colour

On Heteronormativity: “Blue”

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She recoiled from me; our breath left stagnant carbon dioxide in the air.

“What if—”

She bowed her head, interrupting me with piercing subtlety. I felt my body succumb to the numbness of rejection, some feigned self-defense in preparation for when she’d say the word that would make me crumble at her feet.

Her hollow cheeks were flushed, lips pursed- eyes, pensive now. I couldn’t bear the insurmountable shock of no.

Leave now, get out, I begged myself.

Go before she tilts her cheek at me the way she so-often does, ensconced in blue-violet, and says my name.

She was scorching and the thought of losing her felt unbearably electric as I reached for her arm, craving that magenta, tell me it’s okay.

She looked spooked.

“I’m sorry.”

She shook her head as if ridding herself of an awful dream.

“No.”

Blinking, I withdrew. She ran a finger over her lower lip, as if to feel the words as they left her mouth, and then shifted her gaze to me. “I don’t…”

I felt a surge of disappointment. But she let her eyes linger on mine. I studied their magenta hues, wanting to learn her before the moment she would inevitably tell me say goodbye.

I stared at her expectantly, unsure of what I could say.

“Of course I still care for you,” she spoke softly.

I no longer felt like crumbling.

“I want children, you know? This was fun. You have to understand.”

Now it was she who awaited my reaction. I wanted the moment last as long as possible. Anything I said now would become inextricably linked to a new era of us and I wasn’t ready to let her go just yet.

word by Annie Rubin
 
“Bold colours, and the well-defined silhouette of a woman inspired this piece to focus on passionate intimacy. This is a critique of heteronormativity, emphasizing two conflicting views on the legitimacy of a relationship between two women. I want to bring attention to the ways in which societal standards shape individual choices at a basic personal level.”

colour by Andre Barnwell 

Andre Barnwell was born July 7th, 1984 and raised in Toronto but currently resides in Vancouver. Ever since moving out west in 2013, Andre has been inspired by the city’s art community and motivated by the accessibility to the tools he needs to pursue his artistic passion and desires. Graduated as an animator from Ontario’s Sheridan College he was exposed to various styles and media to create art even though he prefers to use digital as a means to an artistic end. Fascinated by the human face, most of work is portrait based ranging in different colour schemes, particularly his blue and red monochromatic digital studies.

Outside of portrait work and digital sketches, he enjoys music, film, travelling, and building his brand, Sex N Sandwiches. He looks forward to collaborating with artists such as sculptors, photographers and musicians for future projects. With the world getting smaller with the help of technology, he implores artists and art lovers to follow his growth via social networks and eventually to international stages.

Keep it growing!

Professional Contact: 
Email: andrebarnwell@gmail.com

Social Contact:
Twitter: @AndreBarnwell77
Instagram: AndreBarnwell77

The author’s words do not necessarily represent the views of the artist.

On Motivation: “Here’s to the underdogs”

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Here’s to the underdogs,

The ones who have learned from the mistakes of those before them.

The ones who have summoned their feisty inner Judith.

The ones who have embraced bloodthirsty David in the fight against their own Goliath.

Here’s to the underdogs,

The ones unfairly perceived to be one card short of a deck.

The ones with the stone-cold poker face undeterred by rebuttal.

The ones with the cards up their sleeves and the wind in their hair.

Here’s to the underdogs,

The ones who march to the front lines even when the cards are eagerly stacked against them.

The ones who steal those coveted crowns.

The ones who scream “no dice” at the top of their bloodied lungs and at edge of their fraying wits.

Here’s to the underdogs:

This game is yours.

word by Hannah Beach

colour by Andre Barnwell 

Andre Barnwell was born July 7th, 1984 and raised in Toronto but currently resides in Vancouver. Ever since moving out west in 2013, Andre has been inspired by the city’s art community and motivated by the accessibility to the tools he needs to pursue his artistic passion and desires. Graduated as an animator from Ontario’s Sheridan College he was exposed to various styles and media to create art even though he prefers to use digital as a means to an artistic end. Fascinated by the human face, most of work is portrait based ranging in different colour schemes, particularly his blue and red monochromatic digital studies.

