Visual Art and Design

Photos by Steve Wilson For those unfamiliar with European legend, the Krampus is a mythical creature.  In various regions of the world – particularly Austria and Hungary – it is believed that Krampus accompanies St. Nicholas during the Christmas season, warning and punishing naughty children. While St. Nicholas gives gifts to good children, Krampus is →

I grew up on the West Coast, dividing my time between the big city of Vancouver and the beautiful Sunshine Coast. I wandered around Europe before deciding to attend the Langara College Fine Arts Program. After chiseling away at soapstone, wielding a brush loaded with acrylic paint and soaking metal plates in acid, I found →

“Children should learn to draw as they learn to write, and such a mystery should not be made of it.”  — An admirable ideal expressed by the American painter, William Morris Hunt (1824-1879). Whenever it comes up in conversation that I went to York University for visual art, the inevitable question follows: “So, what kind →

One mid-December afternoon, when I was still gap-toothed and too short to drop my own fare in the collecting box for the subway, I found myself in a dollhouse supply shop with my grandmother and my slightly older cousin, who I thought was the very definition of cool by virtue of the fact that she’d →

Simili-artiste/étudiante en design de Montréal qui aspire à être une art superstar. Mon atelier, c’est une accumulation de portraits de femmes, de filles, d’androgynes, des émotions autobiographiques, des narrations simples : des joues rouges, des positions candides, les épaules basses, toujours un peu découragées, des rondeurs inspirantes, une pilosité abondante. Bien interprété, c’est la beauté sensible, →

[The poster] is a means of communication between the seller and the public – somewhat like a telegraph. The poster artist is like a telephone operator; he does not draft messages, he dispatches them. No one asks him what he thinks; all he is asked to do is to communicate clearly, powerfully and precisely. A.M. →

Tiffany Muñoz is a Vancouver based artist/illustrator.  She was born in Kamloops and raised from Salmon Arm to the backward suburbs of Vancouver.  She is mostly a self-taught artist.  This past year, Tiffany completed foundation studies in Interdisciplinary Design at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.  Her preferred media is a traditional hands-on love for pencils, pens, watercolours, →

Most everyone starts learning to read with books in which pictures vastly outnumber words. As we become more comfortable with the alphabet and its myriad combined forms, we edge our way through wordier, less illustrated books until the ratio of words to pictures is reversed, and we are ready to graduate into “chapter books.” Not →

Amanda Nedham – “The Hunger Artist II” Yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood: for thousands of years the art of bloodletting was sought to balance the four humours of which the human body is composed. Greek, Roman and later Muslim and Western European medical establishments that adopted and adapted classical medical philosophy believed that →

I’m a recent graduate from McMaster where I majored in anthropology. I started teaching myself photography with the help of a very expensive and very awful digital camera when I was thirteen – all digital cameras were expensive then. Presently I’m more interested in analog photography. I love the entire process of rationing film and →

The other day, while pawing absent-mindedly through an old cardboard box of miscellanea, I happened upon a treasure trove of Children’s Record Guild 78s. Dressed in garish, dog-eared sleeves, and bearing titles like, Mendelssohn’s… A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Swing Your Partner, and Said the Piano to the Harpsichord, the actual records themselves are no great →

Andrea Wan is a visual artist and illustrator based in Vancouver, BC. She went to Emily Carr University of Art and Design where she received a degree in Film, Video and Integrated Media. With a strong passion in storytelling and image making, she went on to study illustration and design at Designskolen Kolding, Denmark. Since →

Viewers take a look at the works, with Mars-1′s Tulpa 2 on the main wall “Phantasmagoria” refers to a procession of ever-changing and often fantastical imagery. This sequence of imagery, haphazard and associative, is not something we would see on an everyday basis. A surreal passage through time. The transition from waking to dreaming. The →

Kate Beaton is the kind of artist that makes my job difficult. You see — she’s awesome. So much so that it’s difficult to write anything at all about her work without merely waxing poetical about said awesomeness ad nauseum. That is, without descending into a fangirlish quagmire so thick with praise and adoration that →

Patricio Betteo, son of South American parents, was born in Mexico City in the late 70’s. He studied  graphic design at the National School of Arts  but dropped out three years later because he wanted much more than that. So he started a big pursuit for comics (as an aspiration) and eventually he felt more →

Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893–1910) is among the most well-known and widely reproduced icons of Western art. Given the four versions (in paint and pastel) plus a lithograph made by Munch himself, The Scream has been a somewhat promiscuous and democratic image from the start. Over the last fifty years, everything from fine art prints →

The combination of an all American mother and a Puerto Rican father, Mia experienced cultural confusion from birth. At the age of 7 she was sent to live with her father in Sao Paulo, Brazil where she found a heavy aesthetic influence in the Catholi buy levitra online c Church. At 14 she moved to →

Born and raised up and down the west coast of the Americas, acorn is a self taught sloth mimic and representative of the “skate-jutsu” methods. After a long stint of collecting seeds throughout Europe over the course of a couple years, acorn is now living in the bat-infested community of Melbourne, Australia. This particular seed →

“Banksy came to Toronto!” Ah ha (I think, too groggy for an exclamation point) so I didn’t leave my cellphone set to “loud”— I merely dreamed the obnoxious ring-tone, and now for the surreal conversation. No doubt the scene shall soon shift without warning to a seaside resort or Santa’s underground lair or somesuch. “… →

Look at this piece and tell me what you see. Microscopic organisms illuminating a dark passage, maybe an ever-expanding mass of fireflies or perhaps it’s just one of those trippy 3D graphs. Whatever it is, it’s surrealism to the core. The San Francisco-based Mario Martinez, better known as Mars-1, has been blowing minds for a →

Ambling up Ossington Ave. the other day (which, up-and-coming-neighbourhood status notwithstanding, I rarely do) I came across an establishment called Meta Gallery, located in a white-painted building built like an auto-mechanic’s garage and set back from the side walk. The adjoining building’s northernmost wall stretched out, painted black-on-black with a peculiar clouds-shaped artefact of more →

You may remember Dan Perjovschi from last month’s piece: Illustration Proclamation: Gary Taxali and Dan Perjovschi.  After writing that piece, I decided to go down to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to meet Perjovschi and tell him about the uproar that Libeskind’s Crystal caused after its grand opening in June 2007.  By introducing myself →

As this past January came to a close, the webcomic Axe Cop went pandemic over the internet. Of course a great many viral pandemics are sweeping the internet at any given moment, and under closer scrutiny they by and large develop little past the “How funny! I laugh!” first impressions (yes, I’m looking at you, →

Alexis Barattin is an illustration student and a freelance illustrator from Toronto. She spends most of her time drawing and enjoys experimenting with collage and other media. Alexis also likes really expensive cookies and is trying to learn how to do the cryptic crossword. Check out more of her work on her blog and in →

Gary Taxali and the team at Narwhal Art Projects have brought together a collection of original illustrations by Taxali. Hundreds of works are assembled in groupings that flow like a free form comic strip. Ranging over the generous displays is an experience that lends itself to playful associations amongst neighbouring illustrations, while demonstrating Taxali’s dexterity →

Hi my name is Megan, and I’m a Toronto-based freelance illustrator. Having grown up in the city, I attended the Ontario College of Art and Design to eventually graduate with a Bachelor of Design in illustration. When not hunched over my drawing table, you can find me immersed in a book, playing with my ever-growing →

Marc Bell’s Hot Potatoe (sic.) is an irreverent mockery of the monograph.  A snicker (but never snark) at every turn keeps the tone lowered and the eye wandering. Each element of the typical one-man art-book is submerged into a deep fryer of schoolboy humor. No calm and levelheaded analysis of Bell’s work is possible within →

In matters of art on the internet, conceptual artists have a habit of getting there first and leaving behind little more than tedious ghosts of their abstract inspirations. Sometimes it takes an artist from the commercial world to build something truly awesome on that old territory, something destined to do more than just stick around →

I have a love-hate relationship with fashion. On one hand, it’s interesting, creative, and provocative. Fashion design is so fascinating. Some of the pieces that designers come up really ought to be displayed in an art gallery. Wearing a well-made g Buy viagra soft cheapest tab arment must be some sort of sartorial sex. On →

