I like bright colours!

(This sun is on the front of my house.)

A few weeks ago I had the chance to draw some pictures for Calgary Reads, a local early literacy initiative. (Here's the picture I drew!) A group that encourages reading – what’s not to love about that? But there was something else I really liked, too: the colours. Calgary Reads has used colour to make its work space fun, vibrant, and inviting. And in doing so, it’s branded itself as a fun and colourful organization.

It seems like a no-brainer: bright colours will make things more memorable, more accessible, and more welcoming! But it’s surprising how seldom folks are willing to take a chance and add colour to their scheme. I guess there’s always the danger that the colour you love might rub someone the wrong way. Taste in colour is pretty subjective. But I’d rather take the chance – especially in the space I’m going to inhabit (or work in) myself. Being surrounded by an inspiring space – which definitely includes colour – makes all the difference to my happiness and productivity. Well, and it helps if there’s also a coffee pot.

Calgary Reads front lobby welcomes you in with bright colours that tell you all about what you’ll find inside. Here is a bookshelf’s worth of sponsor names – a great way to recognize them in a permanent way that’ll never get boring.

I like how the objects on this wall seem to tell a story – starting small and getting bigger as your eye moves towards the right. You “read” the wall from left to right, just the same way you read the words on the page of a book!

I have the feeling Calgary Reads' Steacy Collyer, who was the driving force behind all these colours, would get along fine with the German artist Angela Holtermann-Stumpf. Here's a picture of her house in the city of Witten. I wish my house looked something like this, too!

When I bought my 1911 Ramsay house in 2004, every single surface in the house was painted white. I loved that – it was like a blank canvas just waiting for me to paint. And I didn’t stop until I had done just that.

I like painting skies and suns on the ceiling. (I’m really claustrophobic, so I think it’s really just about creating the illusion that there’s more space over my head.)


Here’s a sun I painted on the ceiling of an apartment I lived in about fifteen years ago (above). The room was already purple. I never would have chosen that colour, but it kind of grew on me. And here’s my own living room ceiling (below). This picture was taken by Rachel Psutka, a interactive reporter at the Regina Leader-Post, during her internship at the Calgary Herald a couple of years ago.

Here are some pictures of my house back when we renovated it (and I painted everything!). And down here is a little mural I painted on my son’s wall after he was born. Wasn’t I ambitious back then? We’ll be lucky if my second son even gets a mural at this rate!

I'm looking forward to catching up with the colourful Calgary Reads on March 6th, at their Reading Rally at Ramsay School! What is a Reading Rally? Here's what Calgary Reads' website has to say:

Doesn't that sound like fun? See you there!

I heard that Calgary's Signal Hill Library will be getting some new public art. I thought that sounded exciting, and I went down to take a look at the library. Although I have some good friends in the neighbourhood, I hadn't actually been in the building before. It was a lovely spot: bright and spacious, but inviting and cozy, too. And there was a lot going on in there. I liked being reminded of how much the Calgary Public Library is about more than just books. It's a gathering spot for familes, seniors, students, and all sorts of Calgarians.

Since that visit, I've been thinking about about how much libraries have shaped my life. A lot, it seems.

Why did we count in French? I'm guessing my mom was trying to come up with ways to improve our minds, of which, in a life of walking back and forth to the library with a two-year-old in a small prairie town, there were probably relatively few.

When I was a student, I worked for four years at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College Library. During the first three years, I was actually attending Trinity College - then I took a break and came back to work there again while I was a student at OCAD. I always worked the 6 PM - midnight shift (and these are still my favourite working hours). Things weren't very busy then (as now) and there was lots of time to sit and draw.

Strangely enough, when I look around the internet for photos of the old Trin Library, I can't find a single one. It was in a century-old basement, and rather dark and dingy. The whole thing has been moved to a shiny brand-new building (pictured here - and not even that new, anymore). I knew the library had been moved to this new and improved location, but I'm surprised that there isn't a single picture of the old one to be found.

Incidentally, I'm also surprised that I can't find a single image of U of T's old Sig Sam Library, either. The stacks were built of metal grilles. You could see through the bars. The floors and ceilings were made of it, too. So if you stood in the aisle between the stacks, you could look up, down and all around and just see rows and rows of books. It felt as though you were in a kind of surreal 1950's book-filled cage.

