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[caption id="attachment_6261" align="alignnone" width="497"] Spending all your time outside in a back alley can sure age a person, let me tell you![/caption]

This painting has some eye-appeal, as the detail above shows. The deliberate cracking is a nice touch, and a bit of nudity never hurts either -- I'll just throw that out there, just like someone threw this painting out there, leaned up against an apartment dumpster.

[caption id="attachment_6133" align="alignnone" width="497"] Kent taking it easel; getting ready for a bike ride, in fact.[/caption]

Yesterday I visited my friend Kent Crawford, a local Vancouver artist. His landscape painting are quite the thing -- straightforward realism at first glance -- on closer examination the detail resolves as a multitude of jigsaw puzzle-like bits of solid colour. It's not exactly pointillism, but the tiny shards of solid colour similarly blend together at a distance. I like his painting a lot, and happily encourage people to check out the galleries of his work on his Web page, Which I admit I've had a hand in building.

Difficult to take photos of starry night skies in a big city -- all that ambient light bouncing around. More so if you have a camera out of the dumpster with little rhinestones stuck around the lens. But, as they say, I'm trying -- very trying, so last night I saw my opportunity, and took it.

As I teenager in Saskatoon, I used to loiter around the ivy-covered, University of Saskatchewan on weekends. I "audited" classes, snooped, and generally watched the grown ups get educated. I remember spending part of a Sunday breathlessly watching a Fine Arts student try to figure out the one right place to place a little black spot on a big white canvas. My recollection is that it was an actual assignment, but I couldn't stay long enough to see the student's solution, So, all these decades later I was happy to see that a local Fairview painter had tackled much the same problem.


The varied thickness of the paint is visually very effective, particularly in the case of the black "fly-speck." The irregular shape almost makes it look like it changes position as the viewer changes their position. Unfortunately when I tried to take a straight on photo of the painting, the black spot apparently fell off, which may explain why the artist threw the painting out; the technique, though bold, is still quite flawed. Ah, well. Bravo, I say, Full marks for the effort. Click the images to enlarge them.

Painting on canvas was a great technological step forward for art. One of the more under-valued virtues of the technique is how it keeps the mess off the floors and walls, and when the creative fervour passes, and you come back to your senses, you can take it out to the dumpster and pretend it never happened. Click the images to enlarge.