Vancouver has a long history of artists taking to the streets. Many insightful, poignant, and even brilliant works can be found in the most unexpected places. Thirty or forty years worth of graffiti on top of graffiti is sure to be whitewashed away when Vancouver hosts the winter olympics in 2010. Part of the appeal of graffiti and street art for me is that temporary nature, one day there’s an old building festooned with generations of graffiti, the next day it’s gone. Forever.

Here are a few pages from a “graphic novel” of sorts that I’m working on. It’s kind of a documentation of the visual richness of Vancouver’s downtown eastside. The text will be provided by the prolific amounts of poems, pleas, wisdom, and often insane writings found in the back alley doorways too many people in Vancouver call home.