Outside of portrait work and digital sketches, he enjoys music, film, travelling, and building his brand, Sex N Sandwiches. He looks forward to collaborating with artists such as sculptors, photographers and musicians for future projects. With the world getting smaller with the help of technology, he implores artists and art lovers to follow his growth via social networks and eventually to international stages.

Keep it growing!

Professional Contact: 
Email: andrebarnwell@gmail.com

Social Contact:
Twitter: @AndreBarnwell77
Instagram: AndreBarnwell77

The author’s words do not necessarily represent the views of the artist.

25th edition of the First Peoples Festival

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Présence autochtone, the 25th edition of the First Peoples Festival, is currently taking place at Place des Arts in Montréal, and is definitely worth checking out.

The festival features movies, concerts, readings, art, and more, celebrating aboriginal culture and its importance for Canadian identity.  Moreover, the festival highlights the evolution and adaptation of aboriginal music and art in a changing world.
Drumming circles and other forms of aboriginal traditional music, as well as new forms of aboriginal musical expression, such as DJ Psychogrid, Madekimo, Moe Clark, and Katia Makdissi Warren are featured every day on the big stage.
Additionally, many important aboriginal organizations like the APTN, the Makivik Corporation, Land Insights, and the AVATAQ Cultural Institute are using the festival to bring attention to the challenges that still remain within the aboriginal community, like the societal integration of First Nations and Inuit People who adapt to life in urban centres.
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In response to this issue and others,  the First Peoples Festival promotes the use of art as a means of societal mobilization, identity building and cultural understanding.
Inuit cultural expression using modern and non-traditional materials, including tepees and sacred animals like deer, turtles and moose, can be seen all over Place des Arts. In addition, the festival features First Nations artists like Jeffrey Veregge  of Port Gamble S’Klallam. Veregge’s art will be of particular interest to comic book fans, as it integrates traditional aboriginal artistic designs with popular culture icons like Iron Man and Buzz Lightyear.
Lastly, Parks Canada is giving out free airbrush tattoos of modern and traditional designs of aboriginal spiritual animals, each created by an aboriginal artist. With each tattoo comes a short explanation of the spiritual importance of each animal, and a description of the artist’s vision for the design.
The First Peoples Festival is not to be missed – check it out this week, until August 5, at Place des Arts!

On #Alllivesmatter: “The Sting Of The Jellyfish”

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There’s a mural in the street that says ALL LIVES MATTER. A few days ago, it said BLACK LIVES MATTER.

As I stare at the defaced artwork, I begin to understand that the great sin of our time isn’t hatred. It’s apathy. It’s the impulse to surrender to your default settings, to your pre-configured notions of who somebody is based on how they appear. To assume, rather than think. To fear, rather than learn. Hatred has agency, it has intent. Hatred is a spear, ground to a fine point over hundreds of millions of years to serve a single purpose. It knows only one end, and therefore it’s limited. You dig? We can overcome hatred. But apathy? Apathy is easy, unassuming; it’s a jellyfish floating in the waves. Shifting and amorphous, it poses a far greater threat to the ocean than the spear, it’s callous indifference spread to all those around it via a simple touch. The  jellyfish is content in its carelessness, happy to administer its sting to both the tiniest fish and the greatest whale, as though they have fought the same current all their lives. Except they haven’t

This is why BLACK LIVES MATTER is an anchor, a rallying point for the marginalized and disenfranchised victims of systemic violence, and ALL LIVES MATTER is a mindless platitude, a jellyfish whose deadly sting serves only to satisfy our base impulse towards indifference, our desire to look beyond the pointed issue towards a world where we may all float along, unaware of to whom our ignorant stings are being administered. That’s the non-polyp ideology;  float on and care not who runs afoul of your tentacles, for your conscience will remain clean. You didn’t make the ocean violent, and therefore you don’t feel responsible for the structures that exist before you, around you, inside you. This is how indifference has become our new prejudice, how a lack of awareness has become far more toxic than even the most hateful of voices. When everyone is content to say nothing, even the quietest utterances of discrimination can be heard.

word by Josh Elyea

colour by Andre Barnwell 

Andre Barnwell was born July 7th, 1984 and raised in Toronto but currently resides in Vancouver. Ever since moving out west in 2013, Andre has been inspired by the city’s art community and motivated by the accessibility to the tools he needs to pursue his artistic passion and desires. Graduated as an animator from Ontario’s Sheridan College he was exposed to various styles and media to create art even though he prefers to use digital as a means to an artistic end. Fascinated by the human face, most of work is portrait based ranging in different colour schemes, particularly his blue and red monochromatic digital studies.

