It’s been a while since I’ve made a post here at FormerAirline.com. I, of course, had been busy preparing for the wedding. So much planning, so many details, so many things that could go wrong, so many guests, so much love and excitement. But that’s all over now, and I’ll link to images from that special day soon. The photographers I had brought in for the event did a great job.

But the honeymoon is now also over. We had a fantastic time on the Hawaiian Isle of Kauai. AKA Jurassic Park. The purpose of the honeymoon is to relax and have fun, and that’s exactly what happened. Photography was certainly not the focus, however NOT taking some photos would be missing a huge opportunity to capture images from one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Not wanting to lug around lenses and bodies, I just took my Canon s90. However I did get a 3rd party filter attachment (the polarizer did come in handy) and, more importantly, the WP-DC35 underwater housing made by Canon. Wetness and water is prevalent in Hawaii, and if you don’t have some form of water protection you’re missing a whole lot.

These photos are just a little sliver of time we can hold onto.  We had a wonderful honeymoon, and now we also have wonderful memories.

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While browsing facebook this past week I saw that my former college roommate had started an art raffle for Haiti. I asked him if he would accept a piece of my work for the cause and he agreed. I pitched in my latest, a linocut of a barn owl that I quite like. I did some color experimentation on it - although nothing so ambitious as a reductive color print.

The raffle is accepting donations (for tickets for the raffle) until the 27th. All monies go to the Canadian Red Cross. The Red Cross donations are to be routed through Chapters (think of it as Canada’s Barnes & Noble) who with match the donation, as with the Canadian government - thereby effectively tripling the donation.

Facebook link to the Art Raffle

Recently I bought a Canon s90 (well I bought it after selling off some photo equipment that was going underused). The features impressed me, as well as its compact size. I hate fiddling around with an SLR and various lenses so having a compact camera with a zoom lens has an enormous appeal to me - however their image quality is typically quite inferior to that of an SLR. While the s90 doesn’t deliver DSLR quality - it is a huge cut above normal compacts that I’ve had experience with in terms of dynamic range, and low-light performance.

With my old SD850 it just had a certain look that screamed POINT-N-SHOOT, but I don’t feel that with the results I got from my Thanksgiving trip to Arizona.

Let me state here that America’s National Parks are my most favourite thing about the country. They do a great job at providing information and access to some truly magnificent natural wonders. We only spent a brief amount of time in the Grand Canyon, and I kind of regret that. We got the bright idea that we should spend more time in Sedona which, I think, was a mistake but there wasn’t much to be done about that considering our time and hotel reservations.

Sedona does indeed have some great vistas - but you can only really see them from your car and very few mediocre scenic points if you’re not willing to dish out the dollars for a Jeep, Helicopter, or Balloon ride. The place also smacks of touristic cheesiness. It doesn’t approach the awfulness of Niagara Falls, but it’s getting there.

The first shots of this gallery are of Montezuma Castle. It was interesting to see these kinds of old Hopi settlements and I was impressed - that is until someone told me about Mesa Verde. This looks like small potatoes by comparison. Oh well, it was nice fall day and I enjoyed walking around in the park with my fiancee. The middle shots of the big canyon would be of the Grand Canyon, and the rest are basically scenes around Sedona. I included some shots from my Autocord as well.

All-in-all it was a nice trip. We did more driving than we would’ve liked, but it gave us a little taste of Arizona and I’m sure we’ll be back to the Grand Canyon one day.

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The first shots in the

An 18″x12″ print inspired by a post on PZ Myers’ blog about Sperm whales killer poor, sweet, innocent cephalopods.

Despite its size, it didn’t take as long as I thought it would compared to my other larger piece (it was only an 8×10) but this required far less geometric patterns, and far less areas to clear.

After an evening of fruitlessly trying to spool a roll of film on a reel I came to a stark realization that I needed an artistic change in my life. Or, more accurately, this realization occurred after flinging the changing bag on the floor in frustration. I was in the midst of an artistic funk; My zest for photography seemed to have come to a halt sometime in August, and nothing was shaking me from it. The incident with the reel didn’t help either - let this be a reminder to thoroughly dry your reels and make sure they’re photo-flo free.

In the intervening weeks I didn’t do much. I did a little writing. Memoirs to be precise. I thought back to my youth and my coin-collecting days and thought I should re-ignite a similar passion for that by collecting banknotes. One of the more interesting (and inexpensive) avenues of that hobby I delved into happened to be something called Notgeld, emergency money from the Weimar Republic. They displayed a huge variety of styles, techniques, and were very socially aware and expressive. I saw a certain preciousness in these little prints. It’s really something else to hold a piece of art compared to seeing another digital image on the screen. A lot of these notes looked to me to have been done by making woodcuts or linocuts, and one day I suddenly thought, “Hey! I can do that, can’t I?”