I am an illustrator and a textile artist. Born and bred in Alberta, Canada, I have been drawing and painting ever since I was a kid. However, like every other member in my family, I decided to be realistic and became a chartered accountant. After five years in the field and one quarter life crisis →

Photos by Zach Hertzman // Through performance and body painting, Adrian Cohen-Gallant and Sophia Ilyniak have negotiated their relationship with several issues central to the artistic representation of sexuality and the gendered subject. The early successes of this artist couple are related to two tensions in their works. One tension is the conflict between the →

I met Adrian Cohen-Gallant and Sophia Ilyniak at Gallery 1313. They were performing as part of a live Internet broadcast hosted by In My Bed Magazine. The artist couple has created a series of body paintings since their senior year at the Etobicoke School of the Arts (ESA). Together they position themselves on sheets of →

It’s a given that any review is going to hand the reader a pair of expectacles to wear when sallying forth to view the object in question with their own eyes. It’s a rare thing to come across an object where that taint could make a significant difference in the experience—but so help me, the →

My name is Dani Crosby. I am a graduate of the Sheridan BAA Illustration program and am currently based in Oshawa Ontario. I put my personality, emotions, and twisted sense of humor directly into my work to create strong visual messages that words alone cannot convey. Through my work I love to make people from →

The internet should have been such a great thing. All the creativity and outlandishness of television and the world that makes television, why isn’t that what the internet is made up of? Why do I despise Youtube, but adore cable access television? It can happen, right? That magic? That spark? That oddity? Of course it →

Describing Polaroids is simple. It’s a big, black, paperback photography book containing all of the polaroids that Dash Snow selected to be enlarged and displayed as works of art during his career. However, explaining Dash Snow’s Levitra order online polaroids takes much more consideration. One of the collections eight titles, ‘Situations Galore’, best describes the →

Since encountering those flip-books from the bins in the kindergarten classroom, I’ve always had a soft spot for mix-and-match monsters. Surely you know the ones: sectioned like three-piece barn doors, the upper section bears images of various animal heads; the middle, torsos; the bottom one, legs. Flip to different pages in each section and a →

Kim Sokol is a recent graduate of Sheridan College’s Illustration program. She’s a Toronto-area illustrator, diving headfirst into the freelance business. She works with ink, watercolour, and a copious helping of Photoshop to create bright, dynamic narrative illustration. She’s inspired by strange people, old hats, cars from before 1930, terrible movies, weird mythology, and eye-searing →

Justin Erickson is a Toronto-based artist with a particular passion for horror and the macabre. His compositions are generated by working with a variety of illustrative media techniques, digital manipulation, graphic design, and narrative concepts. After graduating from Sheridan College’s Illustration program in the spring of 2005, Justin experienced three years of success as a →

I’d wager that for most everyone reading this, the Art Gallery of Ontario is one of the last places you’d think of when I say the words “horror,” “ghostly,” “creeptacular” or “Halloween.” Since its recent reconstruction (what with its slick modern architecture and interiors so brightly-lit that shadows tell tales of it to their little →

would have been a great Halloween show if it hadn’t closed just shy of the 31st. Walking into the Forest City Gallery to see the works meant passing through a sunny front room into what felt like the dim, sparsely decorated living room of someone long gone. Most of the light filling the space comes →

Toronto has plenty to be proud of, those Canadian Heritage ads constantly reminded us that Superman may not have been originally from Krypton after all, we’ve been the backdrop of superflicks (even if they claim it’s still NYC) and above all, writer, artist and inspiration Darwyn Cooke calls it his hometown. Earlier at Fanexpo I →

Explosive, surreal, invasive, aggressive, natural, Bill Sienkiewicz’ art is as hard to describe as his name is hard to spell. One of the most memorable new talents of the 80′s, Sienkiewicz has graced his brush on everything from the works of Frank M purchase cialis online iller to Moby Dick. His style has become signature, →

Screens of all sorts consort with art these days. For instance, as you read this, computer-based media are forging mind-bogglingly new aesthetics and new ways to interface with viewers… but screens and art go back way before the Commodore 64. The kind of screen I’m about to discuss here is the kind that clogs-up, rips, →

