More Halloween, 2008

Further down rue de Rouen. Near Moreau. This will probably look even cooler at night.

Hallowe'en 08

I was going to do an entire new blog with photos of the wonderful Hallowe'en displays here on rue de Rouen in Montreal. But I only got a couple of pictures, and there weren't so many good displays this season. Sometimes they build whole scenes with sound effects and lights.

But these ones are a few doors down, and are cool. I bought a lot of candy last year, and didn't get one visitor. So, this year I'm going off to a party, and will let the cats handle the visitors, if they care to.



Last night, I was at the Montreal Monthly Comic Jam. Mostly the usual suspects, and my photos were pretty dark, or I'm just to lazy to preview and put them up. (er, not any more! See below.)

This is Jane Tremblay, with her whip (!!) and her beautiful bat necklace.


Three more of my comics comrades. Kurt Beaulieu, Rick Gagnon, and Eric Theriault.


The bar was a tumult because of noisemakers and crowds in for the hockey game. Very unpleasant. When most of the hockey fans had left, I drew this old guy nursing his beer. His mouth was actually more open than this, but I was just sneaking peeks at him to draw him. Happy Hallowe'en!

The Dude, and Head Shaking Cats

Just putting up another coloured pen sketch from the back of paper I've printed on. This is sort of "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski.

And I was taking pictures of cats. They often look away, and I have to take another shot. Afterwards, they seem to move when I flick between the pictures on the camera, so it's irresistible (to me, anyway) to make an animated gif. The background and most of the cats stay still, because I cut out just the heads.

In this picture they're shaking heads, rather than nodding.

Suits and Murals

Wow. Tired at the moment, but happier working and earning money than not. I relaxed by drawing on the back of my research materials with that colour pen.


Below is a photo of the mural that guy did a couple of posts back. Unhappily, there was a car in the way, also a crazy lady screaming beside me (poor soul), while I took the picture.

Film Stills

Film stills in catalogs are always promising. You can imagine an entire film based on the still, together with the title.

I had fun drawing some of the faces from stills in the program for the recent Festival du Nouveau Cinema. Also combining characters from different stills, which would make totally new films.





Finally, just another character, out of my fevered imagination:

Nice Lines

Pedaling along down the street, and, as with every Sunday, there were a lot of people working on the free graffiti space on the underpass by rue de Rouen and rue de l'Esperance. This guy had really great technique, and I asked permission to capture a little movie of him making his lines. Below , a couple of still shots, and I'll try to get the finished mural, but sadly, they don't last long.

Buncha Faces

Something a little less ugly for Saturday. A bunch of faces. Working on hands a little, too. Exciting stuff, hey?

So Sorry

Sorry about this, but I'm drawing more fat women. This time they're weighty versions of these sexy chicks with weapons a friend of mine draws. Maybe good for a laugh. Still fun playing with the colour ballpoint pen.

Bigger Pen

So I went out to the dollar store and got a bigger pen, plus a bag of chips. Both about the same price. I think the more white you leave, the better the drawing. (the pen looks like something ladies buy in one of those specialty shops in downtown Montreal!)



Was watching this film called People I Know, with Al Pacino. It was made in 2001, but not released until 2004, because it said uncomplimentary things about the mayor of New York.

It's a movie about a wheeling and dealing press agent (Pacino), who get enmeshed in a silly, by-the-numbers thriller plot. More interesting than that is the work of a publicist, glad-handing, and begging people to appear at benefits. All of that was quite convincing in the film.

Big Pen

I did this sketch with this big pen I bought at the dollar store. It comes with four colours which you choose by clicking a lever: red, blue, black and green. It's a little bit wobbly, but so are my drawings.

Now I want to find a pen with a whole bunch more colours, like the one I had as a school kid. Sure they're around. I don't think the inks are archival, however!

Nora the kitten prefers traditional media:

Strange Pair

Despite warring kitties, I managed to draw this. Was it worth it?

