I look out for the scant evidence of fantasy that others might involuntarily reveal in their manners; bittersweet ponderings of who they are and who they'd like to be. It's sort of voyeuristic to always be on the lookout for other people's innermost, to be sure, but no matter if it's superhuman or superficial, I always find it ever so entertaining to plumb.

It reminds me that the unreal self is just as real as the actual self inasmuch as the unreal self is always that 'man behind the curtain' pulling the strings.

Also, and I'm not sure if this is detouring from my point too much, when reality and fantasy blur as it does in these new 'realistic' super hero movies being pumped out (in a world where superheroes exist), who or what occupies the pages of a comic book?

Horrifically, this new drawing in progress not only looks cadaverous, it depicts the artist himself in the nude!

This is basically what my next series is going to look like, only on a near life size scale and with my typically ambiguous colouration.

I don't want it to be a series of self portraits if I can help it, either. So, if you'd like to be a subject or commission me to do your portrait please let me know through this blog. And no, you don't have to be naked if you don't want to be.

Here is a string of pictures from the premiere of some of my "Brash Play" work at the Astoria Hotel for Olio Festival.

Above is how the installation looked at the beginning of the evening. It's a diorama made out of a large packing box from my shipping department.



This is Sarena, who helped me with the set up. We didn't get black paint or glue anywhere, except possibly on our hands.



Of course, who knew that setting art up in a pub would ultimately degrade into something that looks like a Russian constructivist "Girls Gone Wild" video?



She was the little paper disco that could. It all turned out sort of like that disastrous restaurant scene at the end of Jacques Tati's "Playtime", where the ramshackled side of the fashionable bistro garners it's own exclusive crowd.

Or, more accurately in my case, I had a rather brightly coloured photo booth for tens of club goers to come take advantage of...



... like this leering stork of a guy who immodestly asks that his crotch 'keep dry' for the duration of the night!



Girls came to dance...



...laugh and pose like popstars.






It was a great amalgam of pub and playground, two of the most dominant meeting places in many young people's lives, and while carefully edging the art out of harm's way, I played along as the relentless shutterbug.




This was an extravagantly tragic sort of event. It was simultaneously fun and terrible to be there, like having a chess set open in the middle of the dance floor. I had to be on my toes at all times to watch for stray light bulbs.







Mild raucousness did occur in the form of a red rose, a red bra and a pitcher of Rickard's Red.






The evening ended with the crossword puzzle moved to centre dance floor, where I smiled at this tiny dance floor being used atop a larger one.





Although I have previously voiced a dislike for pub shows, I decided to let this one slide in favor of some initial exposure, and Olio Festival seemed to pull in some decent throngs.

It was a lot of fun and hard work for one night, but secretly I hope never to have to show in a pub again!

Upon closing the angry toy box of my latest endeavors, I remembered all of those translucent figurative works I made about three or four years ago, and realizing that the dangers of too much revision could prove tedious to both viewer and myself alike, it's merely my own sense of schooling that causes this; I have to keep my methods updated in order to grow enticingly. I made the picture above (titled "I feel so at home with you now", 15" x 15") in 2005 with a forecast of chill anticipated, and by gum, I was right.

Naturally, after so much impertinent patchwork, I'll be turning back to this style for future work. Raw, sinewy and writhing with bone and gristle, I'm curious to see how my current melancholia will shape out.

Though I'm usually shockproof, a recent encounter at a house party with a group of young hedonists left me feeling sexually frigid; the lot of them were on some sort of festive drug when they all decided to cram themselves into a shower stall to grope, squeeze and suckle each other silly while I retreated in disgust to an airing television set. All the going's on left me feeling almost bored with sex in a Warholian fashion, (albeit without the veneer of colour planes and silkscreen). I would have fallen asleep if it wasn't for the slight nausea induced by this flesh crew. Herein, a shift to the lascivious wouldn't be so ill a road to retrace right about now.



