Keirart

The soil beneath the empty lots of our industrial sector is completely saturated with toxic chemicals. You’d think nothing can grow there, but not so. Wild carrot, chickoree, ragweed and a plethora of other astonishing plants all grow alongside each other through the asphalt cracks, a neighborhood of tough, defiant, determined souls. They do the work of soil restoration just by being what and how…

Cracks are opening everywhere. Pot, Paint Tube, 2021 For three days a week I’m a personal support worker who provides care to thirteen lovely and sometimes difficult people. Each navigates their own stage of disrepair and dementia, all are present, alive and aware, palpably and engagingly human. PSW-ing is exhausting but satisfying work, shockingly underpaid and under supported in this…

I shovelled for 2 hours then met two of my neighbours for the first time yesterday - recruited them to push me out of my driveway. I work part time in health care now; there's no such thing as a snow day for us.

A solid eighteen inches of snow since Saturday afternoon in the GTA. All available vehicles, from snowblowers through skid steers and pickups with plough attatchments to massive snowploughs all in 24-hour play on the roads. It’s Tuesday morning and the side streets are still thick with slush, cars without snowtires spin their wheels but go nowhere. Neighbors are out and visible on every street,…

The sky here is a uniform sheet of white this morning, the sun a faint dot of yellow. A few snowflakes dance outside my window, there is a skiff of white on the rooftops and hydro lines from the wee-hours snowfall. Trees sway and wave in the same wind that has pushed these snowclouds here. They look restless, the trees. I feel restless too, after this morning’s scan of email and news. Today is…

When I first saw and drew these trees it was two weeks after Russia had invaded Ukraine. The City of Vancouver identifies all their trees so I found out they are Crimean Lindens (Putin annexed Crimea to Russia in 2014 with no international protest). It’s unthinkable that we live in a world where colonialism can still justify the annihilation of an entire culture, unthinkable that the invasion in…

I think of my folks when I look at this piece, and the incredible life they had together.

The pink you see in this piece is from a tree called Brazilwood. The yellows are Apple and Osage, the grey’s an iron gall ink made with Pomegranate.

A contortionist tree, so expressive I couldn’t resist drawing her from three different angles. ‘Buckthorn Moon’ is another view of this tree, as is the green tree in ‘Dance’

All colour on this piece comes from the buckthorn berries I harvested from my little place on Georgian Bay. The round collage piece is the filter I used to strain the ink.

24” x 24”  On stretched canvas: Acrylic gel, titanium and zinc white, collage (ink filters, washi paper, vellum), inks made from natural sources (brazilwood, buckthorn, cochineal insects, osage, fustic, logwood), water, gravity

Caterpillars have 12 eyelets known as stemmata which can perceive only light and dark, I read. They’re guided not by sight but mostly by taste, which tells a caterpillar whether the plant it has just taken a bite of has the nutrients it needs. A hatched larvae’s imperative is to eat and grow, eat and grow and eat until it can grow no more. When its body is the largest it can be the caterpillar…

This olive tree was young in 3000BC. Before the pyramids were built in Egypt, before the stone circles were built in what we call Spain and England It stretched itself down through the dry soil of what is now Palestine to find water. This tree, Al Badawi, has lived for a thousand human generations. It continues to grow and yield an enormous crop of olives close to the place that became famous a…