Opening up the economy around here involves wearing a mask in every store/bank/etc: No shirt, no shoes, no mask…no service.
A bit of lino, a t-shirt and now, as I ride off into the sunset I’ll no longer hear “Say, who was that masked man?”
Two engravings done with a multiple line tool on a sample of a material I found just before this lockdown. This one, ‘Passing Storm’ has become my covid-19 print. The other, ‘The Watchers’, is like so many kilometers of Georgian Bay shoreline.
Apparently I’m not the only one who’d rather watch squirrels than mat prints. 
The Archipelago on the east side of Georgian Bay gets its share of rain. This past week we had lots of it and spent many hours under a tarp drawing. We even had a black bear stalk us, moving from island to island around us then sneaking into our camp from behind. My extensive repertoire of bear chasing noises had him leave in a hurry.
A friend told me that at my parents’ Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary he asked my dad what the secret was to being married that long. My dad said that it was ‘Easy, just get married and wait!’
Apparently having a cool newspaper is the same. I bought this fifty years ago (with my pre-kindergarten milk money…honest) and have moved it around all these years.
I can’t imagine thinking about 2019 when I bought it.
I called this ‘Out Of The Wind’ all the time I was working on it but, because I imagined the two people lost in their thoughts at the end of a day, but still very much together, it reminded me of a poem I’d read called ‘Two Solitudes.’
Without any explanation I presented both titles to a few people. They all disliked ‘Two Solitudes.’ I assume that it was a negative thing for them, the two people were angry at each other. Or something.
The poem reads: Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Long story short, by the time I got it into ‘Insights’ it was called ‘Out of the wind.’
This is a fun show in a great village near Guelph. Lots of Art, lots of music!
This is one I did for a postcard exchange for the Chinese ‘Year of The Boar’.
I call it “Two sows, and nineteen.’
What kept me going
What kept me spending long hours last summer turning this old shed into a great studio was the thought that we could be inside working on those icy cold, snowy winter days.
I had to go out in the icy cold, snowy winter night to take these pics of my partner at work.
My first concept for a Chinese ‘Year of the Pig’ card was this Hoggytonk piano player singing “Have a swill year, my sweet (and sour) mama’…..but I have a better idea :- )
