CARTOON DRAWINGS!

COMIC BOOK MURALS

Cartoon Drawings and Life Sized Comic Book Pages! A office lady disintegrates as a result of her routines, a bottle drinks an alcoholic and a teenager turns into a text message. "Cycles of Life" was a large format drawing installation featuring a series of comic strips and animated artworks revolving around the themes of progress and repetition. As part of an artist's pop up project at Toronto's renowned Drake Hotel I spent 10 days turning an empty storefront studio into an imaginary world.

Working with the theme of "cycles" was also interesting as I attempted to bring each short story full circle ending the loops with a little joke. Working without any scripts or preliminary sketches this format proved both challenging and insightful. While thinking about routines and all the things we do over and over I started to discover cycles in all aspects of our lives.

However despite all our constant repetitions I also noticed a distinctive progression; while things seem to constantly repeat and recycle life tends not to renew exact replications but instead offers perpetual intersections and inter changes. Representative of this the comics often featured a cycle of replacements where either one person or object steps into the role of another. In the end the exploration revealed the dark yet humorous banality of morality, mortality and progress.

I started the project by covering the entire space with bank white paper and proceeded to work from the ground up. I covered the entire floor, created live sized comic strips for the walls and decorated smaller areas with extended sequential artworks. Once the space was sufficiently covered I set up an on site animation studio. Using a small light table, digital photography and a cheap laptop computer I created several minutes of stop motion and classical hand drawn animations.

Once the cartoons were completed I projected them on the last unused wall effectively transforming the entire space. The entire collection included a 20 x 30 foot floor mural, four 4 x 12 foot life sized comic strips, five large ink drawings, three long sequential artworks and approximately 400 small hand drawn animation stills. All the work was done with India ink on cheap drafting paper which was destroyed at the end of the project.

The End of the Line

Following the large scale versions of these cartoon drawings I adapted the "cycle stories" into regular comic book format. Along with a wide selection of comic strips created over the past ten years I collected these new works in a limited edition anthology entitled "End of the Line".