A biography of sorts

I was 18 from a small town when I graduated from grade 13 and was told by my mother that I should go to university. I came to Carleton University as science student and for some reason insinuated myself in the School of Architecture and the School of Journalism, in anthropology and the stories we tell ourselves, and what we tell the stories with. It would not have occurred to me, nor likely that I would have been successful in trying to enter an ‘art’ school. The School of Journalism, through the Audio Visual Department had a television studio and an animation camera and Helga in Journalism would teach on a flat bed 16mm editor if you were interested. The School of Architecture had large darkroom as did the Student association. I was employed in the Audio Visual Department, employed as a teaching assistant in the School of Journalism, and employed as the darkroom manager by the Student Association. The student association had what we would call today, a ‘maker space’ with wood working, and silk screening.

I can’t claim to be an autodidact, too many teachers and peers have pointed a way froward, but much is made of the formal 'Art Education' which I can not claim. After Carleton I continued with 5x7inch B&W landscape contact prints culminating in a Ontario Arts Council grant to mount a show of work in 1980. It is this support, for which I was grateful, but it seemed to me that to finance my investigations a choice between an academic life of semiotics and structuralism or commercial practice was necessary. At this time I worked doing ‘industrial’ films shooting a slow 16mm film, 35mm transparencies, and recording sound, working from coast to coast to coast. It is this work that gave me a unique stills portfolio of transparencies that would get me advertising and design firms commercial clients. It is these two tracts that weave in and out of a life as a’maker,’ art and commerce.