As a university tour guide, I made a point of taking new students through this library just so they'd get a feeling for how university would soon immerse them in books. Well, partly it was just to freak them out a bit, too.

Somehow, it seems no one's taken a picture of this.

However, I did find this picture of the Hart House Library, a cozy spot in which, according to both my dad and my grandfather, students used to come for a nap. If you Google "Hart House Library Nap" you'll find quite a few pages of testimonials from other erstwhile nappers. (Incidentally, the picture was part of an article in which the author mentions that she, too, used to take naps here.)

The only image I can find that has anything to do with my four years at the Trin Library is this picture of a library bookplate. These were glued into the inside front cover of library books. When I look at it, I can still smell the glue paste.

At the same time I was learning to read in rural Saskatchewan, Margaret Mahy began working as a children's librarian at the Christchurch City Library in New Zealand. Mahy went on to write the myriad of wonderful stories we know and love (although, alas, we don't know them very well in Canada. Today, despite Mahy's literary accolades such as two Carnegie Medals and the Hans Christian Anderson Medal - children's literature's "Little Nobel" - I can tell you exactly which of her works can be found on the YA shelves of Calgary's Public Library. Maddigan's Fantasia (also published as Maddigan's Quest) (fun, but not her greatest novel); the soaked-in-Gilbert-&-Sullivan and luckily-still-popular Great Piratical Rumbustification; and her last great work, The Magician of Hoad (which I've also seen under the title Heriot). Publishing restrictions must have something to do with this serious lack of Mahy. It's not the fault of the library. But if not for second-hand bookstores (see above), I'd never have discovered Mahy's The Catalogue of the Universe. Enough said).

Luckily, I discovered it, wrote about it, and was invited to come down to the Christchurch City Library to speak about Mahy's impact on my life and work. I loved being in the place Mahy herself had worked. And I loved meeting Margaret Mahy. Despite my Bob Dylan groupiedom, I'm really not much of an autograph-seeking kinda person. But that was one in-person meeting I will always remember.

This is my only picture of Margaret Mahy and me. She was signing my old copy of The Catalogue. As I wrote in a tribute to Mahy published in Storylines' online newsletter following her death earlier this year: she reminded me of an Ent. It was fun to see that we were both wearing long drapy scarves around our necks. (It was freezing. But so was my whole trip to New Zealand. A intelligent-seeming graduate student asked me the following question about Canada: "Don't you have some kind of special houses up there to keep the cold weather out?" Well, we have insulation, if that's what you mean. Anyway.)

Here's a bit about Mahy and libraries from the comic-strip portion of an essay I wrote about Mahy.

By the way, I suspect that the reason you can always find The Great Piratical Rumbustification on the shelves of a library is that it's usually published with a companion story, The Librarian and the Robbers. This fantastic tale of a heroic librarian is one that Mahy clearly wrote from the heart, just as it warms the hearts of librarians everywhere. The fact that it's illustrated by Quentin Blake just makes it all the nicer. I wish I had a picture or a quote from it to add in here, but as soon as I find a copy I inevitably give it away to someone. Oh well - if you want it, you know where to get it.

Well, and last of all, my own hometown library. I have many fond memories of growing up with the Calgary Public Library. Maybe the strangest one is being part of a kids' summer reading group that used the following method to encourage youngsters to read: Every time you read a book, you'd report on it to the librarian, who'd make a mark on your chart. When you'd read a whole bunch of books and the marks reached the bottom of the chart , you received some kind of a prize.

I know - that doesn't sound too strange. The strange part was that the charts depicted oil derricks pumping oil out of the ground. (I have tried to draw a picture of this big chart here.) Each child got an oil derrick (and was allowed to name their own oil company. I can't remember what I called mine, except that it ended with the words "In Company," which I thought was what "Inc." was short for. You can see my future wasn't in business). At the bottom of the chart there was a picture of an enormous underground pool of oil. As each book was marked off, you got a bit closer to the oil. When you struck oil, you hit the library jackpot! I can't remember what the prize was. But I remember loving the big wall-sized chart on which some creative librarian had glued construction paper to represent layers of sand, rock, and other stuff you had to "drill" through to make the reading journey more exciting and suspenseful. I remember thinking, "when I'm grown up, I'll make a big wall-sized poster like that."