Outside of portrait work and digital sketches, he enjoys music, film, travelling, and building his brand, Sex N Sandwiches. He looks forward to collaborating with artists such as sculptors, photographers and musicians for future projects. With the world getting smaller with the help of technology, he implores artists and art lovers to follow his growth via social networks and eventually to international stages.

Keep it growing!

Professional Contact: 
Email: andrebarnwell@gmail.com

Social Contact:
Twitter: @AndreBarnwell77
Instagram: AndreBarnwell77

The author’s words do not necessarily represent the views of the artist.

On child abuse: “Snow in the water”

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A small girl and a tall, middle-aged man eat lunch together at the local fast food restaurant. Both have sauce on their face: him on his chin, her just above her left eyebrow, and both eat the French fries between them with ferocity.

‘Can I have another burger?’ the small girl asks the middle-aged man.

‘No, you’ve had enough, little dumpling,’ the man replies.

The girl looks down at her white liquid thighs. There are delicate webs of blue vein just beneath the skin. She can almost see them wriggling.

 

The man and the girl go to see a film at the small cinema with the smell like neglected cupboard and forgotten jacket. They stand looking up at the posters.

‘What would you like to see?’ the man asks.

‘I don’t mind, Daddy,’ the girl replies.

 

The middle-aged man buys two tickets to Titanic and as the opening credits roll he reaches over and puts his hand in the small girl’s lap. She begins from one hundred in her head and pictures each number brightly coloured, flying free across the dark inside her skull.

 

word by Laura McPhee-Browne

“This piece of art is beautiful to me but it is also confusing, and I believe it is not what it seems. The title of the painting is ‘iceberg’, and I decided to write a little story about something that, like an iceberg, is almost never what it seems to be; child abuse.

When child abuse occurs between a parent and a child, it can easily be dismissed as imagination or exaggeration, but often what a child discloses about what has happened to them will be only the tip of the iceberg. It is important for us as adults to delve deeper—to dive down and find out what is really going on underneath the surface.”

colour by Emilie Rondeau

“My visual practice is a transgression and alteration of our perception of reality. I encourage free and intuitive interventions. Although abstract, my paintings carry the memories of atmospheric gardens, nebulous spaces, organic landscapes and architectures. Made of solid and bright colours, washes, painted and drawn marks, the compositions are reminiscent of complex and dreamlike environments. From the infinitely big to the infinitely small, cosmic or cellular spaces transport us with a strong impression of movement and energy.

The lines intersect and intertwine, linking shapes and colours together. Sometimes fast and agitated mark making succeeds to slow and smooth gesture. Colour is pure and vibrant. The harmony is rich and thoughtful within the limits of strangeness. A delicate balance takes place in this continual research for new visual forms. The eyes travel, search and rest. My paintings are an invitation for a trip in between the painting surface and your mind.”

Not Afraid of Drowning

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The first time they met was spectacular. She moved her hands across her body like breath, and told her every lurid detail of her dreams. She listened so hard and attentive as they untangled the depths, brushing pollen from her cheek and unfolding the bedsheets. She pulled the socks directly from her feet, insistent, and stood there naked and nauseated.

Her spit on her mouth like the milk at the broken stem of a fig pulled directly from the branch: these are soft, round fruit, weighty as organs. Fleshy and pink she carried them all day in the sun, stopping intermittently to adjust the sweater that cradled them in her bag. They bruised and split anyway.

Blackberries ripened in the hot field and along the train tracks and the only blank space was the white blue sky: asking no questions, reaching for nothing. She was having trouble looking at her hands, berries bleeding from small fists hanging at her sides.

What was soft at dawn had unfurled wicked and cheap. Every sentence was a scribble: unfinished and impossible to hear. The last time they met there was gravel underfoot and it was raining. She was indecisive and distracted by every turning head calling her name. They ate oysters and hard, ripe cheese. Green grapes.

