Inflatable Eye - Biographies

B.A. Lampman

After criss-crossing the country and living in Calgary, Vancouver, Quebec City, Vancouver (again), Montreal, Vancouver (again), and Montreal (again), I finally settled in my hometown of Victoria, British Columbia with my husband D.P. Smith and our daughter Chloe. While living in Montreal I completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (With Distinction) at Concordia University, with a focus on painting (oil and acrylic). Collage began to show up in my sketchbooks and in my paintings while at Concordia; and at some point after graduation I began to produce simple black and white collage calendars culled from sources like "The World Weekly News". From there I began to collect illustrated Bible and Fairy Tale books from the 50's, 60's, and 70's, and the collages shown here are the result. My collages tend to have some combination of the following elements: humour, darkness, beauty, ambiguity, mystery, and/or a juxtapostion of the expected and the unexpected. Paintings run the gamut from rich thick oil to free-flowing ink, and tend to be more straightforward in their imagery. I try to give attention to detail, composition, and craftsmanship. More recently, Adobe Photoshop has begun to enhance and expand the possibilities, primarily with collage. ...

David P. Smith

In the fall of 1980, I decided to study Visual Communication- graphic design and advertising art- at The Alberta College of Art. I was interested in cartooning, calligraphy, and photography, and was a fairly adept wordsmith. Somehow things went awry, and six years later I graduated from the Fine Arts department with an honours diploma in painting and was focusing increasing energy on performance art. Despite my reputation as an intense freak, upon graduation I was not immediately embraced by the art world. The double life of bone-crunching, soul-sucking, mind-numbing employment counter-balanced with artistic and creative endeavors began. This has been my life for fifteen years. I have bike couriered, worked in a glass studio, a Chinese furniture warehouse, loaded trucks, unloaded trucks, and painted houses painted houses painted houses. I have also consistently drawn, painted, performed, written, recorded and played music. Those early inclinations toward graphic art, advertising, and illustration have always been present in my visual art, and have increasingly come to the fore in recent years. That work is represented here, along with information on the music I've recorded over the last five years.

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