Radio interview about Dave Foohey

Joe Pugh, the new host of the ever-awesome People First Radio program out of British Columbia, was nice enough to have me on to talk about Dave. The interview is really a follow-up to my op-ed that ran in early July in the Ottawa Citizen about Dave's death. While it was hard to do, Joe did a terrific job as an interviewer and his questions were empathic and honest. I couldn't ask for anything more than that. It's funny; it has been just over three months since the police came and told my wife and I about Dave's death and I'm still finding it pretty hard. I think part of that is still the uncertainty over exactly what happened (we're all still waiting for toxicology reports from the coroner). Closure, in other words, is still hard to come by. Being able to write about Dave helped as did being able to talk about him on Joe's program. A step at a time, right?

The interview can be found at https://www.vancouverislandmentalhealthsociety.org/podcast/remembering-dave/. There's a handy audio player so you can listen at your convenience, plus links to other sites that are also hosting the interview (i.e.: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.).

Alternatively, you can directly download the MP3 file right here. On a desktop or laptop, you can just "right-click" and download it to your computer from there.

Joe is also a writer at the CBC, so you can find more of his writing by visiting https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/author/joseph-pugh-1.6226261 - and please do so! There are some excellent pieces there!

Lastly, here's one of the few photos I have of Dave and I. It didn't make into my main post about Dave for a few reasons, but I thought I'd share it here. This is from 1995 in my old bachelor apartment in downtown Ottawa.

Drawing Kids

Given everything that has been going on, when I get a chance to draw I've been looking for fun little pieces to work on. The illustrations below certainly fit that bill!

Drawing kids is a great deal of fun. Very challenging, but fun! Why challenging? Drawing adults allows for more "wiggle-room." In other words, there's more flexibility in how one chooses to render adults. Or rather, I find that there's more flexibility. That's partially based on style, probably mixed in with a bit of my own sensibility when it comes to figure drawing. If you over-render children, they immediately look "wrong." Generally my goal is to try and keep everything as simple as possible while (at least in these cases) still maintaining my own visual style. It might sound easy, but it's really not in practice. In the cases of all these girls, I didn't want to get too cartoony or abstract, so that also influenced how I approached each piece.

In the case of the middle illustration, I also decided to play a bit with colour holds (where I change my black linework to a colour). Why do it? Again, for fun! It's neat to play and see how the art (and, more importantly, the feeling of the art) changes with different visual approaches. I've done it before, something you can see in this little celebration of Mary Marvel.

One of the things I love about art is that there's no "right" way to do it. There are multiple ways and multiple approaches. How one feels about that is a reflection of them, at least in that particular moment. And, of course, opinions change about art, too. Even how I approach colour has changed over time (see this, for example).

I don't know about you, but I find that pretty exciting.