I began as a compulsive doodler in a Toronto public school, back when making pictures was dangerous, subversive fun. My first project was a 5 cent sex magazine, drawn on stolen carbon paper and secretly printed in the school's copy room.
This underground enterprise initiated me into the deliciously troubled life of an artist when my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Cassidy, dumped the mess in my desk, full of freshly printed contraband, onto the classroom floor while I was home sick with the flu. My mom's response, when we were all called in to Principle Brown's office, was "So what?"
Now I was notorious for my art and now I was all in.
I lived within the margins of my classroom exercise books, drawing tiny, deliciously bloody, violent warfare, undetectable to the eyes of roving teachers. I believe I inherited the ability for exceptionally detailed marks from my great-grandfather who inscribed religious Judaic texts onto tiny scrolls of parchment paper, stuffed into ritual boxes, called mezuzah, protectively nailed to the doorways of Jewish homes in Poland.
Today, through exploiting the driving, accumulative qualities of drawing and investigating the process of mark-making, the language of drawing has become both a means of self-expression as well as a system of thinking for me. The practice and process of marking a surface has moved to the level of obsessive fixation, and unexpected compulsive necessity.
Together with my wife Paula, I left Toronto and relocated to the Maritimes in 2020. We opened the doors of our new home in rural New Brunswick the day the Covid-19 pandemic locked down Wuhan, China, ironically, to social distance, and surround our practices with nature, peace, and freedom from distraction.
Acclimating to the rawness of rural life has intensified the trajectory of my work. Going forward I hope to see my drawings seed themselves, in all their states, resolved, unresolved, hybrid, and to act upon the minds of others also trying to come to terms with the global biological and climate crisis.