I’m glad I took this picture because all these gorgeous oxidation colours have disappeared after the iron heated up for the first time.

I finally splurged on something I’ve been coveting for a while: a customized wood-burning iron with the Fragmentalist logo, for branding the backs of my mosaics.

If you’re looking to get a custom wood-burning tool: I found these guys after reading a lot of recommendations on a lot of woodworking forums. They not only ship internationally – which is always an issue when shopping on the internet while Canadian – but also have great prices and shortest processing time. You have to call them to place an order, which turned out to be a good thing, because apparently I was trying to order a heavier-duty tool than I really needed. So they saved me some extra money and were, overall, really helpful. In short, I picked well.

This is my test board and, next to it, a sample burned on veneer that arrived with the tool. Clearly these guys have had a lot of practice.

And today – exactly two weeks after I ordered it – this thing arrived!

It’s an electric tool, and takes about 15 minutes to get to the right branding temperature. Then the human wielding it takes – oh, hours – to get the hang of how to apply it properly.

I exaggerate. I got a handful of good impressions after another 15 minutes of practicing on a scrap of plywood. But not so good that it made me want to immediately go to town on all my completed mosaics.

Here’s one that turned out well:

Also, this room smells heavenly right now.

Rob’s personality, like his art, projects such optimism, that the first question I ask when we meet up for coffee near his Queen East studio is about what helps him to stay so upbeat.

“I’m just grateful that I get to do this. I worked some terrible jobs over the years. I’ve got so much going for me already – I get to do what I love every single day. Even if things are not always as financially rewarding as I might like them to be, I get to do something that I’m passionate about and that’s amazing.

“It really helps when you love what you do. My paintings are really upbeat and positive, and I try to really be playful – and when you have that around you all day you can’t help but feel that way.”

But the consequences of the recent economic downturn can be disheartening for a professional artist, and focusing on the positives requires an occasional self-reminder, especially after a disappointing show:

“I have to say to myself,  ‘It’s ok, Rob. People are really responsive to the work, and it’s really good work, and remember you love to do it. It’s not about the outcome, it’s about the process.’”

Speaking of the process, how does he choose the phrases that make up are such an integral part of many of his works?

“I sit on some of them – there’s a few that I’ve been sitting on for some time, I can’t think of how to make them.  I don’t want to be too preachy, and I don’t want to be too ‘cat of the month calendar’ either.  So I sit on a lot of them until I find the right inspiration, the right imagery.”

One Answer quotes Neil Gaiman:
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one.”

Rob admires many of the authors of the clever, funny and thought-provoking quotes that accompany his paintings: “They come from people who are the person I would like to be [...]  I’d like to have the knowledge and experience it takes to say those smart things.”

He says it’s very exciting and rewarding when all the pieces of an artwork finally come together.

“I’m just finishing one right now. I’d started it one way and thought, ‘It’s a bit preachy, but ok, I’ll try that.’ Then I thought, ‘It’s not nearly funny enough,’ so I went back to the drawing board and made it a little bit funnier, a little bit sillier.”

Wanting to make his work more humorous, to “turn up the heat a little bit” sometimes makes Rob doubt its marketability: “Every now and again I get that voice in my head, ‘Don’t say that, Rob. No one’s going to hang that up in their house.’”

But his main concerns about turning up the humour in his work are not commercial. He worries that because his paintings are fun, they are sometimes dismissed as not being Art.

Fortunately, he recently had a confidence boost after watching Beauty is Embarrassing – a documentary about the filmmaker and artist Wayne White, whose paintings were initially dismissed by the art world because they were fun and humorous. Until they began to be sought after by a few discriminating collectors and galleries, that is – then the art community got behind him!

“I found it really nice hearing this successful artist who felt the same doubt that I felt,” Rob remarks. “I’ve been trying in the recent paintings to water them down slightly so that they’re more palatable to a larger audience. But after watching that I thought, ‘You know what, no, I’m going to stop that. Because if it really is good, then it doesn’t matter.’ I think you just have to believe in what you’re putting out there and eventually people will get behind it.”

Rob comes from a theater background, having painted scenery for the stage after completing his BFA at Ryerson. When I ask about his theatre work, he talks of the differences in the two creative communities:

“In the theatre, there is a sense of inclusion. There’s a real sense of community. If you’ve got a lead on something, you say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this great lead, you should send a message to – whoever.  I’ll put in a good word for you.’

“And when I moved into the art community, everything is sort of secretive. ‘I’ll tell you what I need to tell you, but that’s all.’ And I’m not that guy. If I know something, I’ll share it with everyone I know. There’s a  place for all of us.”

Though he sometimes misses working in the theatre, Rob enjoys no longer having to paint someone else’s vision.

Rob also spent a few years painting murals:

Route66 Casino Mural

“Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of murals. It was good. It was great training ground. I don’t really have any formal arts training, so I sort of learned as I went. The more you work on something, the more you hone the skills.”

