G.D. TRUC is not politically correct. He has a severely over-sized ego and simply cannot get enough of himself. He fancies himself a sportsman, an artist, a philosopher and a master of seduction...a citizen of the world who has the answers to almost every major problem facing the world today. Truc (which means "thing" in French) is a French cartoon character created by Canadian artist Scott MacLeay in Paris where he worked as a photographer and composer for thirty years until moving to Brazil in 2010. MacLeay recalls, "G.D. Truc was comic relief. I started drawing him when I was working day and night in the darkroom on the Fragments Series of photographs in 1981. I think it was a simple question of sanity. He just arrived out of nowhere. His personality evolved quickly and before I knew it he was quite a complex fellow. He never smiled and had an uncanny knack for misunderstanding relatively straightforward situations. I grew to like the guy. There was something touching about his naïveté and his larger than life inadvertent buffoonery."This book is a character snapshot of this almost lovable character with drawings dating from his creation in Paris in 1981 until the present. The ever-expressionless TRUC can be very charming and is not completely devoid of wit, although we tend to laugh at him more than we laugh with him. Some say that the more we see of him the more we grow to love him. "Vast Program" as General de Gaulle once replied to a heckler who had cried out "Death to idiots". Well, perhaps this unorthodox cartoon biography will help people to make up their own minds about this bohemian Parisian megalomaniac.
About the Author: Scott MacLeay is a Canadian artist (photographer / composer) who lived and worked in Paris for over thirty years. He received a formal education in the social sciences and holds a Masters of Science in Economic Theory specializing in Development Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He earned a Canada Council Doctoral Scholarship but left these studies at the University of British Columbia to pursue a career in photography in Vancouver, Canada. He moved to Paris in 1979 and had his first major one-man exhibition at the Space Gallery in New York in 1980. For the next eight years he exhibited his work worldwide and was represented by the Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery in New York and the Galérie Créatis in Paris. He founded the Photography Department at the American Center for Artists in Paris in 1980 and was a Rockefeller Foundation Artist in Residence there in 1982. He became Director of the Center for Media Art and Photography of the American Center in 1985. He founded the MMAP (Music / Media Art / Photography), a network of professionals dedicated to providing practical hands-on education to young artists in the media arts in Paris from 1987 to 1999. In 1983 he began composing music for contemporary dance and pursued this work until 1998 composing not only for dance but also for video art and special format cinema as well as for his group Private Circus with whom he wrote and produced two CD's - Small Crowds and La Moitié de L'Histoire. Between 1994 and 2009 he also worked as an international project planning and creative consultant on cultural projects in France and in China as well as creating and managing several development projects for European companies in China, India and Brazil. In 2003 he returned to doing commercial photography and advertising design work in the spa cosmetics field in Paris. He currently lives and works in Florianópolis Brazil with his family. He has returned to working in photography and video and has developed a technological arts development program entitled The Creative Process.