Artistic Influences

Toru Adachi and Shunsuke Itakura make up this influential animation duo and have been cranking out work since 1999. Their work is legendary for its intentional awkwardness, as AC-bu attempts to execute 'the wrong way on purpose.' You can watch my favourite video of theirs here, and learn more about them from Animation Obsessive.

Made at Bell Labs by Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton, the Studies in Perception series was one of the first attempts at a 'pixel' system, though it was not a pixel display. Rather, Studies in Perception was a rudimentary process of sampling images for their brightness, selecting glyphs, and printing. This image of a nude woman covered an entire office and was hung up as 'a prank.' Like many other advancements in imaging (the LENNA image is a prime example), this remarkable achievement was buoyed by a desire to produce images of nude women. A site of profoundly contradictory feelings, Bell Labs is.

You know her, you love her. Standing with Marjane Satrapi and Art Spiegelman as titans of artful and important autobio comics, Alison Bechdel's work is a seamless mash of political world-making, psychoanalysis, and situated storytelling.

When I saw the Whitney retrospective of Cohen's work in early 2024, I was so animated by my own plotter that I went 'missing' for three days. His work with AARON (the drawing program he designed to draw like him) presents a vital corrective to the hegemonic construction of generated imagery as median slop. It helps that the outputs are beautiful too - though I'll admit that I am partial to the sharpie-only drawings. You can watch a video of AARON carrying on after Cohen's death here.

A huge influence on my intuitions regarding shapes, colour blocks, and flooding the visual field. Beyond visual prowess, he has taken the field of comics to soaring new heights by constructing a wholly new relationship between the visual and the narrative. It is impossible to describe outside of reading his comics yourself. My favourite, Familiar Face (2020), can be purchased through Drawn and Quarterly (or borrowed from your local library). Beyond his work in comics, he models the life of the artist as a community member and political actor. We live in the same city; the vast majority of Pro-Community, Anti-Cop and Pro-Palestine signs that I notice are drawn by him, not to mention hoards of local event flyers, album covers, solidarity marches, and fundraisers. At his best, he presents fully-formed possibilities of a better world.

The singular voice behind the design of the 1984 Apple II interface and the parent of all 'pixel art,' Susan Kare's icon sets and logic are as simple as they are brilliant. You may be familiar with her Cairo icon set(s), which I have loving appropriated in my KARE Paintings.

The second Toronto-based comics creator on this list, and for good reason. Kyle's mastery of pattern and negative space is dreamy and off-putting. He has many imitators, but none that can capture the spirit.

Though plotters have been around for decades, Lehni arguably made the first 'drawing robot' in 2003 with his project that took spray-paint to the wall.

Michel Majerus saw and created the future. His estate is still active and invites contemporary artists to expand on, converse with, and continue Majerus's project.

As it says on his website, he's the father of video art.

Walter Scott does many things, but his comics about art (rather than as art) are what he's known for. Reading Wendy presented me with the possibility that I could be part of a world of art production (which is ultimately an industry made of people. Did you know that? Somehow I didn't).