Well, since I've been thinking about alphabets, I thought I'd post one more - an old one. In 1999 I painted a large mural on the wall of a Calgary office building. I hired my brother's friend to help me. This was one of the most enjoyable summer jobs either of us ever had. Here's my alphabet-style "graphic recording" of the work. It never was coloured in completely, but maybe I'll get around to doing that one of these days.
"A was an Author who went for a walk..." was the Edward Gorey alphabet that inspired this one.
The chalk was to draw a grid on the wall. And the course was for swingstage operation certification.
We did do a lot of sleeping in, and a lot of painting in the late hours. The logistics of eating on a swingstage proved tricky, so there was a lot of pizza from the Wicked Wedge. And my assistant had the role, at times, of just keeping me entertained while I was painting (he ended up proving highly skilled at colouring things in, but I did all the outlines). So he read aloud quite a bit, and (for some reason) a lot of this reading featured Farley Mowat's "Top of the World" trilogy, which recounts all sorts of true stories of Arctic adventurers, many of whom met grisly fates at the hands of the bitter North.
"Forever Ha!" was a joyful phrase which my assistant remembered having seen inscribed somewhere (like, maybe in his high school yearbook?) and it quickly became our motto.
Four storeys up, our music couldn't bother anyone, so we listened to a lot of Louis Armstrong. (Years later, I spoke to a lady who told me she'd seen us dancing up on the side of the building, and since she couldn't hear the music, actually stopped to watch the surreal scene.) Kane was another one of those doomed Arctic explorers who appeared in Farley Mowat's books. And our swingstage... which had become a sort of metaphorical sailing vessel for us (the Captain & the Mate), was dubbed the Lavish. We loved this name since the swingstage was so emphatically not lavish... and yet, the work was so fun that it did kind of seem a bit decadent and fabulous at the same time!
I don't think we really had any naps on board. We did have some blankets, but that was just because it got cold in the evenings (see below).
I did spill a can of black paint right down the side of the wall. And I think "more rum" was a reference to another one of these swashbuckling tales we spent all summer reading. No rum was consumed in the creation of the mural.
By night we watched old movies... Ladyhawke? Dune? I can't remember. Willy was an eccentric gentleman who tried to enlist us to paint a mural on the side of his warehouse in... maybe Airdrie? - anyway, it was a very unusual-sounding project which (luckily, I think) didn't happen. And Zorna, of course, is the happily-ever-after land of James Thurber's wonderful tale, "The Thirteen Clocks". This was another one the Mate read out loud while I worked, and I remember him being surprised that I could recite right along with the text. But really, that's got to be one of the most glorious tales around. It's out of print, but this is the kind of copy I had - with illustrations by Ronald Searle - in case you're looking for one. But I digress.
One more depiction of the Captain and the Mate on the good ship Lavish. All of these drawings come from The Drawing Book, a series of autobiographical comics journals that I kept between 1996 and about 2003. I published the first volume last year. You can read a bit of it (and subsequent volumes) here on my website. This mural painting alphabet is part of the third volume in the series.
*NOTE ADDED IN 2024: I've been publishing those Drawing Book comics in a free Substack newsletter called "The Drawing Book," and it has been a lot of fun! You can read and subscribe for free, here!
*NOTE ADDED IN 2024: I've been publishing those Drawing Book comics in a free Substack newsletter called "The Drawing Book," and it has been a lot of fun! You can read and subscribe for free, here!
By the way, the mural is at 17th Avenue & 1st Street SW in Calgary (thirteen years later, still there!).
And here's just one more thing. The characters who appear in the mural were all based on real people I knew, but I'll just put this one up here to help celebrate the memory of Christian Rhude.
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