Canvas to the Imagination

Do you remember those paper instruments I was commissioned to make a few months ago? The music video they appear in has recently surfaced and I can finally share it with you.

This is Current Swell’s latest release, “I Want A Bird”.

The video was created by the wonderful team at Giant Ant.

Have a mentioned before that 2012 has been a record year for commissions? Boy has it ever, and this is the last of them.

This is a yarn-based mural I created in the offices of Pencilneck Software in Vancouver. I used the process and materials of creating a yarn tree as the jumping off point and took it in a whole other direction.

I’d been in conversation with Steve Tannock, owner of Pencilneck Software, for a couple of months about creating custom artwork for their new space. He liked the idea of the yarn tree, but did not want a tree. I eventually settled on the design of repeating triangles because this is the basic structure that makes up a yarn tree.

I used a level and ruler to try to keep the triangles as straight and as in line as I could while moving up and down across the wall. The coloured pieces are cut from rolls of vinyl with adhesive on the back, a material very similar to a wall decal. I used a mix of different shades of blue, and threw in some red and yellow too.

The finished mural has brightened up an otherwise neutral space, and gives people something to look at other than white walls or computers. The day after I completed work, Steve told me people kept finding excuses to come into his office and stare at it. This is positive feedback enough for me.

I wonder if over the years I will manage to create a small forest worth of trees made with yarn and pushpins. This latest commission brings the yarn tree mural count up to five, which is a long way from becoming a forest, but give me time (and walls).

This lovely white yarn tree now lives on the bedroom wall of clients (and good friends) living on the edge of Chinatown/Gastown. The wall is painted with blackboard paint originally intended as a background for a salon-style picture hanging idea that never came to fruition. Kay decided instead that it would be the perfect spot to commission a one-of-a-kind yarn tree.

The white yarn on black background was my client’s wonderful idea, and wow does it ever look striking. The idea was to keep the tree within the black square and have it off centre, leaving part of it to disappear out of frame as if looking through a window.

I used approximately five hundred pushpins, and one and a half balls of yarn to make this. The tree stretches to about eight feet by eight feet at its highest and widest points. For the knitters out there, I used a fine merino wool in cool white.

At the moment the tree has been left bare while my clients decide whether or not it needs leaves, flowers, or something else to decorate it.

Thank you to Ross Howard Jones for the photos, and for being such a gracious host while I worked in their home.