FASHION DRAWING!

MONSTER SHIRTS! Limited Edition Hand Painted Fashion Designs! Crazy Monsters, Creepy Faces and Surreal Citizens in this collection of weird shirts. One face melts into another, man turns into animal and animal into man. If the city is a stage the cast is deranged! Turning our thoughts, fears, dreams and emotions outward, this set of unique designs personifies the imagination transforming the human face into ridiculous stories. Each shirt is a one of a kind entirely original hand painted artwork.

The entire collection was created in a single sitting working at a rapid pace reminiscent of my early street art performances. The idea behind this spontaneous process is to avoid predictability by incorporating errors and impulse without predetermined ideas about the finished artwork. Basically I try to meditate on the human face, crowds, sounds and emotions while drawing as fast as I can. Working with black ink on white material makes this process interesting as there is absolutely no opportunity for corrections. This aids the meditation by eliminating any need to revisit either physically or mentally during the creative process. This is technique was particularly interesting to me as a live street performance because there was a never ending stream of inspiring people and I really enjoyed the impulsive incidents and accidents that gave the work life.

This series was a collaborative effort between CBE, a Toronto based clothing company, and “HEY APATHY!” that specializes in local designs, fabrics and artistic expression. CBE provided the t-shirts and set them up in there loft studio space for me to paint. In one afternoon I managed to splatter monsters all over the blank shirts. CBE then baked the heavy black inks in their oven to setting them permanently into the fabric. It was a really interesting way to combine grassroots production, printing processes and fine art into a wearable canvas. There where 40 hand painted shirts in this set each done on heavy duty cotton with brushes and black screen printing ink. This was a part of an ongoing CBE collaborative experiment in which they have worked with numerous Toronto based artist's to create unique fashions.