It’s been a great experience so far and the staff at the PNE have been supportive and helpful. I’ve met some of the other artists also showing at Container Art and it’s wonderful to see the different types of work and how each person has chosen to make use of their shipping container gallery space. I don’t have photos yet of anyone else’s work because everyone is still in the process of installing.

This is what the Container Art Gallery space looks like from the outside, to give you an idea of what to look for. It’s big and hard to miss. There will be video projections and light displays on the outside during the evening hours of the PNE. On the inside there will be art, including paintings, altered books, and wild installations I’m not sure how to describe. You’ll just have to go and see it for yourselves.

In my container the twenty-five encyclopedias float along the side and back walls, and the multitude of paper flowers I was working on last week hang from the ceiling. The final touch was to add a few arrangements of driftwood, pine cones, sticks, rocks and wildflowers along the bottom wall and corners. These were a last minute addition I decided was needed because the space along the lower part of the walls looked stark and empty.

The work will be on display for the two week run of the PNE and access to the Container Art show is included with the price of admission. Check it out if you get the chance and please do social share about the show on twitter, facebook, flickr, etc.

Earlier this week I decided the installation I’ve been putting together for Container Art needed “something more”, and so I started making paper flowers. These are made from five pieces of paper and then attached together with glue. I have made about fifty of them using pages cut from one of the left over encyclopedia volumes. You’ll have to wait and see what I’m going to do with them as part of the display.

The paper flower design is taken from Playing With Books by Jason Thompson, which I purchased from RubyDog’s Art House.

[A big thank you to Ariane for coming over earlier this week to hang out and help me make a few of the flowers.]

I was away on Quadra Island with Boris’ family last week which was a vacation but it also meant a long break from working on this project. Monday I resumed cutting up encyclopedias and as of today I have twenty-one of the twenty-five books completed. I love it when hard work pays off and things go smoothly. When all the books are done I can get started on some of the other ideas I have in mind to pull together for the installation. I have about two weeks left before this gets installed in the Container. I’m excited.

The books featured in these photos contain seaweed, deer vertebrae, some form of fungus, chamomile, acorn caps, and drift wood. I had to rehydrate the seaweed in order to work with it because it was too dry and brittle to put in a book after sitting in my studio for weeks. I was amazed at how well it revived. It will dry out again over time, as will the chamomile flowers, but I’m okay with that.

Previous posts about this project (which will be on display in the Container Art show at the PNE): [1] [2] [3]

This week I’ve been working away at the individual altered books that will be assembled into the installation for the Container Art show. I set a goal to complete ten of these by the end of this week and as of yesterday afternoon I finished number eight. I’m very pleased with how this project is slowly coming together. Once all the books are finished I need to do further planning on how these will be displayed. My idea has evolved a bit since I wrote up the proposal over a month ago.

It felt difficult to return to the portraits after a month long break, but I love these shots of Krista and the paper lanterns. They make me happy because they’re so wonderful and colourful.

I decided to experiment with processing the series in different ways and played around with a set of Photoshop actions I found on the internet. I’ve never really used Actions before because they lend themselves more to batch processing and I don’t really do much of that. I still had to do a considerable amount of tweaking.

I added a texture to the final shot I worked on last week. In some ways it suits the photo but I think the texture isn’t subtle enough and distracts from the shot. I may redo this one a bit.

This is the twenty-third portrait in the Imaginary Girl series. My original goal was the create twenty-five of them but I may keep going past that number.

I shot this portrait of Stephanie at the beginning of June and as of the beginning of July it will be in a group show at Gallery Gachet along with the portrait I took of Jess. (How’s that for putting new work to work.) This was taken on Granville Island with the giant leaves of a Gunera plant as the backdrop, and Alice in Wonderland as the inspiration.

June has not been a productive month for working on the portrait series because I’ve had other projects I’ve needed to concentrate on. There are numerous artists calls with summer deadlines coming up and it’ll mean more shows in the future if my work gets accepted. (Fingers crossed!)

I have used balloons once before in a photo shoot, with Siobhan in the studio back in November. I decided I wanted to use balloons again as a prop, this time with Eagranie as the model and with balloons of a different colour. Oh how I do love red!

