My Story
I grew up in Thunder Bay and started drawing cartoons as a kid. Thunder Bay was a great place to grow up. A great natural environment surrounds the city. It inspires a great love of the outdoors and sports like hockey and baseball are played in every neighbourhood. You can't avoid it. In the early eighties I moved to Calgary to take a job with an accounting firm. Not the best fit for me. I love art, photography and music. Maybe I should get involved in a business that is better fit to my interests.
I switched into the ad business and worked on a lot of the Petro-Canada Olympic promotions. I was dabbling in watercolours and oils and ended up taking some night courses at the Alberta College of Art. I worked for a while on a series of paintings that I referred to as "Report on people in business". It tried to project the work environment. I had a plan for an exhibition that was going to be a big installation like entering a business and walking though the office. Unfortunately it ended up being a startup that never got off the ground.
I fell in love, got married, and we moved to Vancouver. I always wanted to live in Vancouver because of the ocean and the mountains. Every time I visited Vancouver, it just seemed to be incredibly beautiful. I kept working in the ad business and eventually moved into the telecom business working on cellular phones, one of the greatest consumer products of all time. The industry never stopped moving and was the convergence of communications, internet and computing. I kept drawing and painting and playing music along the way and got to contribute some creative along the way, not the easiest thing to do in a big corporate environment.
On one of our family holidays we ended up on Hornby Island. Wow what a place. It inspired a whole series of drawings and graphics.
As time went on I started cycling to work. My round trip was 40km but I usually took the long way home cutting through False Creek and Stanley Park. I was doing it so often it started all to feel like my neighbourhood. When you do it on a regular basis you start to notice a lot more details. It was also getting addictive. If I didn't get the opportunity to ride around for a while I missed it.
Eventually everybody got a wireless phone and the business became more like a traditional phone company. It was time for me to move on. I wanted to pursue my interest in art and music. I had witnessed first hand the transformation of information and content to a digital world. One of my favourite artist's David Hockney had been doing some drawing on his iPhone and iPad. They had a wonderful quality and i thought I should give it a try so I started to take it with me on my rides around Vancouver. It seemed like the perfect medium to to capture the experience of cycling around Vancouver. I hope you get the picture.
I had the opportunity to participate in the Eastside Culture crawl. The weather was brutal but the response was warm.