Spanish

Supposed to be Rebecca Pidgeon and Steve Martin from David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner.

Below, I took a couple of shots of the cats, and wasted some time getting him to nod in an animated gif. Needs some kind of soundtrack to work.

Miss Me?

When one posts in a blog once a day, going away for even a couple of days seems like a long time.

Still, I've been so involved in my web site, it sort of burnt me out on computers. Occupied enough with that, I wasn't even drawing, except for the web site. For example, the useful graphic above, which fits this blog at the moment, as well. Go to this spiffy page to see what I've been doing. There are still odds and ends hanging which I'm fixing as I learn more about CSS. Darned hard, for someone like me, it seems.

Still, I have some interesting things from the weekend to blog about, but if I post about them at all, they will seem sort of time-shifted into the past (is that clear? It's kind of late at night!). Meanwhile, new stuff might be happening.

In the meantime, I've lit the pilot on the heater, and the cats have discovered that. So these are heater cats -2008 models- making a backwards letter "S".



Unfortunately, the newest cat hasn't figured out how to fit on the heater. Don't worry, she's keeping warmer than this, most of the time.

The Devil's Hoard

An ordinary sketch from mid-July of a masculine-looking woman pointing in a Calgary coffee shop outside an art gallery (compare it here) became this wild scene thanks to collaboration with my friend, R. Gagnon. It happened on a Thursday night, rather than the usual Friday. He drew a devil in a cave on the opposite page, then connected the two with the pile of jewels. Also added the kitty-cat (I drew the dog). It was up to me to ink it, and we had fun adding details, making it better and more interesting. It's exhilarating to be able to draw and invent funny things. Doing it with someone else adds an element of surprise, because you never really know what's going to happen next.

Missing Things

A friend is telling me I'm too hard on some of the pics I post here. Will try not to do that, but might be writing a bit more in this space. Expansively, at times wrong-headed-ly. Feeling less shy about it, however. You can read it, or not.

Meanwhile, my little computer broke, but I can still use it, with an external mouse.

Above is the Seaview from "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea." Found the DVD of the movie at the flea market, which is cool. As a kid I loved the TV series, and built the Aurora model of the sub. Also remember seeing a large scale model of it in the window of a hobby shop in Toronto, way back in the 1960s. My Dad took me out specially one rainy night, just to see it, blue in the window. Yay, dad!

Went to Shary Boyle's presentation at the Drawn & Quarterly store last night. She's an interesting artist, seemingly very "hot" at the moment, in the very narrow world of Toronto-Montreal English-language culture. I had intense responses to it, because of my family history (my mom was a watercolourist and used to paint those kinds of figures) not to mention the kind of material I do.

But it was a tough night, because the room was crowded, and the presentation was long, and I'm getting old, getting old (will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled). It seemed the slightest move I made would upset something, or make noise. And she was very generous -- you'd have to say long -- with her answers, but it was all interesting. At least I didn't collapse this time ...

I wanted to say a couple of words to her, but she was shy. Of course, being a guy, and coming off as nervous as I often do, and considering the gender issues in her art, I wasn't surprised to be shut out. At least it's not the 80s any more, and the culture wars have grown colder. The issues are still there, though. It was tough being the art writer at the Mirror in the early 90's, working under two opinionated feminists!

Missed the American Presidential debates on T.V., but I'm calling this guy below "Joe The Plumber" in honour of that. That's even though he's been in the book for a while, but I finally finished him the other night.

As Flies to Wanton Boys are We to th' Gods...

Only blogging a little drawing of one of the kids across the street, during recess in the schoolyard.

Other than that, I wanted to mark that there was the Canadian election last night, which changed nothing. I made an ass of myself at the polling station, because I hadn't brought enough ID. Along with my passport and my polling card, I had to dig up a gas bill with my address on it, because I forgot the passport didn't have that information. I complained to the staff, and sounded like a nut, but came back with the third document. It seemed there were other people in the line in the same situation as me. Well, it was hardly worth it in the end, because the same government came back in basically the same situation we had been in before this exercise was started.

