Mixed Media Orchids From Denmark (With Love)

I just returned from a quick trip to Denmark. I am going to post some sketchbook pages from my travel-sketchbook, but before I do that, I'll share this mixed media piece that I did over there, and that my father will now have to find a frame for and add to his (not-so-small) collection of his youngest daughter's creative expressions. Like most parents, though, he appreciates his children's' work (unless I include him in my semi-autobiographical comics) and always displays it around the house. 

I had forgotten how beautiful Denmark is in the summer. Most of the days came with warm sunshine, but without the extreme heat and humidity we get over here. The inspiration for this piece was my father and stepmother's orchids in the big living room window with all the sunshine and blue skies outside. My parents' houses are full of plants and flowers, and in their gardens and greenhouse, there are tomato plants, cucumbers, herbs, roses, berry bushes, fruit trees, and plenty of brightly-colored flowers. All meticulously cared for with love. And here I am, someone who can't even keep a cactus alive, and I have no patience for gardening and plants anyway. Instead, I inherited my creative urge from both of them, and prefer to draw flowers rather than care for the actual things (though, to be honest...I don't draw or paint an awful lot of flowers either). 

The background is made of cut-outs from local newspapers from the Sallingsund area, pasted on bristol board with gesso and paint mixed in with it. I drew the flowers with pencil, painted them with watercolor and redrew them with ink. The zipper on the upper left hand corner is something I found out on my father's porch, and nobody could figure out who had lost it. I think it must have been my friend, Lis-Anne, who came to visit a few days earlier. Lis-Anne: if you are missing this object, you now know where to find it!

Canada, Comics & Cheesecake

Cheesecake pen & ink drawing w/ pink frame

View from our hotel window in Montreal

Mural in Montreal

Expozine 2010

On most Friday nights (after the worst rush traffic has subsided), we drive up to Vermont for the weekend. Last Friday, we decided that we would stretch the weekend out a little, so we went on to Montreal on Saturday, spent the night there, then drove back to Vermont on Sunday afternoon, and finally came back to Boston Monday night.

Montreal is one of my favorite cities in the northeast for several reasons: it's in Canada, and since it's also in Quebec, where most people speak French, you really get the sense that you have gone abroad. Otherwise, going to Canada from the U.S. feels a bit like crossing the border from Norway into Sweden. Yes, you're in a different country, but it's not a drastic change (I know many Canadians--not to mention Swedes--will be offended by this statement. Try not to take it personally! :-).

Other things I really like about Montreal is good restaurants (French and Indian are among my favorite cuisines), the old part of town, even though it's touristy, and Chinatown, which seems bigger and has a lot more stores than the one in Boston. It is also the city of Leonard Cohen, Julie Doucet and Drawn & Quarterly :-)

When I was a kid, we sailed up the St. Lawrence river on the bulk carriers my parents worked on (for more information on this see my Inbound 5 story, "The Sardine's Tale") on our way to the Great Lakes. I don't remember much of these trips, except stopping further up the river, at Niagara Falls, where we went to see the falls and the surrounding kitch. I also remember falling down from one shipdeck to another, a fall from which I still have a scar on my chin. But that's all a different (comic book?) story.

This time in Montreal, I decided to go to the Expozine for a few hours, with a box of Inbounds, Outbounds, Hellbounds and some of my own minicomics for trade. I was only there for about 4 hours, but it was a really cool experience, and I got to meet a lot of nice and interesting people, and on my trading spree I ended up with some neat stuff (for example an illustrated version of T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," by Julian Peters, a local artist. The drawings are really beautiful and accompany the poem really well. In addition, Peters used buldings and street scenes in Boston as references for his drawings, so it just couldn't be more perfect! :-)

Back in Boston, I am working on a project, which I should try to get done pretty soon (illustrating a chapter of someone's graphic novel), and otherwise drawing cheesecake drawings of pretty ladies (preferably with some pink involved, the color I love to hate, or maybe hate to love...), which has been my favorite hobby for as long as I can remember. There are lots of crafts fairs and shows coming up this holiday season, you might see me at one or two, if I'm tabling for the Boston Comics Roundtable.