He sometimes misses the larger scale of the stage and mural work, but his focus is definitely on painting:

“I just find that whatever you put your concentration in, whatever you the put most focus on in your life, is the one thing that begins to flourish. It’s like feeding a plant. If you feed one plant more than all the rest, it’s going to be the one that does well. So I figure if I feed the one that feeds my soul, that leads me somewhere.”

Starstruck

Sometimes it leads in wonderfully unexpected directions, as when one of Rob’s clients – an art teacher from Florida – decided to use a painting of his as a basis for an art project with her class.

“She broke it down into, ‘I want you to put one retro/vintage element into it, I want you put some words on it that say something, and I want to have a landscape – and use his work as your inspiration.’

“So then [the kids] all did versions of my work. It was fascinating. It was so great. But weird. Super weird.

“I Skyped with them and they were asking all these questions, and I kept saying, ‘The biggest thing you have to do, is you have to do the work. It sounds ridiculous, but you have to do so much work – you have to paint and paint and paint, or sculpt and sculpt and sculpt – every piece takes you to the next thing. I can’t stress it enough.’”

He wonders what his painting would be like, had he started earlier in life.

“It takes a while to refine your voice and how you want to say something, and what you want to say. And do you want to say anything at all? Some people don’t ever feel the need – they just want to paint pretty pictures, which is great, but I felt like it needed to say something.”

While his work may already be taught in schools, Rob himself is constantly learning, experimenting and trying to grow as an artist. His smaller mixed media works are one of the recent experiments.

“I wanted to make something small, that would be at a different price point. But then I realized how fun it would be if I started to layer stuff on top of each other. In the theatre, scenery is always stacked as it goes back, so that there are layers of things you can see on stage. I didn’t realize that was going to be part of it until things started developing that way.”

The mixed media works, though they have a very similar visual aesthetic to Rob’s paintings, are a huge departure for him in terms of process.

“When I’m designing [the paintings], I’ll sketch them and scan them and fit everything together in Photoshop, so that when I start painting, it’s there exactly how I want to do it. But those little ones, I don’t do a drawing ahead of time. I just sort of plow forward, thinking, ‘Well how’s this going to look? I don’t know!’ So it’s interesting to use that part of my brain, building it out of my head, unplanned. It becomes a whole new challenge for me.”

The urban themes in a lot of Rob’s work betray his love of the big city.

“I came from London, where everybody was white, middle class. And you either lived in the poor end of town or the middle class. Not even the “poor” – there wasn’t even that many poor people. It was just all the same. And there were big malls. And one theatre. And one gallery.”

The diversity of cultures and neighbourhoods in Toronto is Rob’s favourite thing about the city: “Toronto’s a great city to explore and there’s no end to it. It’s enormous. “

Still, even in this cosmopolitan metropolis, he finds that making art with a tongue-in-cheek message can be a struggle.

“Especially in Canada. People here are so Group-of-Seven-whitewashed. Group of Seven did beautiful, beautiful work  – but there’s a whole world of things beyond that.

“But it is a struggle. Selling art is a struggle. But it’s that struggle that makes you do your best stuff. Like being questioned by the people on whether it’s actually Art. So I’m realizing now, ‘No, just because it’s funny, doesn’t mean it’s not art.’ And that’s the part that I’ve been struggling with. I think going forward, I will have more conviction.

“And I’m really excited about these new pieces, I think there’s a couple that are going to be really good. I can’t wait to show them next month [at the TOAE].”

Come see Rob Croxford’s new paintings July 5-7 at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition – he’s got a primo spot!

You can see more of Rob’s work on his website and in person at a number of galleries across Ontario.

All images in this interview are © Rob Croxford and are used with the artist’s permission

My booth at RAW

The weather was all kinds of crazy, but not during the set-up and take-down times – so I think the weather gods liked my offering. Throughout the day, ten-minute bursts of drenching rain just cooled us off from the scorching sun and made sure we got our exercise running around covering stuff up.

I got lots of compliments on my mosaics, many fascinated visitors who haven’t seen mosaics before, a few who wanted to learn how to make mosaics, but on the whole not that many who wanted to buy them. One guy brought me samples of a material called smalt, with a printout of its history and properties – that was kind of awesome. A whole lot of my friends showed up all at once and then brought me amazing artisanal ice cream from a place called Ed’s. On Sunday, there was a bluegrass band playing between bursts of rain – a joy to my honky-tonk heart.

Also, my neighbour artists were fantastic – so here’s a shout-out to them, plus a couple of others whose work I enjoyed. Click on the images to go to the artist’s site.

Lynn Leonard
Photography

Rob Boerboom
Painting

Stephen Cooper
Photography

Rob Croxford
Mixed media

Paul Karkas
Painting

Patric Lajoie
Photography

Andrew Smith
Photography

Deirdre Wicks
Watercolour

Continuous YouTube playlist here.

There are over 120 artists participating in the show – you can check out images of their work at the RAW Artist Galleries site.

As for me, I’ll be showing the mosaics from my Favourite Books series (including the one inspired by Neuromancer, that William Gibson himself complimented), as well as the slate abstracts and other new works, including this charmingly titled one:

Mixed Emotions (Dark Side of the Moon)

Here’s a map of the park to help you find my booth:

Hope to see you this weekend!