I'll leave a last word to Mary Soderstrom, who actually worked for a candidate, in Westmount, and has a literary-themed take on the election.

Swordfish

This is an elaborate picture, but doesn't please me. Funny, I fooled with it a lot, but couldn't see what to do to fix it. I don't know why she's standing there, and the colours are wrong. There's no mood or reason. I might feel better about it, later. In the meantime, I've got to hunt up some work!

Single Mom

Another not so cheerful picture, painted again on thin paper, which I haven't stretched.

Trouble with Poetry Contests, and E-zines

I just wrote the following as a letter to an e-group of writers that I belong to (please contact me privately if you want the address to join, but it's pretty small, and unchanged since about 1994 or so). Anyways, thought it looked like a blog post, so I may as well put it up here.

I thought this was an interesting article about poetry contests. (warning: pdf file!)
http://rattle.com/eissues/eIssue5.pdf

It came from this post in a blog I enjoy reading:
http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_10.php#013576

I'm thinking about participating in a local e-rag. The problem with it, unlike even the most miserable and small-circulation zine, there's nothing to hang on to afterwards. Nothing you can point to on your shelf and say "I was published in that." Even my 1991 only-ever-published short story is in a neat glossy magazine in a file somewhere.

If it's halfway decent writing I think there'll be some audience. And I have been keeping a blog pretty regularly, all the way since 2004 (and I know a few of you do Livejournal, etc.).

Still, it's a little sad, and I don't even know if 'back issues' or archives of blogs or e-zines I like are even easily accessible. I usually don't even try: just reading the latest thing and then moving onto something else.

A Tree Grows on rue de Rouen

And a cheerful picture of the lovely ladies of Iraq. Thanks to one of those news programs I'm addicted to, but usually happier avoiding:

New Faces

Gosh, that's twice in one week going to this bar, and drawing with my friend, R. Gagnon. A little tired of drawing the people there, who are the same faces, it seems, just like us. So here are some new faces. Above, a drawing of Ezra Pound I did a while ago, and Rick just inked, of Ezra standing in front of his "gorilla cage," where he was held prisoner by the US army on charges of treason. He had to spend years after that in a mental hospital, but won the top prize in poetry for the poem he wrote in the cage.

And below, a happy couple:

Song-Stress

A lot of my freelance work is writing presentation documents, or pitches, for proposed television shows which producers try to sell to networks. Many of these are music specials, and it's my job to imagine the show, and come up with a list of guest performers. They may not be the people they can actually get, but the names give an idea of what kind of show it will be. Still, I think it's funny to imagine what would happen if guests who were supposed to play together hated each other, and things went terribly wrong. Above, the sweet songstress of the classical guitar is going a little mad. Slightly looser in the watercolour, including dragging a sleeve over the wet paint. I suppose it all goes to make it look interesting.

P.s.: This would be funnier if he were dropping some exotic instrument: an oud, or a vintage autoharp. I guess I could photoshop one in.

Dreams and Sewers

Today, it's a sewer guy who was working outside. It's still pleasant weather - pleasant enough to sit out on the balcony and sketch.

Below, it's Raquel Welch from Fantastic Voyage, a film I found in the bargain bin at the flea market. Love these old Science Fiction things, but this was less psychedelic than I remember it.


Bottom, just an old guy sleeping, while a diver (or maybe Raquel Welch) dances in his dreams.

Ball Point

Some fairly routine drawings, scribbled last night with a ball-point pen. I tried to make the cat one more interesting, with photoshop filters, but now it just looks like the pen was leaky. Perfectly pleasant drawing, before.

Gagnon Monday

Gosh. R. Gagnon dragged me out of the house, away from my fooling with CSS, and got me out for a meet at the Cock N' Bull bar. It's what we usually do on Fridays, but that night last week was a book launch at Billy Mavreas' gallery, and R. had a comic in the book, so we had to go to that.

