May 11, 20202 min read

Off Topic - What I Do

Here's a peek behind the curtain. You may have noticed that there are two general types of blog posts here - those with a lot of writing, links and images, and those with mainly just images and links. I post the latter while I'm working on the former. This ensures a steady stream of content while multi-page writing is going on. After all, this is just me working on this thing.

For me, painting began while I was still at university during the early 90s, starting with boats (I was living on one at the time). A couple of dock-mates convinced me to audition for a traditional British pantomime. I got a mid-sized part (the last time I performed), introducing me to the weird, wacky, and wonderful world of community theatre (the Metro). I started volunteering in the Scenic Paint/Set Dec department. Three years later, I was the head of that department. Throughout, I supplemented my income by working in corporate events, a weird and wacky world all its own. Although not nearly as wonderful. By 2000 I had landed the position of Head Scenic Artist for the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre, where I worked for about a decade before the theatre went belly-up, a victim of some questionable historic administrative decisions and, frankly, the Vancouver Olympics (curse you, Olympics!).

After the Playhouse closed, I worked in commercial/industrial painting for a while (painted a lot of SportCheks, especially in Alberta), finally settling in a busy downtown Vancouver scene shop the Great Northern Way Scene Shop, headed by Elia Kirby. It was from there that I got laid off, along with everybody else, when the Shit Went Down.

These pics are from my time at the Playhouse.