Rick Janson Art Studio

I used to walk by here all the time when I grew up in the south end of Ottawa. The marina was on Mooney’s Bay, somewhere between the beach and the Hog’s Back falls, where the Rideau Canal picked up for its final run through to the Ottawa River.

At the time in the mid-to-late 1970s I was studying at the University of Ottawa and working at the Fulcrum, the English-language student newspaper that used to print back-to-back with La Rotonde, the French-language counterpart. At the time there was an artist who regularly contributed cartoons to the paper consisting of tiny little dots made with a rapidograph pen. I was hooked watching him at work.

I was taking drawing classes in the University’s Art School and decided that this might be something for me. The only thing was, I would make these drawings on a far larger scale and would eventually add colour with Prismacolor Pencils.

I remember literally laying down on the floor of my parent’s basement and making endless dots while letting my mind drift sideways. The dots would go over a loose pencil drawing I used to navigate the image, any traces of pencil erased once the ink had been applied. It helped to have music on. Looking back, I don’t know how I did it. One would think the repetitive strain alone would do in my hands, let alone my head.

While most of the image came together this way, I did make exceptions where I could wildly make a line, such as the tree branches in the image.

I made quite a few of these drawings, some making their way to two commercial galleries which were intrigued, but really didn’t know what to make of it. Neither ever sold a drawing for me and I got left on the hook for the cost of framing. It was clear that the economics of spending a week or more on one of these just wasn’t there.

In the end, I didn’t get my BFA from the U of O, but through the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where I embraced oil painting, requiring a very different approach to my art making. I literally had to re-learn how to draw using a paint brush, although having made few lines and instead embraced tone in these early drawings, the transition was not as difficult as I had first feared.

Recently I bought some watercolour pencils that really reminded me of this period. But unlike the prismacolor pencils, these require water and once wet, look more like a watercolour painting. I will post one of these once I get over my present fear of making new marks this way.

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