But he called me on Monday, and I cycled across downtown to the bar, and here's what took place. He did these wonderful colours with his Caran d'Ache colour pencils on my brush pen sketches. I really think I'm going to take them out of the sketchbook, and frame them.



Here's a collaborative drawing by Gagnon and myself. I don't know if it really looks like her:



Meanwhile, it was Craft Night at the Cock N' Bull, which means that everyone there had paints and drawing boards. Rick drew a few of the people drawing, which is always fun:





Rick also inked an old Alfred Hitchcock drawing of mine, leaving alone the sage story advice which I don't know comes from Mr. Hitchcock, or a book I was reading at the time.

Odd Drawing, and a Lot of Poorly-Edited Writing.

Since I do a lot of this drawing while watching DVD movies, and I’m trying to get back into typing more (funny for a writer, but typing in a long-winded computer “journal” was another form of relaxation for me, akin to these sketches.) But lately, I’ve been only writing notes in my book, and typing for work. And also, leaving comments in other people’s blogs.

I’ve decided, at least for now (because these decisions don’t always take), to try more written material. Don’t know if the few visitors who come here to look at pictures will want to read. I usually don’t want to read long articles in other people's blogs, unless something is absurdly entertaining. Here, at times, I feel, this blog is anti-entertainment: look at the effort I put into an unpleasant drawing, for instance, rather than trying to please the eye.

This is a long way of saying, I want to try more film reviews. Believe it or not, I used to be a professional reviewer. Back in the day, in the Calgary Sun, and numerous book and art magazines. The review below is very rambling, but maybe I’ll sharpen up. That feels a lot like work, however. On to the film:

Watched the movie Stoned last night, about the late Brian Jones, founder of the Rolling Stones. Kind of a wasted opportunity, in that it was mainly a dragging tale of dissipation, on the order of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” when it could have shown more of what made the man an artist. The only hint of that we get is the bit in Marrakesh, when he’s listening to the pipes which sounds like the ones in “Paint it Black.”

But they don’t play that song, and you have to figure that out yourself, and pick up on the dozens of references which are apparently scattered throughout the film. What we see on the screen seems to be the same, and more of the same. Some very obvious lines from characters explain things, but that only makes it more stupid. There was interesting interaction between the builder and Jones (gay? Repressed? – that would be too simple!), but I wish they had gone into it more. As it is, it only seems that the drugs take a toll. Maybe he’s jealous of the girlfriend. Anyhow, the stupid, obvious parts push you away from it, like the symbolism of the house falling apart as the builder’s life goes downhill. And, he didn’t seem terribly affected by it all. The murder seems to be a bit of bullying and homophobia, which wasn’t prepared for by the story.

Interesting how completely forgotten Brian Jones is, even though he basically put together one of the most famous rock groups in history. The Stones go on, but there isn’t even some sort of mythology about him. The deleted scenes on the DVD show him with a little bit of talent, and I liked the aspects of surrealism, the actors, and the art direction.

Plethora

A bunch, nay a plethora, of drawings I did today and yesterday.

mruttan.ca

My new website is on line. That's been a lot of work, and still not all together. These are a few of the icons I did for it. I'm hoping it will be fun, and change a lot, like this blog.

Busy Again.

Wish it was with paying work, this time. But I'm putting together my website, which feels a little like knitting a Persian rug. And my non-analytical mind is not good at all the numbers and cascades, so when it's in bits and pieces and things aren't working, I get discouraged. Think I'm going to be able to put it up today, however. Still not ready.

So, I haven't had much time or mood to draw. Did these guys last night and today. They're kind of boring, though I like the mix of wild colours on the top character. Hope things aren't looking too frenzied. I feel all right, I tell you, despite complaining e-mails to other quarters about issues I'd rather not get involved in.