Two illustrations inspired by the American poet Ezra Pound’s famous and famously short poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” first published in 1913.
I have no experience with Chinese and Japanese brush painting, and it is known as a technique that takes at least a whole lifetime to perfect, but it’s the idea that counts. Perhaps I will return to this theme once I’ve had a little more practice with this painting style.
I am currently at work on “Each in His Narrow Cell,” a graphic novel recounting the siege of Quebec and the Battle of The Plains of Abraham in 1759. In revisiting this pivotal moment in Canadian history, my intention is not simply to present a didactic history lesson in visual form, but rather to create an emotionally engaging, character-driven narrative centered on the personal motivations and inner conflicts of the French, English and Indigenous participants. Below are 8 completed pages of the first 60-page sample section I am working on.
One of the parameters I set for myself with the colouring was that all the characters from a particular nation would be depicted in a combination of a neutral grey tone and one characteristic colour -blue for the French, red for the English, purple for the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and so on. Similarly, the colour of the lettering in the speech bubbles indicates what language is being spoken. Chief Nissowaquet of the Odawa of l’Arbre Croche appears in yellow, a decision based on the background colour of the present-day flag of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa, within whose reservation boundaries the village of l’Arbre Croche was situated.
In this section, the French commander at the siege of Quebec, General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, finally returns to his beloved chateau of Candiac, in Languedoc. To fully understand this scene, it is necessary to know that just before the beginning of the siege, Montcalm received the tragic news that one of his four daughters had died. Although from across the Atlantic Montcalm was not able to find out which one, he assumed it was his youngest, Mirète, who had long been sickly.
A few months ago, the American magazine Plough Quarterly commissioned me to create a comics adaptation of the celebrated final section of T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding”, the last of his Four Quartets. The comic is now up on their website: http://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/poetry/little-gidding and will appear in the next print issue, which will be available in a couple of weeks.
Click here for more information about Plough Quarterly: http://www.plough.com/en/subscriptions/quarterly
A watercolour of the interior of the Benedictine convent of Sao Benito in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Based on a photograph by Bernard Hermann.
I am currently at work on a graphic novel recounting the siege of Quebec and the Battle of The Plains of Abraham in 1759. After drawing out a 60-page sample section in pencil, I have begun the process of inking and applying watercolour to it. This is the first completed page, featuring the Marquis de Montcalm, commander of the French army in North America.
In the spring of 2015, I was Artist in Residence at Wait-te-Ata Press of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (with funding from the Canadian High Commission in New Zealand). While there I participated in “Entrenchments 2015”, an initiative of Dr. Marco Sonzogni (Director of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation), and of Dr. Sydney Shep (Director of Wai-te-Ata). Along with the New Zealand author and graphic artist Sarah Laing, I was invited to create visual responses to texts originating from or dealing with the First and Second World Wars. Among my assigned activities was the creation of the “daily dispatches”, a series of fifteen-minute live “visual response” to a daily twitter feed associated with New Zealand’s WW100 project, which tweeted extracts from the wartime diary of Lt. Col. William George Malone, the commander of the Wellington Battalion of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. The drawings were executed in whiteboard marker on a glass panel in front of a live audience and a stop motion camera. Two years later, a composite video of these performances put together by Warren Butcher is now up on Youtube:
Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc
As she came riding through the dark;
No moon to keep her armour bright
No man to get her through this very smoky night.
She said, “I’m tired of the war,
I want the kind of work I had before,
a wedding dress or something white
to wear upon my swollen appetite.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you talk this way,
you know I’ve watched you riding every day
and something in me yearns to win
such a cold and lonesome heroine.”
“And who are you?” she sternly spoke
to the one beneath the smoke.
“Why, I’m fire,” he replied,
“And I love your solitude, I love your pride.”
“Then fire, make your body cold,
I’m going to give you mine to hold,”
saying this she climbed inside
to be his one, to be his only bride.
And deep into his fiery heart
he took the dust of Joan of Arc,
and high above the wedding guests
he hung the ashes of her wedding dress.
It was deep into his fiery heart
he took the dust of Joan of Arc,
and then she clearly understood
if he was fire, oh then she must be wood.
I saw her wince, I saw her cry,
I saw the glory in her eye.
Myself I long for love and light,
but must it come so cruel, and so bright?
-Leonard Cohen, Joan of Arc (1971)
I recently acquired a Epson V6oo scanner, which means I no longer have to pay to get my colour scans done at the copy shop, and can now post watercolour images -such as this watercolour class exercise- that I had previously deemed not quite scan-worthy.