When she turned the tap out poured rust and sediment, but they stepped in all the same to bathe in that murky swamp. She rubbed tea tree oil into her skin and ran a comb through knotted hair

When they made the bed that night every fold made her choke. She pulled the sheets taught and felt her body tense, muscles binding. Every sweeping gesture cut through the air, the blurred alarm clock’s blinking digits. It was not terrible, it was completely normal: the weight, the sinking feeling, the inability to remember what it was like to be awakened by her own vital breath.

She woke to the rain and the dampening of summer bush fires. The sharp smell of a half empty glass of red wine on the table reminded her of last night’s strain and she poured it down the sink.

She showered: clean, hard, spitting hot water, and sat at a single chair at an empty table in the kitchen and wrapped herself in a lavender bathrobe. She ate toast with warm blackberries, and the sugar hurt her mouth and the seeds lodged between her molars. She was not afraid of drowning in this rain, but only of slipping away.

word by Alisha Mascarenhas

“I wrote the piece as a documentation of tumultuous experiences occurring on several planes: fragments of dreams, fiction, and so-called reality that met or clashed in some way with the form and feeling of Rondeau’s work. The painting fed its form, and served to surface and to purge some previously unarticulated sensations and images.”  

colour by Emilie Rondeau

“My visual practice is a transgression and alteration of our perception of reality. I encourage free and intuitive interventions. Although abstract, my paintings carry the memories of atmospheric gardens, nebulous spaces, organic landscapes and architectures. Made of solid and bright colours, washes, painted and drawn marks, the compositions are reminiscent of complex and dreamlike environments. From the infinitely big to the infinitely small, cosmic or cellular spaces transport us with a strong impression of movement and energy.

The lines intersect and intertwine, linking shapes and colours together. Sometimes fast and agitated mark making succeeds to slow and smooth gesture. Colour is pure and vibrant. The harmony is rich and thoughtful within the limits of strangeness. A delicate balance takes place in this continual research for new visual forms. The eyes travel, search and rest. My paintings are an invitation for a trip in between the painting surface and your mind.”

On Mental Health: “blue”

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She felt all sorts of colours, but she noticed blue the most.  Its thin translucent shade seemed to seep into the corners of her eyes, through her tear ducts, tainting everything in a filmy azure haze.  It was vague and arbitrary.  Resting above her heart, compressing the edges ever so slightly on good days, or sitting clammy and heavy (as a stiff tongue) on not-so-good days.  Such weight meant lengthy exhaling and slight inhaling, her chest exhumed its fire as the oxygen departed.  Her shoulders rolled forward, concave, curling inward.

The blue was pervasive.  It was a tinge with the boldness to disobey the doctors and smut her everyday life.  It was prescribed that she share sadness and cool shades with the therapist on Mondays, and reinvigorate her heart and head with pilates on Tuesdays and piano on Wednesdays.  Her room was painted yellow, an attempt to restrict pathetic fallacy.  From Thursday to Sunday she was unmoored.  In such barren gaps, she aimed for off-white and neutral shade.  A dank white was as martyred as it was innocent.  Shinning like an exemplary virgin untainted by any distressing moods, she perfected a bared-teeth smile and upturned eyes.  In the schoolyard and dining room such whiteness was encouraged by her mother’s wrinkled brow.  She floated down the sidewalk.  A wispy white cloud pulled through a royal-blue sky.

The abject arrival of the sadness dumbfounded the medical men.  No predicating calamity validated the diagnosis.  She was bred with a full palette.  Rosebud bushes and rose-rimmed eyelids.  Spinach salads and vitamins in colour-coded bottles.  It was juvenile and chaotic.

The flooding of blue necessitated a quarantine of colour.  Its existence was permissible, but in controlled segments.  She would be a swirling kaleidoscope.  In the turvy checkered shape, eyes would roam, seeing nothing lucidly.

