Graffiti Drawings! Technological tentacles are assimilating mankind! Weird wires have attached themselves to the minds and eyes of the metropolis denizens converting human ideals into streamlined ideologies. Beware of unusual people turning into animals and then into machines! Giant Robots stomp through the dystopian landscape hunting down raw emotions and inflicting telepathic restraints against creativity, individualism and inspirational anomalies of any kind. Symptom of the assimilation include flashing metallic appendages, staring intently at a little box in ones hand and talking to oneself while walking alone or talking on the phone while in the company of others. During my second season as a street artist I focused on the faces all around me to create a series of surreal metropolitan portraits. These rapid gesture graffiti drawings generally depicted a single denizen while expressively investigating the unconscious contradictions which exist between progress and the human psyche.

I started the 2005 season off with the same small toolkit full of card board graffiti drawings that I’d used the previous year things evolved quite rapidly. The first thing that changed was my technical approach. I switched to using brushes as my main instrument instead of quill pens. By changing to the brush I was able to create graffiti drawings a lot faster. As a result my process became an entertaining performance. I was making 30 x 40 inch characters in less than a minute which was quick enough to catch the attention of passing pedestrians. Crowds of people started to surround me watching to see what sort of monster would appear next.  I began working mostly on poster sized images but as I got more comfortable with the materials the size of the artwork continually increased. By the middle of the summer I was doing 4 x 6 ft. and 4 x 12 ft. performances and finished the year off  with my first large format street mural.

As a result of the bustling energy my imagery also started to change. I had been drawing alienated zombie like monsters but became deeply affected by all the strange people I was meeting in the streets. My symbolic hieroglyphics were replaced by fleshed out caricatures; pictures of people wearing business suits, using cell phones and hand held devices while suffering multiple personality disorders personified as telepathic attacks. This metamorphosis was extremely significant in the development of my artistic narratives.

Only a few years earlier I had drawn the entire metropolis as an endless sea of faceless denizens. I was however, determined to investigate the anonymity of the crowds further and suddenly there I was years later sitting in the middle of the busy city sidewalks studying the faces of all those people first hand. In my final street drawing of 2005 I did my first caricature of the city in its entirety, adding up all the crazy characters and introducing the Toronto Skyline in a 12 x 15 foot mural. The work took about three days to complete and was first exhibited with duct tape on an abandoned storefront behind my display Queen Street West (See Photos at the bottom of this page).

TORONTO STREET ART SCENE

I was having so much fun doing graffiti drawings the street that I started inviting other artists to join me. Before long were painters, print makers, photographers and sculptors all along the sidewalks of Queen Street West. The whole area was transformed by the group of visual artists and we started to get a lot of attention. The press, collectors and even galleries started to frequent our little strip of outdoor creativity.

Unfortunately the city by-law officers were not so excited. It turned out that displaying anything on the street is illegal in Toronto and we ended up playing a perpetual game of cat and mouse with the authorities. For the most part the officers would just kick us off of the sidewalks however on a few occasions’ heavy fines and confiscation did occur. In order to avoid the penalties we would pack our stuff of quickly and hide in nearby cafes until the officers had left. Despite these interruptions the experiment was primarily a success and everyone who participated had a really good time.