Once upon a time, I was combining this ugly kind of wriggling with some sharp, electric coloration. I was listening to a lot of laptop pop like DAT Politics, Momus and Secret Mommy at the time, undoubtedly inspiring the piece above called "Piercing Eros" (2003, 14" x 18"). At a time when I was a lot more shy and without the internet at my immediate disposal, it was fun to mimic the trashy graphic design that was coming out from labels like SKI-PP and Chicks on Speed Records with basic acetate and acrylics. Sadly, I think a lot of that drive disappeared both with the ebb of electroclash (plus it's better tributaries) and my acquisition of an iMac; and looking back, I think I really was on to something that wasn't entirely derivative.

Hell, the goldfish I am, I was of mind to be making pictures more like 'singles' rather than 'albums' back then, only making my shows in Edmonton rather like hodge-podge with little care for group cohesion, and this is, I suppose, where a lot of "Brash Play" came from: a desire to make something like pedantic stage design in a gallery space.



("Bird", 10" x 14", 2005 shown above)

"Piercing Eros" aside (and only mentioned for transitional sake, really), I feel it's appropriate to pluck these tendons of the past for my newfound sexual criticism. Sex is both beautiful and ugly, as an anatomy student might find a corpse to be. So soon after finding old soiled panties in my closet and the recent witnessing of an orgy, I'm going to title my future collection of work "Visceral frigidity", and just as Tracey Emin or Egon Schiele might do, I won't be denying honesty from the project (with the exception of identities).



("Constructive criticism", 15" x 30", 2004 shown above)

John Torrington will never have looked more sultry, just you wait and see...

Something I've been trying to suggest with my show 'Brash Play' is the way that many fine artists have trouble finding themselves in a playful state while worrying about coming off as puerile.

The area in which my take on playfulness might falter lies is in it's lack of subtlety; it's shameless and drunken, an obsessive enfant terrible wearing make up and wigs long suppressed by layered tones of cloudy pastel, angered by incestuous art scenes, even jilted by love. I'm not about to cut my new body of work down completely, though; the confrontations within such loudness were required to bridge over the median between the poker-faced and those reckless things I've grappled with in the company of fellow aesthetes; an aftertaste to some lotus eating, perhaps.

As luck would have it, someone by the name of Chad Murray was scheduled to show alongside myself at the Astoria Hotel for Olio Festival the night of August 14th, and peering in on his work via Facebook I saw a world not unlike what Björk suggested in her song 'The Modern Things'; a world where the mechanized stuff of late can fit comfortably next to what is more naturally occurring.



This is a world where pigeons and redwood trees steadily exist while laser beams dart and eddy about; Chad's painterly approach is carefully orchestrated to include your iPod and your satellite dish without making a poor environmental mark. It's extremely fun, yet also subtle. Ambiguously, it might also incorporate what I'd like to call the 'theatre of the everyday', a world where pretentiousness is naturally occurring without worry of presumption, a perfect mesh of the brash and accustomed, the real and the fake; a perfect world I can only dream of living in.



In the picture above, it's as if Balthus the painter had abandoned his little girls for the infrared. Now, how can any painter execute a task like that without deplorable failure? How can it be that the cosmos could educate me with such coincidental deployment?

Stay tuned to see what this old bone rack has to respond with next as 'Brash Play' makes it's fold.

I feel a lot more relaxed lately, as this picture by photographer Ola Cholewa suggests. Ola found me in a thrift shop on Main Street and we met up a few weeks later to hold a photo session; her inquisitiveness brought her, an old Rolleiflex camera and an accomplice carrying a silver umbrella to my apartment door. Feeling very posh indeed with the circumstance, I simply reclined and didn't bother to get theatrical or strike any poses. As languid a shot it is, it's all about forgetting past heartbreaks and finding a new home not nearly as lonely as I initially took it, seeing a great deal many of those darling acquaintances I knew in Edmonton out here in Vancouver anew.