But on Sundays, she found pleasure in evoking the hue.  Blue, cerulean, plum, indigo: she let her lips wander over their sounds.  Stepping out of the yellow rooms and white shrouds, she made her way to the seaside.  Alone at the cusp of this cumulative blueness, she could rest.  Other colours slipped off the edge and fell into its abyss.  Carmine reds, vivid greens and rusted oranges overpowered by the silver-blue mass.  She wouldn’t dive in- she was satisfied sitting on the shore.  Though comfort lie in this watery body, she held out for other colours to come through.

word by Keah Hansen

“I relate the colours of this piece to emotions.  The distinct yet blended shades symbolize the complexity of our moods, while the lines represent an artificial attempt to restrict or regulate feelings.  The prevalence of blue represents depression, and society’s discomfort with it.  While the protagonist tries to understand her mental state privately, she is subjected to regimented treatments.  Her accepting its existence is a cathartic step in recovering from it.” 

colour by Emilie Rondeau

“My visual practice is a transgression and alteration of our perception of reality. I encourage free and intuitive interventions. Although abstract, my paintings carry the memories of atmospheric gardens, nebulous spaces, organic landscapes and architectures. Made of solid and bright colours, washes, painted and drawn marks, the compositions are reminiscent of complex and dreamlike environments. From the infinitely big to the infinitely small, cosmic or cellular spaces transport us with a strong impression of movement and energy.

The lines intersect and intertwine, linking shapes and colours together. Sometimes fast and agitated mark making succeeds to slow and smooth gesture. Colour is pure and vibrant. The harmony is rich and thoughtful within the limits of strangeness. A delicate balance takes place in this continual research for new visual forms. The eyes travel, search and rest. My paintings are an invitation for a trip in between the painting surface and your mind.”

“

A Wild Animal

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Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault 

We’ve gone to counseling a few times, but I don’t like it. Tom keeps saying the same things over and over again. Why are you so angry with me? he asks constantly. I want to say, When you start off loving somebody more than you can even imagine is possible, there’s only one way to go, but I don’t say anything.

The counselor asks us to initiate sex more. She says we should both initiate at least twice a week. The word initiate makes me feel extremely unsexy. When we get home from the session and turn off the lights and get into bed, Tom moves down to eat me out and I say I’m not into it and he says You love it and I try to push his head away but he starts licking my clit anyway. I clench my fists and close my eyes tight and I see spots that look like they belong on a wild animal. I tense my whole body as I feel the beginnings of an orgasm, and I am so frustrated I can feel a million bees pushing against my organs, trying to break through my skin from the inside. Tears force their way out between my eyelids and run down my cheeks, and I thrust with my breathy sobs. I come but everything else is still inside me. Tom moves back up and kisses my face and I wonder if he can taste the salt. See, I knew you’d love it, he says.

word by Leah Mol

“This piece made me think of two living things that exist in the same place but will never really be joined together, and the conflict created as a result. So, I wanted to write a story exploring a relationship that has serious conflict, but neither party can really explain where it comes from. Relationships are complicated and confusing and boring and exciting. We are all just animals, in the end.”

colour by Chris Gismondi 

“I am an artist and an activist. I know this because I lie awake at night thinking about things in my life, in our world, and I think about communicating them to others. Not in text or song, but in performance, acrylic and instillation. I do not like the way the world is: I want to change it, make it better, loving, healthier, sustainable, tolerant and accepting. At first I thought my two passions of art and activism were disconnected, but as my thoughts came alive in performance, mixed media, acrylic, print making and body painting, I realized they were one in the same.” 

High School Visionaries

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Rebecca Platt is and continues to be a member of an unrecognized but nonetheless elite club: Senior Superlative Actualization.  Rebecca Platt’s Willstown High School Class of ‘12 voted her Most Likely to Find The Meaning of Life.  As senior superlatives go, Ms. Platt’s was considered one of the more unachievable ones, along with Most Likely to Steal the Statue of Liberty, which Damon Quinn has still had no luck with.

The Class of ’12 had no good reason to believe that Rebecca was going to Find The Meaning of Life.  This is because Ms. Platt is as dumb as a doornail.  For example, she is known around Willstown High as the girl who infamously commented, ‘Is this Pennsylvania?’ on Hank Wiley’s photo in front of the Eiffel Tower.  She has regrettable tattoos.  E.g., a trail of generic lips runs down her oblique and beneath them reads, “Christ Was Here.”  Her fridge is empty because she spent her $300 monthly allowance on a Sun Conure, which she named JFK.  And with no additional money for a cage, JFK has been shitting everywhere.

