Todd Stewart
From Todd's website:
Originally from Saskatchewan and residing in Montreal for the last 15 years, I am an illustrator and a self-taught screenprinter. Since 2004 I have run Bree,ree, a small scale print studio. Photography, illustration, collage, stencil and letterpress have all found their way into my screenprinted works. My posters for art and music shows have been seen on city streets in Quebec, Canada and the United States, and my art prints have been exhibited in galleries and public spaces in Montreal.
My prints begin as drawings which are scanned and re-worked digitally before being transferred to screen. This allows me to build up my images with multiple overlapping layers of light and colour and tactically explore themes of consequence of thought and action, of history, ghosts, wonder, creation and decay. Working from a base of imagery culled internally - from memory, dreams, past experience - and externally - from my immediate surroundings, architectural illustration, city planning theory - I create pieces that consciously allow for open interpretation and multiple perspectives within both the narrative and composition itself.
My formal training in architecture and urban planning informs the style and content of my prints and drawings, which contemplate social life in urban spaces. Architecture and landscape serve as containers for stories and memory; the marks people leave on buildings and places are proof of their lives lived. At the end of my life, what do I have other than the stories that make me who I am? My most recent works form part of a larger narrative about an imaginary city, a fictitious version of cities I have witnessed in real life or in my imagination. Through a series of works on paper, I am creating a visual catalogue of different elements of this city and its many stories.
Originally from Saskatchewan and residing in Montreal for the last 15 years, I am an illustrator and a self-taught screenprinter. Since 2004 I have run Bree,ree, a small scale print studio. Photography, illustration, collage, stencil and letterpress have all found their way into my screenprinted works. My posters for art and music shows have been seen on city streets in Quebec, Canada and the United States, and my art prints have been exhibited in galleries and public spaces in Montreal.
My prints begin as drawings which are scanned and re-worked digitally before being transferred to screen. This allows me to build up my images with multiple overlapping layers of light and colour and tactically explore themes of consequence of thought and action, of history, ghosts, wonder, creation and decay. Working from a base of imagery culled internally - from memory, dreams, past experience - and externally - from my immediate surroundings, architectural illustration, city planning theory - I create pieces that consciously allow for open interpretation and multiple perspectives within both the narrative and composition itself.
My formal training in architecture and urban planning informs the style and content of my prints and drawings, which contemplate social life in urban spaces. Architecture and landscape serve as containers for stories and memory; the marks people leave on buildings and places are proof of their lives lived. At the end of my life, what do I have other than the stories that make me who I am? My most recent works form part of a larger narrative about an imaginary city, a fictitious version of cities I have witnessed in real life or in my imagination. Through a series of works on paper, I am creating a visual catalogue of different elements of this city and its many stories.
