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Upcoming events
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SDBC TAPROOM CONCERTS PRESENTS Rory Taillon live and in concert at the Stray Dog Brewing Company, 510 Lacolle Way in the Taylor Creek Business Park. Doors open 7:30 p.m. Tickets $10 in advance and $15 at the door.
TRIVIA NIGHT from 7:30 p.m. every Tuesday night at the Royal Oak Pub Orléans. Free to play. Prizes for the winning team! The Royal Oak Pub is located at 1981 St. Joseph Blvd. near Jeanne d'Arc. For more info visit 
TRIVIA NIGHT from 6:30 p.m. at the Stray Dog Brewing Company. Exercise your grey matter before it turns to mush over the holidays. Reservations are a must to secure your spot. Send your team name and number of people to info@straydogbrewing.ca. The Stray Dog Brewing Company is located at 501 Lacolle Way.
OPEN MIC NIGHT at the Stray Dog Brewing Company, 501 Lacolle Way. Registration begins at 7 p.m. Music at 8 p.m. with your host Matthew Palmer.
CUMBERLAND INDOOR WINTER MARKET from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the R.J. Kennedy Arena in Cumberland Village featuring local produce and products and items produced my local artisans PLUS a cash style breakfast.
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(Posted
8:30 a.m., July 13)
Orléans artist Patrick Fraser can still remember the moment that would change his life forever. He was 16 and was immersed in the hip hop culture that had just come out of New York City and was spreading across North America like wild fire. An habitual doodler as a kid, Fraser was immediately attracted to both the music and the art of hip hop. The year was 1983 and the movie Wild Style had just been released featuring renowned graffiti artists Fab 5 Freddy and Lee Quinones who designed the Wild Style graffiti logo that's featured in the film. "When I first moved to Ottawa from England, the only music on the radio was classic rock and pop. That's what I grew up with and then when Wild Style came out it was like this whole new world opened up to me," recalls Fraser. That same summer, his mother managed to save enough money to buy a turntable/cassette/AM-FM radio combo with digital tuning from Woolco. The first record he played on it was a 45 a friend had brought back from a trip to New York called "Rock Box" by Run DMC. As he soon as he saw the "Wild Style" logo, Fraser wanted to do graffiti. He had already gained a reputation for painting classic rock themed denim jackets for his friends and fellow schoolmates at D. Roy Kennedy Elementary School in the west end. Part of the hip hop culture at the time was "tagging" whereby graffiti artists use a grease marker to draw their logo on public installations like hydro boxes, bus shelters and pretty much anything that doesn't move. It's a form of marking one's territory which exists today and is often associated with vandalism. Thankfully, Fraser wasn't a very good tagger. His canvass of choice, at the time, was the OC Transpo bus he took nearly every day. It didn't take for him to get caught and he was ordered to do community service in the form of cleaning up graffiti on OC Transpo buses. "In a way it was a good thing because it turned my life around. Instead of tagging buses, I started collecting big cardboard boxes, like the kind they use for appliances, and I used that as my canvass," says Fraser. Besides graffiti art, the young Fraser was also a comic book fan. He was into the DC comic book series and liked both the story line and the art. Pretty soon he started to imitate the art and drew countless sketches of Spiderman, Superman and the rest of the DC universe characters. After graduating from high school, Fraser went to George Brown College in Toronto where he revived his fabric art and started his own little cottage industry painting graffiti on jeans for other students. "I'm sure there are some jeans out there in a thrift store somewhere or in a box with my designs on them," jokes Fraser. As he got older, Fraser began to focus more on caricatures and he developed a free-form, stream of consciousness technique which he employs today drawing caricature murals using permanent black markers in various sizes. He's also developing a line of T-shirts, which he hopes to one day market along with a possible comic book series which he's also working on when he's not changing diapers. He and his wife recently had their second child which came along just 18 months after their first. When he's not at home, Fraser teaches cartooning and caricature drawing to kids seven to 12 through a city-run program in Nepean. His work is truly unique and can sell for hundreds of dollars. To see more of his creations visit www.rawartists.org/dublic. (This story was made possible thanks to the generous support of our local business partners.) |
Orléans
artist Patrick Fraser with two of his unique
creations which he does using a stream of
consciousness technique employing a black
Sharpie marker as his only medium. Fred Sherwin
Photo
Commons Corner
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Queen's Park Corner
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