It’s a boring story of how Rebecca Platt came upon The Meaning of Life.  She didn’t have a vision; there was no beam of light.  What it was was a series of mundane events that gave her some insight into the way the world is.  It happened on her 22nd birthday.

Rebbeca Platt was on the subway to work.  She sat across from a woman whose triceps were loose flaps of fat.  The man next her said, ‘Happy Birthday, Beth.’  ‘What?’ Beth said, leaning closer; she couldn’t hear him.  Beth was a mirror for Ms. Platt that day.  Fifty or some odd years separated them.  Beth’s arms were in some metaphorical sense a signpost of what Rebecca had to look forward to.   Ms. Platt imagined herself with her own flaps of fat, her own hearing aids, and sensed that she was deteriorating, nearing the end of her visit here.  Everyone has a Beth, and Rebecca observed that she could either neglect her eventual decay or accept it.  So she decided to bow to her mortality instead of avoiding it.

The subway stopped.  ‘Someone on the train needs medical attention.  We appreciate your patience.’  Work started in ten minutes and if Ms. Platt were late again she’d be fired.  Surprisingly, she didn’t get irritated.  Other people on the train are probably in similar or worse conditions than I am, she thought.  Rebecca didn’t know what to call it, but what she understood there on the stalled train was the importance of compassion.

Ms. Platt then learned about forgiveness.  ‘I’m sorry I always said that your brother was the smarter one,’ Rebecca Platt’s mom said through a teary happy-birthday call.  For most of her childhood, Rebecca was blue.  But daughter forgives mother, and by waiving her inner rage toward her mom, Rebecca relieved herself of a lot of psychic pain, and grew steady.

When Rebecca Platt got home from work later that day, though, she was unemployed and hungry, and still had to clean up all of JFK’s shit.

word by Jacob Goldberg

“If there is a meaning to life, I think it has to do with the stuff in the story.  And if you were to come across it, I imagine that a palette of colors might merge as they do in the artwork, and people would realize that deep down we can blend, too.  It’s important to always keep in mind that even if you think someone is stupid, they might in fact be worlds smarter and more capable than you think they are.  People are mirrors, and we shouldn’t miss out on opportunities to see ourselves in them.”

floating downstream

randeecrudo

There was a creek behind the house, and there she dropped the pillow and the blanket and the little stuffed tiger into the water and watched them wash downstream until the world closed in over them. She let go of the things that had happened and the ones that she’d hoped for that hadn’t. She left and grew up.

She ran down the sidewalk on all fours, roaring. She didn’t stop for anything. A beetle got in her way and was splashed onto the pavement. Bubblegum and tar stuck to her palms and knees. She roared past two of the neighbourhood boys and they laughed at her from the lawn. She felt shame burn in her but she did not stop.

She remembered excitement, excitement so deep that it kept her from sleeping. She remembered jealousy, so rabid that it made her wish harm on people who owed her nothing. She remembered fear, so terrible that it could only be forgotten for moments at a time. She could label all of these feelings and put pins through them like a catalogue of butterflies.

She used to cry at weddings, as a little girl. She saw the shining eyes under the lifted veil and thought that the bride was crying because she had lost everything: adventures and backyards and sleepovers and staying up all night to read and her mother’s arms whenever she needed them. That, she assumed, was why everyone was crying.

She tried to do things, to see if she could feel something again. She tried to have her heart broken. She tried to win a competition. She tried to go to school and become interested in politics. She tried self-righteousness. She toyed with the idea of religion.

Finally, she went back to the empty house and threw out her old things, the tools of childhood. She watched them float downstream and wondered what she’d lost.

word by Charlotte Joyce Kidd 

colour by Randee Crudo

“Randee Crudo is a Montreal based artist born in 1986. Randee has been developing a distinct style over the past six years in which she experiments with the fluidity of the paint and the interplay of colours.
While having always been a creative person, it was only in 2009, when Randee graduated in Art History from McGill University that she decided to embark on her own creative journey. With no formal training, Randee has taken a different route, using non-traditional methods and non-traditional tools to create her paintings.

Randee was drawn immediately to the abstract. The ability to express herself freely, without any limitations on her technique, style or choice of colour is what allows Randee to keep growing and creating as an artist.”