From this shoot I learned that photographing balloons outside when it’s windy is like trying to photograph an uncooperative monkey that can’t stay still. Other than the tricky breezes, the weather was perfect with a lovely blue sky and fluffy clouds as a backdrop. I count these portraits among my favorites of the whole series (so far).

These are a few of the shots I took of Lauren a few weeks ago, when she came over for a portrait session in the old apartment. We had a lot of fun using the pocket doors as a backdrop and Lauren was terrific in front of the camera.

I first met Kirsten Chursinoff at Northern Voice a few years ago, when she came up to chat with me between sessions. She recognized me from Flickr and as we talked I realized I’d seen her textile work a few years before at The Secret Garden Tea Company.

This portrait session was very much inspired by the colourful fibre art Kirsten creates with fabrics and threads. She provided all of the objects I worked with and she brought over a large variety of things to choose from. She was also very patient as I placed layer upon layer of thread over her arms and upper body. I wanted these photos to be similar to the portrait of my sister. I was interested in exploring the theme of fibre arts further and feel there are many interesting ways to use thread as a prop.

The final shot is a composite pulled together from two photos. I created the set using spools of thread and a cute pincushion Kirsten brought over, and then had her pose separately holding the giant scissors made by Peter Kiss. It all came together nicely in photoshop – after a few hours of hard work that is.

Sometimes I don’t have a clear idea of how I want to photograph the person I’ve asked to pose for one of my portraits. This was the case with Kristi, though I did know I wanted to use a natural setting.

My original idea was to use her garden as the setting, but it was too early in the year for the garden to have much growth. I decided to improvise and scouted around for a location near her home just before the shoot. The ivy was located at the front of her house and proved to be the perfect setting for the portrait. The vines were thick enough to crawl into and I disentangled a few and layered them over her body.

I like the smaller series of nature portraits that is slowly taking shape within the larger body of work.

Nature is a way for me to recharge, clear my head, and become centred, but the influence of good people around me can do this too.

This is my friend Nicole Dextras, a skilled and talented artist in her own right. I consider her one of my mentors and I really wanted to include her in my portrait series. Like most photographers, she’s not a fan of having her picture taken so I’m really glad she agreed to sit for me.

It was Nicole’s suggestion to pose with the Camellia bush in her yard and the late morning light I found myself working with at the time was perfect. We started out with Nicole posed in front of the bush but I didn’t want the flowers to just be a backdrop, so we tucked her into the leaves. The portrait was so much stronger once she became part of the bush and she looks very at home in there.

The title is a play on a quote by Kahlil Gibran – “There is a space between man’s imagination and man’s attainment that may only be traversed by his longing”.

I really should do a better job of blogging the portraits I’ve been shooting because when I write about them weeks later I’m never sure what to say. I’m so much better about this with the altered books.

This particular portrait session was very exciting because it presented the opportunity to work with Petrina as a model, and with Shai as a hair stylist. I’ve never worked with a stylist on a shoot before and Shai did a wonderful job styling Petrina’s hair and wrangling the butterflies.

I’ve wanted to do a portrait with butterflies for awhile, and since there was no way I could get real ones I settled for brightly painted fake butterflies. Dressew was my source for butterfly fakery. They have a have a whole section of them in the basement along one of the back corners, which was a pleasant surprise for me to discover.

This portrait features the lovely Casey. She came over to my home studio a few weeks back and did a great job of pretending there was a cherry tree in her hand. As I’ve mentioned before, the shoots I do often require lots of pretending on the part of the model, which can be hilarious. It definitely was in this case. At least it keeps things fun.

As I was working on the post-processing for this I started wishing there was something more in her hand for the tree to rest in. I briefly considered having Boris pose with a pile of dirt in his hand so I could add it into this shot (sans his hands). I decided I didn’t want to go that far with adding elements in photoshop, as it ends up being a ridiculous amount of work and the shot doesn’t REALLY need it. I’m sure Boris was relieved….

