So the last week or so has been busy with the ending of my Banff residency and readjusting to life back in Vancouver. I won’t be back in the studio until next week but I’m raring to go with lots of ideas brewing in my head. Banff definitely gave me a creative boost, and I can’t wait to start working in the studio again.
The last few days of Banff was a write-off, work-wise, as I had to get everything shipped back to Vancouver. Because I was working in oils, the last week of work at the residency was spent creating pencil sketches, as I needed my oil paintings to dry in time for shipping. There’s something really great about being able to just work with pencil…it’s something that I miss doing and am really happy that I’ve started taking up again.
The residency culminated with open studios on February 18th, and here are some photos of all of the work that I created during my residency, laid out in my studio space. It was great to be able to see what everyone had been working on over the 7 weeks we were at the Banff Centre.
These are the pencil sketches I created in the last week. Over 3 days, I made these pencil portraits on gessoed MDF of everyone on the Love residency, plus a couple of members from the 2012 residency, which was taking place at the same time, but who I had hung out with a lot and basically were part of my Banff residency experience. Each portrait measures 6 x 8 in. and has the person’s name on the top and the words “we could be lovers” at the bottom. I’m really happy with how these turned out. I intend to photograph them now that I’m back home and send a print to each person. As much as this residency was about making art and developing my work, the thing I took most from this experience was the friends that I made and this work was meant to reflect that.
It’s going to definitely take some time to get back into things here in Vancouver. I already miss everyone a lot, but good things are on the horizon. I’ll be adding better photos of everything to my website soon. These are just meant to give you an idea of what I’ve been up to for the last 2 months…!