Italian Journals and Drawing Lessons, 1993

In October 1992, with funding from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, I moved to Italy for twelve months. The series of fifty-seven mixed-media drawings on 12 x 9 inch pages began in a drawing book. The project ended the day I left Italy. As a result, some of the drawings are incomplete, as they would appear in any student's sketchbook.

I worked simultaneously on all the pages while they were still in the original book. I drew anything that caught my attention: landscapes, crowds of people, objects in museums, images in books, things around apartments and houses I rented, self-portraits, Spirograph doodles, notes. I included collages of my travels throughout the country: maps, found items, letters from friends and ticket stubs from museums to ferryboats.

The book of drawings resembled the travel journal of a student on the Grand Tour, a role I embraced with pleasure. Eventually, the book was so unwieldy that I dismantled it, carefully cutting away the spiral to retain the look of pages removed from a book.

A few drawings from this series have participated in group exhibitions at Deluge Contemporary Art in Victoria and elsewhere in BC. Several drawings are in private collections.