Here is your Rey-O report for the second week of July, Two-Thousand and Seven:

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July 19th I’ll be participating in the Octopus Project IV: One Ride Only. Based in Toronto, the Octopus Project creates shows on a bi-monthly basis, featuring artists from a variety of disciplines. You can click on the picture above or here for more details.

• Saturday July 19th-20th. 55 Mill St., The Case Goods Warehouse in the Distillery District, Studio 410 (home of Melanie Gordon Photography) and 4th floor studios.

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At the tail end of the month I’ll be in a group show with some pretty talented folks. Featuring Alexei Vella, Michael Byers, Greg Hill, Kyung Soon Park, Christina Ung, and some guy. We’ve been planning this for quite some time and so it’s pretty wild to see it take off and now it’s almost about show time! The theme behind No Parachute Required is that of taking risks something that I’m sure we can all relate to.

• Opening Night -Thursday, July 24, 2008. 8:00pm. Gallery 1313 Queen Street West, West Entrance. Toronto. Have a map.

In other non-news, this action packed month has even more stuff going on behind the scenes - which I really can’t talk about, tough! And this concludes your non-news update for the second week of July.

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Dear Everyone,

Earlier this week the mythical land of Canada celebrated the creatively named ” Canada Day”, I hear that Americans also have a very special day today, the day that a new Will Smith Movie comes out, so here is something we can both enjoy: EXPLOSIONS.

boom.

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Hey everyone,

Today I’m playing catch up with all the various news items floating around this month:

• In a bit of unfortunate news, Matt over at Blueflip Art has decided to close down his business at the end of the month. This means that anyone interested in picking up any of the prints I have available through Blueflip have a couple of weeks left to do so. In case you didn’t catch my earlier post, Blueflip donates a portion of the proceeds each print to a charity of the artist’s choosing: I’m supporting Edge of Existence. Thanks Matt for letting me in on the fun and best of luck in all your future endeavors!

• I did a rather bizarre interview with Brad over at art blog Secret Still. To quote LeVar Burton ” Don’t take my friggin word for it, read it for your own fuggen self”. And look at that, Juxtapoz agrees! Thanks Brad!

• The above sketchbook excerpt is from a cool project started by college colleague, Rebecca Hitchens, aptly titled, ‘The Traveling Sketchbook’. A shared book between friends from all over North America, I was genuinely thrilled to receive it in the mail, I’m sure everyone involved will feel the same way too.

And that is all I can really think of right now, although I have the sneaking suspicion I missed something - but that’s what the edit button is for, right? no? fine. bye!

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Hello everyone,

Here we have the latest in the continuing adventures of the urbanaut, which you can find every Wednesday at torontoist. Enjoy and happy Canada Day!

I’d also like to add a quick thank you to everyone who has been checking out the blog/site/urbanaut and the great response I’ve been fortunate enough to receive, I really appreciate it - for serious.

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salty ancients: 11″x30″ mixed media. click to view large

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Here’s the latest in our continuing adventures of an old man, based loosely on my grand pappy. In a bit of cosmic alignment, I found out that Lolo’s birthday is this weekend, and here I am doing an entire body of work inspired by him.

I learned a lot from my last long format piece, this time I wanted the space to be used better, and have a good sense of movement throughout the image. I also wanted to take advantage of this larger size by going to town on the details, as well as providing a epic sense of scale.

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As I continue throughout this series, the original themes I set out to explore become increasingly more clear. My original inspiration in doing these long pieces, was to convey a sense of adventure, not unlike the unfolding progress of a world 1-1. I realized quickly that having a person move left to right didn’t seem to strike the correct mood - so now we have the old man tending to a rock garden amidst giants, or in this, fishing on turbulent waters. I like the tension this creates, the outside world filled with adventure and mystery, versus the stillness and the personal journey that people take.

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He also now has a little old dog friend!

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Check out the latest Urbanaut, enjoy! For the folks out of town, this is an actual tree in Toronto, you can see more pictures of it here, and here.

When the tree was cut, the city never got around to removing the rest of this stumpy eye sore. So for years now local street artists decorate it, always maintaining somewhere the phrase ‘hug me’.