My timeline for the next while is particularly exciting, I'm happy to report, after about nine months of hermitous composition. During the month of October, I'll be the artist in residence at BLIM, a multi purpose space/cutesy Japanesey boutique located in a great brick building on Main and 17th. Planned for the showing are my more reticent paper works last seen at ArtsHab, as well as some newer takes on that same theme. Yuriko Iga, BLIM's proprietor, informed me with seemingly cautious cadence that I would be required to make a BLIMited edition t-shirt for the event, as well as hold a workshop and movie night, somehow thinking I'd be dissatisfied with this very generous helping of presence. Poor me...



September will be holding an encounter with yet another of my favorite musical acts as the Pet Shop Boys take stage at the Vancouver Centre for the Performing Arts with their 'Pandemonium' tour. Pinching myself isn't enough, so I made this fan video to their latest single 'Did You See Me Coming?' instead.




Serendipitously, Friday August 14th will see me installing a truncated display of 'Brash Play' work for the Olio Festival (my first official appearance in town) at the Astoria Hotel on East Hastings street with none other than the heart-throbbish band Makeout Videotape, who is made up of Edmonton alumni Mac DeMarco and Alex Calder, not to mention another artist by the name of Chad Murray, who I'm having trouble finding more info on. I saw Makeout Videotape perform last Friday at BLIM to a throng of teenage girls who strongly wafted the scent of bubblegum and urine about the room. This should be a fun night; pity the girls won't be old enough to get in!



Here's a preliminary illustration I made of them in response to their fun set.



I suppose it's been a worthwhile nine months of solitude. Now, it's time to feel sublime...

Here are four new 16" x 20" canvases for "Brash Play", a series called "Kaleidocrash".



Using masking tape to paint might seem elementary for some, but I find it restrictive in the same way a rhyming scheme turns free verse into a game.



Compositionally, it's a bit swatchy, but integrational. If the inside of a kaleidoscope contained an imperfect prism and statically charged confetti, you'd probably see something a lot like this.



Much of new pop culture refers to old video game systems for inspiration; these canvases look like those wonderful glitch patterns that appear onscreen when a cartridge malfunctions.



"Brash Play" is, after eight months, finally coming to a close with mostly retouching and incidental prop work left to finish. While I'm still in talks with a gallery to hold the show, I'm planning on premiering a truncated installation of it for the Olio Festival, an art, music and comedy festival taking place around Vancouver from August 13 to 16.

The Olio Festival will be a great opportunity to meet some local creative types in some of the city's coolest places. If the art or comedy doesn't grab you, then most certainly the long list of musical acts will.

Check out oliofestival.com for more details.

This is a new picture (36"x36") of my father Anthony Andel, the uttermost of the nuttermost presented here in a 'stylized representation of his madness'. I would not be as creative without his influences, good or bad.

If Allen Ginsberg had his mother Naomi, I had my dad Tony. He passed away in November of 2007.

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One might automatically assume that part and parcel with a larger city comes more dominant grafitti, which is true to a degree, but in between the seams I've come across a lot of curio art outside. In fact, pictured above is a Liliputian city block (literally a wooden block) somebody stuck to the unassuming side of a storefront on Commercial.

It's evocative to come across so many intimately placed objects in such public places, indicative of a sense of home that goes beyond the brick and drywall for locals. Maybe it's a solution to homelessness: to bring about an end to homelessness, why not bring home to the street?



Chiefly egged on by how appealing intimacy in public is, I put up a whole bunch of tiny thumbnail posters...



...and though she's bigger than a thumb, the scrumptious Kathy K. is now hanging out on Water street.

Flirting with poster art has tickled the situationist in me, creating a sort of psychogeography out of my misadventures, but it's a lot of hard work lugging those pots of glue around, so I think I'll be taking more interest in further studio work this summer. That is, when I'm not on the beach trying to rinse sand from off my strawberries with the mineral water.