The slate was part of the great scrap tile haul from our local tile store, and strips of it were arranged into panels that I ended up smashing apart.

The four mosaics above are quite small – about 6″x7″ – mainly because slate is so heavy.

I did make one larger piece, 8″x12″ (on the right), after which I had to stop with this lovely series, as there was only slate rubble left.

I suspect there’s another small series of abstracts hiding in the rubble though – I’ll see about digging it out tomorrow.

The mirror in Sneaky Dee’s washroom I’m using as the basis for this mosaic

I decided to start with an image of the bathroom mirror at Sneaky Dee’s, both because the mirror aspect of it seemed like an interesting twist to explore, and because this was the place that gave me the idea in the first place.

Graffiti is the main aspect of Sneaky Dee’s decor, and while in the restaurant itself it doesn’t overwhelm you, every time I enter their washroom, it’s like an aesthetic punch to the solar plexus. Every inch of wall, cubicle and ceiling space is covered in sloppily lettered platitudes and highly unoriginal insults.

I like the place, it has good food. And I’m sure its punkish nighttime crowd, whose inebriated decorating efforts are represented here, would be pleased with the revolting effect they have on the casual weekend bruncher. But rather than try to tune out this passive aggressive assault on my artistic sensibilities, I decided to see whether I can turn it into something that I’d find beautiful.

So far it’s working. I love how this unholy mess is turning out in stained glass and mirror, on a 1.5′ x 1.5′ board. But cutting the glass with the required obsessive precision is taking such a long time.

Detail of the mosaic in progress. Under the pieces of stained glass is the printout of the original photo that I’m using as a sketch.

And since I’ve been accepted to exhibit at the Riverdale Art Walk, which is taking place June 1-2, I’ll need to take the next four weeks to make a few new pieces for that show. So I’ll have to lay this one aside for now, otherwise I’ll kill most of that time finishing it. But it’ll be worth the wait, I think; it’s turning out kind of incredible.

You can now download the story that I illustrated for my kids as a PDF.

I hope that you know a kid or two that you can share it with, and that they enjoy it as much as our girls did.

The download is available in English and Russian.

Edited to add: The Story of a Piece of Paper was featured on Boing Boing. As I have no words to express just how ridiculously thrilling this is, I present it here as a bare statement of fact.

On his way to the office one Monday morning, Richard Mayhew discovers that taxi drivers no longer see him, ticket vending machines reject his coins, he is invisible to the other passengers on the train and, upon arriving at the office, that his desk is cleared and none of his co-workers know who he is. In fact, they don’t even see him unless he addresses them first, and then it takes them mere seconds to forget he’s there. When his fiancée fails to recognize him and he makes his way back home, he finds that his apartment has already been rented to someone else. His existence has completely slipped the world’s mind.

This has always been one of the book’s most vividly magical moments for me – when its protagonist slips from the normal world to begin his extraordinary adventure among the warriors, beasts, noblemen tricksters and supernatural assassins of London Below. So for this mosaic I chose the scene that precipitated it all: Richard’s finding of the wounded Lady Door.

On his way to an important dinner with his fiancée, Richard stops to help an injured girl who seems to have slumped to the pavement right out of a blank brick wall – someone his girlfriend can’t even see at first and when she does, she demands that Richard not waste time on this ragged lowlife. Despite this, Richard takes the girl to his flat to recover and hide from those who wounded her.

A place of fables, London Below is unseen by the residents of real London, who rush through its streets and underground stations on their daily commutes, unaware that side-by-side with their world there exists another – in which there is a deadly bridge at Knightsbridge, an aging Earl at Earls Court, and an actual angel called Islington.

The morning after he brings the bleeding girl to his flat, Richard discovers that her name is Door, and that she has the power to open doors where none have existed before. Which is how, in a last desperate attempt to escape a pair of nightmarish assassins who have been pursuing her for days, she ended up opening a door through the boundary separating London Below from London Above, and tumbling to the pavement in front of Richard.

Neverwhere was the first Neil Gaiman novel I read, and it has stayed my favorite after I’ve read all the others. Oddly enough, it was a BBC miniseries before it was a book. In March of this year a radio play adaptation of it was also released, resulting in record-breaking listening figures for BBC streaming radio – no doubt due not only to Neil Gaiman’s popularity, but also to a stellar cast, which included Benedict Cumberbatch and Christopher Lee. Supposedly it’s very good. Still, I’ll take my stories printed on a page over radio adaptations any day.

Door detail

A wall and a dark form of a collapsed girl seemed both a simple and a compelling image for the mosaic. An indication of something extraordinary, I hope, is given in both the striking perspective of the wall, and the fantastic glass I was lucky to find for the bricks. The same stained glass also turned out to be marvelously suited to represent the pool of blood on the pavement. An expanse of wall is a boundary, and a monotony. The monotony of the ordinary, with a hint of something magical hovering just out of sight.

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