I am an interdisciplinary artist currently exploring photography, print media, video, sound and performance. I am interested in using art as a tool to connect with individuals in an attempt to understand the human condition. My openness to ideas and willingness to explore new mediums have created a portfolio of diverse projects. You could also →

My name is Thomas Girard and I’ve lived in Toronto for 3 years now. I’m a professional web developer, aspiring visual artist and armchair neroscientist. When I moved here I was inspired by the artistic community Toronto had and I just wanted to immerse myself in that. I got started doing the things I do →

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These are a few of my favourite things, all of which find their happy home inside surrealism. Surrealism is ultimately indebted to Freud, which the group [the Surrealists] credits solely for enlightening people of the unconscious mind; Surrealists love psychoanalysis, which posits that the conscious mind does not merit the primary position that the layman →

Lined up along Whyte Avenue – essentially Edmonton, Alberta’s equivalent to Queen West – for the weekend of July 10-12, over 230 E-Town-area visual artists set up shop in front of the many pubs and stores along the strip to sell their wares and get a little work done in the unseasonably cold weather. November’s →

Sarafin first showed the signs of a young artist after a concussion at the age of two, when she began drawing a series of anthropomorphic traffic light people. Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she was often found sculpting with foam rubber and a glue gun, painting with acrylics and watercolour, and even making crude animated films with a borrowed video →

My first Luminato experience this year – or ever really as I was scarcely aware of the seminal arts fest until this year (my bad!) – was an installation from New York City-based artist Tony Oursler called Forty One – Five, a collection of three (though I only saw two because I couldn’t find the →

Born in Santiago, Chile in the magical 1980′s, Rodrigo grew up in a loving environment where he was encouraged to express himself through the arts. He was even expelled from a grade school for drawing caricatures of the faculty. Arriving in Canada in 1996 to join with the rest of his family in London, Ontario, Rodrigo attended H.B. Beal →

I remember being fifteen or so and watching some trivial music news segment where this guy interviewed a whole bunch of people on the street asking them who the most feared woman in music was. Courtney Love narrowly lost to Yoko Ono. I didn’t really know anything about Yoko Ono at the time. I just →

Sure, Batman, Ironman, Watch… Men may be out there making superheroes and graphic novels look cool to the masses, but if anything it’s just making it harder for the comics that inspire these social phenomena to live up to the cool quota. Well, maybe for most, not for artist/writer, Paul Pope. He makes cool look →

Jakub Tywoniuk is a 20 year old graphic design student with masculine features and a feminine grace. He resides in Toronto where he draws bizarre comic books with the intention of corrupting everyone. For him, drawing is not a pleasant process, but a stressful pastime fraught with self-loathing and criticism. This biography is terribly sarcastic →

Comic books are fun. And in an age where the most household comic scribe names are usually known for creating the most demolished and grit riddled interpretations of once smiling heroes, we, the comic geek ilk, know there will a sale viagra without prescription lways be one writer waiting on the side lines always ready →

Photography has always been a recognized aspect of my life. Growing up, I was constantly reminded by my father to make sure that I wasn’t cutting off heads in portraits and he did his best to help me understand the difference between a good photo, and a not-so-great photo. Little did I know that his →

Often times I feel like I’m too interested in too many things at once. Other times I feel I’m not interested in enough.  Then there’s times where I feel I don’t have enough time, hands and brain power to ever do everything I want to do and I get frustrated.  I think I’ll always feel →

Curated by Emese Varga with the intent of bringing “contemporary Canadian artists and a composer together under one roof to juxtapose perspectives and expressions of what music/sound is to them”, Permeate features visual artists Katie Pretti, Scott Everingham, Amanda Clyne, Ezra Gray, Margaret Nieradka, Sarah Fardon-Choi and Christopher Wong, all inspired by the intersection of →

Since 2001, Chris Onstad has been producing an online comic that has inspired, confused, enlightened and enriched lives en masse. Achewood, with Onstad’s unique brand of humour has labeled him a cut above any other webcomic with praise from even Time Magazine. The adventures of Ray, Pat, Téodor and very special boy Philippe have kidnapped →

  When first asked to write an article about being an artist in Toronto or an art student trying to make as an artist in Toronto, I realized that I was neither. As of November I decided to take a year off in my final year of animation (Seneca College). I do live in Toronto and I →