Well, that was Calgary in the oil boom of the late 70's/early 80's. It didn't occur to me then that there was anything unusual about oil-pumping library incentives. I also thought that building cranes were a regular feature of any city skyline.

Here are two cards: one in my good old mosaic-sky style...

... and this one's a spin-off from my 2005 painting show "The Brothers: Portraits of the Rock Central Family Band."

Last one is coming up tomorrow... and it's not what you'd expect!

Follow along to the next post, which isn't exactly a Christmas card, but more of a Christmas comic strip.

From a photo of my brother in about 1978. When I painted this, I thought: "At last, a painting with broad appeal. Any Canadian parent would be able to relate to this image... hopefully I'll be able to SELL IT!" Then I showed it to my mom and she liked it so much that I had to give it to her. Ah well, it's better to be a starving artist with a happy mother... right? Anyway, at least I was able to use it for a Christmas card.

And now we have Christmas cards from 2004 and 2005 coming up next.

The above excerpt from a mini-comic called "The Floor" tells the story of how my family house was sold. 2002 was spent packing up thirty years of stuff. For my Christmas card, I thought I'd paint a picture of the house. It had been a gathering spot for friends, relatives and all sorts of local folks, for many years. It was a place people remembered.

I remember coming home from a year away, aged seventeen, and discovering that the whole house (previously a greyish-brownish kinda colour) had been painted emerald green. That was startling, but I got used to it.

After it was sold, it was hard to get used to not having it there. I remember one time diverting a drive with a friend who had to make a bathroom stop, saying, "we can just stop at the house." We were almost there before I remembered we didn't live there anymore.

Anyway, in the Christmas of 2002, I had a photograph of the house that had been taken in the daytime, but I thought it would look more wintery and Christmas-y to paint it at night. So I made the sky and the house dark. Then I made a whole bunch of Christmas cards and gave them to all sorts of people. At last I gave a card to a friend of mine on a visit to London. She was an objective observer who looked at it with the critical eye of a friend and an artist. And right away she pronounced that it was the saddest painting she'd seen for a long time.

As soon as she said it I knew it was true. There I had been trying to commemorate the happy home of my youth, but what I'd painted was a cold, dark, empty building. It didn't look welcoming... it looked deserted. But maybe that portrait showed the real situation more accurately than what I'd had in mind.

Ten years later, my three-year-old son refers to this house of legend as "the frog house" because it was green. That's the legacy... for now!

Contine on to the next Christmas card from 2003...

2000's Christmas card was an image from an oil painting I'd painted earlier that year. It's my dad, Christmas carolling a long time before. You can't go wrong with a hat like that.

2001's Christmas card is coming up next - keep going!

But now here's the funny part. In 2006 there was a big art show called "Masters of American Comics" which included Feininger as one of the, well, masters of American comics. I should mention that he drew comics, like these ones about the "Kin-der-Kids." But I didn't really think they were a big deal, or that anyone else much cared. (I'd never met anyone in Canada who'd even heard of Feininger, all those times I raved about his paintings.) Well, so it turns out he's a famous comics guy, too. Who knew! Meanwhile, those North Sea landscapes are still the paintings I like better than any others. Merry Christmas.

The next Christmas card is from 1999... keep on going!

Avenue Magazine, which recently ran a feature about Calgary self-portraits, just tweeted: "If someone asked you to create a self-portrait, how would you portray yourself?"

So I thought I'd put up a few of my own. As an auto- biographical comics person, I think painting self-portraits just seemed like the logical thing to do. This one was a "Top Finalist" in the Portrait Society of Canada's annual international portrait com- petition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. That was a while ago... this portrait was painted in 2002. Maybe I'm due for another, more up-to-date self-portrait!


Here are some thumbnails from other portraits. Click on the images to see the self-portrait page on my site.

This summer I also dug some paintings out of my basement to hang up for a couple of months at Waves Coffee House. I'm sure the paintings were happy to get some exposure after lying low for a while!