THE STORYBOOKS HAVE BEEN UNFAIR

This project is a collaboration with unwitting partners. It began with an old, skinny, ring-bound sketchbook that I’d purchased in a thrift store in Chilliwack. Its pages were filled with faint pencil drawings of mountains, trees, streams and solitary cabins as well as quaint montages of windmills, water pumps, birds on branches and arched stone bridges. Contemplating these sketches, I decided that these somewhat impoverished landscapes required life. With a disregard for plausibility, I started drawing animals into the scenes – a falcon perched, wings outspread, on a bridge over a small town; a bighorn sheep the size of the cabin it stands beside; prairie dogs calling to one another across a brook in the forest.

Once I’d filled the pages of this found sketchbook, I began to search out other drawings with which to meddle. Ebay for a time proved to be a fair source of drawings. I limited my purchases to landscapes, cityscapes and some interiors in pencil and watercolour. My purchases began arriving in the mail and I continued with my work. The resulting collection of drawings and paintings range greatly in quality and style and are dated back as far as 1850. More recently, I have been collecting work from local thrift stores.

All of these drawings come to me second hand and seem to have been more or less discarded by someone; I consider my reworking of them to be an act of rehabilitation or rescue. Using the existing landscapes as a springboard, I apply pencil and paint and find my own style influenced by the marks and palette of the other artists. The animals I’ve added are both out of context and out of scale so that the resulting drawings becoming fragments of fantastical narratives, of stories half told.