Ian McKay, a self-taught artist born in England in 1949, has had various identities since 1967 when he left Britain for Canada to join Vancouver's entertainment scene. His theatrical tours, including a stint as the opening act for Led Zeppelin, continued until 1990 when he began been working on The Babel Project.

Babel depicts an invented city called Axonometropolis. It is a city of the imagination with infinite structures, roads, canals and bridges. A surreal city without perspective. There are no vanishing points or horizons. As McKay describes it, the buildings, pathways, lakes and gardens are visible in their actual scale, in all directions, to infinity.

Although untrained in architecture, McKay manages to depict his imagined landscape meticulously in detailed architectural drawings. His work is collected internationally and has had successful shows in New York and London. Three images are included in Ernest Burden's book, published in 1992, "Visionary Architecture."

Ian McKay has difficulty seeing the "big picture," literally and metaphorically, as he is legally blind. Paying close attention to detail, his technique is to focus only on a small area at any one time with the help of a high strength magnifier. The drawings, first published in 2008, are improvised directly, in ink, freehand, without a plan.