mapping

a process for getting a new perspective on works in progress. the downside is that often i like the inverted images better.

Making Tracks.

Every step taken, whether along the long road in relationship between people and nature, out on a wander through the hills, or retracing previous industry in the don valley, leave tracks that can be measured. Censored only by the ability to pay attention, tracks yield infinite minute detail revealing the form, habit and personality of every creature who sets foot on land.

a collection of symbols describing a map on the don river valley in toronto.

30″ x 40″ acrylic on canvas

2′ x 3′ acrylic on canvas, 2014

thriving tension of the don river valley, in toronto

which tracks do you recognize?

topographies of grain made with ink black walnut dye following grain on plywood.

"In the pine top of my work table, 
the dark knots are boulders standing up in the river of grain,
 sending eddies and ripples spinning downstream, 
delivering the driftwood thoughtof a new journey to be taken, 
through trees." 

Roger Deakin, 'wildwood, a journey through trees',
 pp.32, Penguin Books, Toronto, Canada, 2007.

This will become a cycle of 50 paintings within the next three months, which will be mounted so that the water systems that are mapped out of the existing grain drain into each other and become a real document of the grain, i.e. a map of the landscape and conditions which the tree originally grew in, as well as an imagined topography created through the inferrence of grain patterns into landforms and features.
After spending literally years following the symbols of maps while traveling and sometimes without the assistance of visibility, like on the tops of mountains, i have used the symbols to guide me safely to shelter. this training made it impossible to not imagine these landforms in the plywood grain, as soon as i sketched them out i began to see rivers, lakes and water-systems, mountains, and could infer where i would look for clean water or shelter.
both the process of tracking grain in industrial plywood, understanding what different lines may indicate in terms of climate or sunlight and the process of imagining topography into grain resonate with the desire to square up and subjugate natural organic forms to geometric, and therefore human-centric patterns. making round spiral grain lay flat with glue and heat. imagining the bridge you would build over the river, the rectangular house on the cliff, which catches southern light, etc.

i am certainly not knocking the desire to square up nature, since the countless hours trying to master broad axes and hatchets, to achieve those straight lines needed to say, make a table out of dynamic cedar grain, would make that insult a little insincere. what i take issue with, and reflect through these paintings is that more often when you ask someone to define what wood is, it comes in 2″ x 4″ instead of growing out there somewhere.

outside of these political views, its quite calming and fun to follow a pattern, especially one which can reveal new insights into how trees grow and what the activity of mapping expresses about our intentions towards wilder landscapes.

speaking of which, i am now going out to discover some tracks left by creatures dwelling in the ravine, by the marks left in this, toronto’s first real snowfall!