I hadn’t done much art in years. Not since TV Cream Toys anyway. I was unsatisfied with my drawing and couldn’t make myself stick with it. I liked my results in Adobe Illustrator but I find the disconnect from the tablet to the screen frustrating. But I thought that there may be potential in printmaking: a means I could use to combine the hands-on nature of drawing and the clean lines and design capabilities of Illustrator.

I got in touch with Randy at the Westminster Art Supply Warehouse to ask about woodcut supplies. Woodcutting supplies and info is, however, quite scarce compared to the relative abundance of lino-cut supplies and info. So I bought ink, paper, a brayer, a baren, and of course the cutting tools and linoleum blocks.

I started by making a simple little print of a cat. I didn’t think much of it but my fiancee loved it and she put it beside her monitor on her desk. Next I tried to do something more stylized. I took one of my old photos from Australia, specifically of the 12 Apostles rock formation on the Ocean Road. I liked what came out and I had fun doing it:

Next I proceeded to do something a lot more ambitious on a much larger block. This took an entire weekend and I had sore hands by the end of it all. Making little squares with geometric precision (or as much as I could muster) wasn’t so much fun. This one is a design of a German city called Esslingen that I visited back in 2004. I seem to be focusing on these old trips because my little digital photos that I took back them seem kind of dated in that they were taken on a 3.2 megapixel digital point and shoot. Not the best image quality, not much room to enlarge, and plus I had a tendency to underexpose too much back then. But using them as reference points for the linocuts gave them a new life.

Most surprisingly, the way people were beginning to respond to these prints was surprising. Much different from the typical “Nice pic” comments I usually get. Even though the content of these prints are somewhat simple, it’s a testament to the enduring reverence people have for the art object.

While the above work took way too long to create, I cut and printed the following block in a couple of hours.

After doing so I posted this on a message board I frequent and someone offered to buy a print. Something about this comment got me thinking about when I was learning about printmaking at the University of Western Ontario. I remember having a good time during my intro to printmaking during the summer of ‘00, but in the fall of ‘01 things had changed somehow. I was an angry young man, or so it probably seemed. What was I angry about? I don’t know. Maybe I felt like every social group I tried to align myself with became out of reach (even though I didn’t really call them), or maybe I felt rejected by them (possibly because I alienated them). I’m pretty sure I felt frustrated that people weren’t recognizing how wonderful I thought I was (especially the ladies). A lack of social skills exacerbated this problem, and the result was a steaming cauldron of angst.

“Why was I taking printmaking!?” I began to think to myself. “What future is there in it? You can’t make money with lino prints! And who does lithography? LITHOGRAPHY! What is this the 1800s?” In fact I began to completely question the use of an art degree at all. “Greek art? Blech! Museum studies? Blah! New media - THAT’S where it’s at! Computers and stuff!”

Of course I couldn’t articulate what I was feeling very well and the result was, in retrospect, an embarrassing tantrum in printmaking class. It was mostly huffing and puffing, but I’m sure I raised my voice once or twice in various classes and generally looked like an unfriendly douchebag (if you’ll forgive the term… but my preppy attire and lack of amiability makes it appropriate in this circumstance). I was 21 years old, but inverting the numbers would’ve been more appropriate.

My behavior did not go unnoticed, and one day while I was in a particular huff my printmaking professor Tricia confronted me and asked me what the problem was. I said I wasn’t sure if I could go on with this stuff. I didn’t see the point anymore. She then led me to the director of the Visual Arts department and, I remember this clearly, the director saw Tricia first and asked, “Ah Tricia, have you spoken with Mister Arnold yet?” when I suddenly came into view.

Below: the Karlsruhe Marktplatz

After having a discussion with the director (Hatch I think his name was) I spoke with other advisers, and finally decided to drop printmaking, get my basic degree and get out of there, and then move out to the west coast (where my family had fled from London to). I focused on my new media course using antiquated software producing what now must seem laughably dated Photoshop projects, HTML webpages limited to 30kb, ZIP drives, and 3-5 minute videos that took innumerable hours to make on a Mac that would crash almost always. At work I now make 3-5 minute videos in 3-5 minutes.

I guess that really says something about the disposable nature of the “new media”. Things date easily. Additionally, everyone’s adept at it. Millions of people know how to use Photoshop, millions of people know how to edit their own video quickly and easily, and even more people fancy themselves photographers. I think I’m coming to see that if you’re going to differentiate yourself as a creative person these days you need to do something different, or at least something that has endured - like printmaking.

I’m surprised I’ve kept up with these linocuts so far. I never had this dedication when it came to drawing, and the results are satisfying and hopefully they’ll endure longer than a digicam snap. Hopefully I’ll keep cutting and printing. And hopefully Tricia sees this blog post and sees I’m sorry for being a brat and that I now wish I had stuck with printmaking.

I started to add color. I’m in deep now.