The Lions are a Vancouver-based doodle tribe. The Lions 4 features the artists James Whitman, Barry Doupe, Matthew Brown, Tasha Brotherton, Lief Hall and Stephen Wichuk. This clutch of intuitive, wandering, figurative drawings is the work of a diligent art crew exploring Voltron drawing practices as they visualize the dematerialization of reality for us. It is a solid anthology. The strongest drawings occur when the gang’s loose doodle style coheres into an efficient abstract bio technical haiku of an image. The pencil scratches hum with the life of a roguish hamburger commanding the actions of a cyborg snowmanplasm escaping the scene. They display a potent alienating drawing style–sharp–crystalline– with little traces of the cartoon/street art pedigrees born by other doodle tribes. They have an extensive collection of drawings available online at www.lionpile.ca.
Untitled by James Whitman, a member of the Lions–appears to explore a utopic landscape where tech has seamlessly merged with the biological to the point where the sustainable integration is not a concern; it’s a basic rule of nature. Large wildernesses punctuated by light machine-like interventions. Evidence of rulebased drawing can be found in the patterns of the landscape textures, the groundcover and the leaves, lending each image a subtle sense of scale difficult to achieve in such apparently simple landscape drawings. (Marc Ngui)
Art zine, James Whitman, Barry Doupe, Matthew Brown, Tasha Brotherton, Lief Hall and Stephen Wichuk, 32 pages, BW and colour pages, Vancouver, BC, www.lionspile.ca