I really wanted to do a portrait full of eye-blasting colour because so many of the portraits in this series were shot against our plain white wall. This one features Sonia Ryan, the Coordinator of “Things” at Bootup Labs. Sonia was very keen to do a photo shoot with me. She came over with beautiful sari fabric to wear which (luckily) was nicely complimented by the rich red of the background. Neither of us knew how to properly put on a sari so we did a lot of careful draping with the fabric and I secured it at the back with clamps.

About the title…when trying to figure out a title I google words related to the photo and see where that takes me. This is how I often end up with wordy titles, but it works.

I love my portrait series, but oh does it ever take a lot of energy to come up with ideas and then wrangle people to do the shoots. I’ve been wavering on continuing with this project at all, but then I keep producing work I really like because of it.

This portrait features the lovely Shelly Roche. She came over to pose and did an admirable job of holding onto the strings I’d pinned to the wall and pretending there were birds attached to the other end. Originally I had planned to use Yuuki as the flying bird subject but I nixed that idea knowing how tricky he is to photograph when still, nevermind trying to photograph him while flying. I settled on the pigeon population of Granville Island for my birds and pulled this together from about five different shots. The results of hours of hard work are pretty magical.

I’ve fallen a bit off track with my portrait series the last few weeks because I’ve been very focused on other things. It’s also been tricky scheduling people during the Olympic craziness. This portrait features Andrea and was taken towards the end of January.

I bought three large pieces of transparent fabrics from Dressew in different colours to use as props for this shoot (and beyond). It was fun to figure out different ways to use them in the portrait, and I especially loved getting Andrea to move the fabric to create swirling bits of colour around herself. It was a hilarious part of the shoot, but the results are beautiful.

For Valentine’s Day I invited some of my friends over to pose for a Valentine-themed photo shoot. The idea was inspired by the work of Katie Sokoler and her “kiss in your pocket” flip book.

I cut hearts from red and pink paper to create a background, and picked up sparkly hearts and red tulips for props.

I asked people to ham it up for the photos. Valentine’s Day is afterall one of the cheesiest holidays ever, and standing in front of a wall of hearts calls for anything but serious expressions.

The portraits all turned out awesome and everyone looks very cute and funny. I love it when an idea comes together so well. A full set of my Valentine’s portraits can be found on flickr.

I think I’ve mentioned before that with the portrait series I’m trying to explore ideas I originally shot as self portraits. I’ve always wanted to redo the Mad Hatter shot of myself from two years ago because it’s a great idea and I felt I could do it better – and incorporate even more hats. And now…voilà!

Shai of Pome Studio is the model in the updated Mad Hatter portrait. I chose her because she’s not comfortable having her photo taken (typical for most photographers) and my thought was I could hide her under the many hats. It turned out to be the perfect concept for Shai because she’s a hair stylist by profession, and she knits lovely hats for sale at Pome (five of which were used in the portrait at the top of this post). In the final concept shot I used sixteen or seventeen hats, most of which were borrowed from friends. The hat pile was far too precarious to balance on it’s own so I had to call in Boris as the hat wrangler to prop things up from the side with a broomstick and remove it from the shot in post processing.

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I started this altered book wanting to change the look of the folded pages by punching flower shapes into the paper. I was going to do this throughout the entire book but the more pages I did the less effective it seemed as a technique because the punched out shapes did not show up very well. So I changed my idea and decided to work with the flowers I had created with the punch and used these as the centre piece. I wanted the flowers to flow loosely and could not imagine gluing each one individually into the book, so I came up with the idea of stringing them together with thread. Only some of the flowers are directly attached to the pages with glue.

I was curious to see how well gluing a ceramic tea cup into the book would hold up and it seems to have a strong bond with the paper around it. I’m excited about this because I have another idea with tea cups that I have yet to explore. The little green bird was added as a finishing touch because I felt the composition needed a little more life and colour to it before I could call it finished.

I wasn’t sure what to title this but the flower shapes remind me of cherry blossoms and my thoughts these days are turned to spring, starting new things, and awakenings.

Materials used: book, paper punch, thread, Japanese paper, card stock, and a metal bird.

