Rick Janson Art Studio

I don’t know why I chose to do this drawing back in the mid-1980s. Being a long-suffering Maple Leafs fan, I must have choked colouring in those red Habs jerseys.

I think it may be the largest drawing I ever did using a rapidograph pen and Prismacolor pencils. Unfortunately back then I didn’t get the importance of recording details such as a drawing’s size.

The picture had been displayed for some time in a commercial gallery attached to the Ottawa Simpson’s Department store. Alas, there were no takers back then.

Amazingly, despite the huge sheet of glass in the frame, it made it intact when I first moved to Halifax from Ottawa. The day of my arrival, I had placed it gingerly on the sofa, thinking about hanging it above the furniture. Then a friend arrived, and decided to sit on the couch without noticing that there was a large framed picture on it that almost covered its entire width. He leaned back and crrrrrrack! The picture had made it about 950 kilometres unscathed, but couldn’t make it another foot or two on to the wall of the apartment I shared. Ugh.

The picture did get new glass, and I recall somebody in Nova Scotia eventually purchasing it for a modest sum. No doubt I was inspired to have someone take it off my hands rather than have to move with it again. I have no idea what has since become of it (if you have it let me know).

This is likely one of the last drawings I did using the ink dots. I like the fact that I had simplified the background, keeping it in black and white while colouring the kids in the picture, propelling them forward.

The photo would have originally been taken in my south Ottawa neighbourhood, the high school kids being my friends back in the day. As I recall, the smaller kids wanted to join us in a pick-up road hockey game. Afterwards I took a photo. It seemed like a quintessential Canadian moment. The original image, while never the best quality (the overexposure may have accounted for the lack of detail in the background), did call out for something more to be done with it. It summed up much of my youth, having played ball hockey on every street and parking lot we could manage with whoever was around.

One of my friends in the photo went on to become a teacher in Texas. Another became Ontario’s first and only child advocate.

I’ve been going through a lot of my old photos lately, thinking about taking the autobiographical subject matter in my paintings a bit further back. It does pose some interesting opportunties and challenges, including working with that strange saturated pallette of early colour photographs, or even yet, figuring out how to translate images from black and white sources. Do I make up the colour, or do I paint it using only tonal values? Or do I paint it using a saturated retro-colour palette? Hmmm.

The more I look at this work I also am beginning to wonder whether my interest is in the landscape, or whether my direction should be more figurative?

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