Lucky girl that I am, I was given an early Christmas gift last year when my good friend and author John Moore ('Three of a Kind', 'The Blue Parrot' and 'The Flea Market') presented me with a dozen used police targets he'd recovered from a nearby firing range. Illegal for civilians to use for shooting practice, they are often destroyed to avoid being re-used by sports shooters. (We'd been out to see our visiting friend and fellow author Jim Christy perform his latest spoken word poetry that evening, so making it home with the targets in one piece was another present all in itself!)While almost immediately I began experimenting with affixing the targets to different substrates (finally settling on a cradled panel and PVA sizing as the adhesive of choice,) what I would actually do with/to the targets was another question entirely. I sketched and stared and circled the first panel for almost 3 months before fed up with Vancouver's burgeoning
drug war (aha! a theme emerges) I decided I would just have to begin (if you've ever played cards with my mother, she'll tell you that the lord hates a coward. Besides, what's a little paint?) The first two are nearly finished now (and while they bear little relation to each other at this time, a pattern is emerging in keeping with the original theme.) The first (which at this time remains oddly untitled) began as a much brighter study of Klee's s tonal harmonies before morphing into a vaguely aerial view of rooftops (I did say vaguely.) Number two will be recognizable to anyone who enjoyed a misspent youth hanging around video arcades (relive your Space Invaders high score here) while number 3 is in the planning stages and may further unite the series as a whole, so stay tuned.
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