I love how this portrait of Julie came out in a wonderfully magical way that didn’t occur to me when I took the photo. As I was processing the shot I started imagining stars in the background and the blue backdrop became a midnight blue sky. Boris came up with the title after finding the lyrics from a song by Melissa Ferrick.

It’s been a month since I shot this portrait for the series. I decided I would only do one in December because it seemed like it would just be too crazy a time to try to scheduling people shortly before Christmas. But a whole month break from this project feels too long. In the meantime, even though I haven’t been shooting I’ve been working on ideas and figuring out who to photograph next. I can’t wait to get started again.

When I came up with the idea to do a portrait with goldfish swimming around my friend Kay, I realized the only way I could pull it off was to get real fish. I needed to be able to photograph them under the same lighting conditions I would be shooting Kay in order to make the fish shots and person shot match. So I went out and bought a pair of goldfish with the long term plan they’d be a permanent fixture in my home. Luckily Boris was okay with the acquisition of more pets and took it upon himself to name the orange fish “Buri“, while I named the speckled brown fish “Astrid“. (Not that either of them get called anything other than fish or fishes most of the time…)

The above image is the result of many hours of work in photoshop, cutting out multiple shots of individual fish to bring together and playing around with colour. I asked Kay during the shoot to pretend the fish were swimming around her and this was one of the expressions she came up with. It was very cute and perfectly suited to holding her breath under an imaginary sea.

This shot of Kay with the goldfish and bowl was early on in the shoot as we were just getting warmed up. It’s cute but I definitely don’t love it as much as the top shot.

When Kay came over to be photographed for the series a few weeks ago she brought a selection of Betsey Johnson dresses and crinolines with her to wear. They were all pretty specular but I loved this one the best because of the bright mix of colours. I usually ask my portrait subjects to bring a few different items to choose from and wear during the shoot. Part of the fun of inviting women friends over for these photo shoots has been getting to see their clothes.

The funny thing about the shoot with Kay, that I didn’t really think about beforehand, was that it didn’t really matter what she was wearing. I was shooting with a specific idea in mind and her clothing was mostly hidden from view. Towards the end of the shoot I decided the fantastic outfit just couldn’t go to waste and did these shots with Kay seated on the floor to showcase the dress. I love how this gave me the opportunity to try a different perspective from my usual style of portraiture.

My friend Kai was the second out of town guest in Vancouver during the month of October, and of course I made sure to take her portrait for the series. Kai has a red winter coat just like I do and I wanted to include it in the shot. I hadn’t intended to fill the whole scene with red, but with coat, umbrella and Japanese Maple tree all in gorgeous shades of my favorite colour, red ruled the day. (As it should.)

The Japanese Maple I had in mind for this shot wasn’t fully turned at the time, so after I took a few shots and wasn’t satisfied with the results, Kai suggested another spot with red trees. She’d just happened to be in the Queen Elizabeth Park area a few days before and noticed a whole street with them. This turned out to be the perfect spot to shoot what I had in mind and it was wonderful to see so many Japanese Maple trees covered in red leaves all in a row.

In September I kicked off my new portrait series with a bang by shooting four of them in one month. In October I decided shooting two a month would be a more reasonable pace, and both subjects ended up being people from out of town. My sister Kathryn was in Vancouver visiting for eight days over the thanksgiving weekend so I took advantage of the timing to include her in my series.

The idea behind these shots was based on a suggestion by my friend Susie. She liked the idea of emphasizing my sister’s very thick and curly hair by making it crazy and nesty with birds and bugs in it. Since the only way I could pull of that idea was with a huge amount of photoshop work, I opted for something less elaborate but that still made use of her hair. My sister is a knitter so I went with knitting needles and yarn. I ended up having to string the yarn into different corners of the room for the shoot and then Kathryn had to sit VERY still while I took photographs. It was hilarious and we finished with the moustachio’d shot below.

The yarn draped over Kathryn’s shoulders is made by a local Vancouver yarn company called SweetGeorgia Yarns. Felicia Lo is the owner and she makes beautiful yarns in rich colours that even a non-knitter such as myself can covet.