Carry On (2024-25)

Here are a few recent drawings that are also in the artists’ book “Carry On” – order / info here.

Deceiver, 2024
11 x 8.5″
Pencil and wax oil pastel on paper

Carry On, 2024
11 x 8.5″
Pencil and wax oil pastel on paper

Solidarity, 2024
11 x 8.5″
Pencil and wax oil pastel on paper

Messages Received, 2024
11 x 8.5″
Pencil and wax oil pastel on paper

Move, 2025
11 x 8.5″
Pencil and wax oil pastel on paper

Tainted Love, 2025
11 x 8.5″
Pencil and wax oil pastel on paper

Year Zero Series / Artists’ Book (2022-24)

This series of drawings is based on “post-apocalyptic” film posters and stills. These works make up a recent artists’ book, which is now sold out.

We Are Down to the Line, People, 2022
12 x 9″
India ink and wax oil pastel on 350lb. Strathmore

When Your Feet Touch the Floor, 2022
12 x 9″
India ink and wax oil pastel on 350lb. Strathmore

How Brief the Dream, 2022
12 x 9″
India ink and wax oil pastel on 350lb. Strathmore

I Don’t Want to be Nothing, 2023
12 x 9″
India ink and wax oil pastel on 350lb. Strathmore

Amerika Series / Artists’ Book (2022-24)

The Amerika series used famous or historical American art as source material for 20 drawings. These pieces were published as an artists’ book in early 2024 (sold out).

After “Veteran in a Field” by Winslow Homer (1865), 2022
11 x 8.5″
India ink on paper

After “Stag at Sharkey’s” by George Bellows (1909), 2023
11 x 8.5″
India ink on paper

After “Secrets of the Night” by Charles M. Russell (1926), 2023
11 x 8.5″
India ink on paper

After “Nighthawks” by Edward Hopper (1942), 2024
11 x 8.5″
India ink on paper

Survival Success Artists’ Book (2023)

A special RISO publication made in collaboration with Marc Fischer (the man behind Public Collectors). The last copies are available here.

From the back cover: This booklet features Jonathan Canady’s drawings based on illustrations from a 1957 U.S. Army-issued survival guide (reprinted in 1970). Canady’s drawings are paired with scans of some of his source material. The illustrator of the drawings created for the Army is uncredited. Some of the original drawings that inspired Canady are placed alongside his reimaginings, while others are dispersed throughout the booklet in less direct placements or not included at all. In his versions of these illustrations, Canady takes these pragmatic guides to surviving under harsh conditions and transforms them into existential scenes of discovery and recovery. His humans are no longer soldiers that have successfully followed a lesson in a book, but creatures from a less identifiable time whose circumstances have been made strange and unknowable.  

Jonathan Canady’s drawings were produced in 2022 and the design of this booklet was a collaboration that we worked on together over email. Previously he contributed to the Public Collectors project QUARANZINE in 2020. Well known in the experimental music underground, Jonathan Canady began to focus his creative efforts on visual art in 2007. He has been living in Portland, Oregon since 2014.

— Marc Fischer / Public Collectors