The Artist’s Subject Goes Wandering

We’re in an age when every other person is a wannabe Walker Evans, and every single object and person in the city is a potential subject for self-reflective urban photography. (You know, the kind you sometimes see here.) Washington, DC artist Alexa Meade takes that situation to its logical extreme by turning her photo subjects into living, breathing acrylic paintings.

In one of her works, she paints a man and sends him into the buses and metro stations of DC, where he stands out like, well, the subject of a painting that somehow jumped out of the frame and began walking around. Though I’m not sure Meade meant to comment on street photography, this particular work delivers a giant wink to the genre by turning her subject into the romantic, photogenic everyman that he was destined to become.

More

A City on Screen and in Paint

Infernal Affairs, “I want my identity back”
Enamel paint on canvas, 100cm(H) x 150cm(W), 2007

Hong Kong’s story is one best told on screen, through dihn ying, electric shadows. For decades, it was one of the world’s film capitals, and it was through film that Hong Kong projected itself onto the world with action films and comedies that, beyond their mass appeal, explored the deeper corners of Hong Kong’s psyche.

Since 2006, Chow Chun Fai, one of Hong Kong’s most interesting artists, has reproduced stills from more than 100 movies, complete with English and Chinese subtitles. Each painting captures a small truth about Hong Kong’s culture and identity; together, they form a sweeping and surprisingly nuanced narrative of the city’s history from the 1970s to the present day.

Earlier this summer, I paid a visit to Chow’s airy studio in Fotan, an industrial district in the New Territories. As I sat beneath his fastidiously-organized collection of books, Chow made me coffee and we talked about art, Hong Kong and a show in which he reproduced Vermeer’s “The Art of Painting.” What really interested me, though, was his film series. Below is a short and lightly edited excerpt from our hour-long conversation.

More

The City Speaks

Mount Royal Avenue, Montreal

Franck Chambrun seems to have rediscovered my photos. After painting several of them in 2007, he has done the same over the past few weeks, though with a distinct shift in style. Whereas his earlier paintings distilled the streetlife depicted in my photos to its bare essence of form and colour, his new works seem to read the city’s thoughts and emotions. Maybe it’s my own personal bias, but his paintings seem to have a greater impact when you see them in conjunction with the photos on which they were based; you get to peek inside the artist’s own mind, seeing what he saw.

More

From Pixels Into Paint

Ste. Catherine Street, Montreal

Last June, a French artist named Franck Chambrun emailed me to say that he had created a number of paintings based on my Montreal and Hong Kong photos. I took a look at his work and, I have to say, I’m smitten, and it’s not just because he likes my photos.

Chambrun’s paintings of streetscapes are unique and eye-catching. Although they are essentially abstract — the city’s detail is reduced into layers of colour — they manage to convey the clutter, frenzy and humanity of urban life. The ostensible simplicity of his work belies a tremendous amount of depth and nuance.

To make many of his paintings, Chambrun projects a photo onto canvas and works from there. More of his work, including some interesting behind-the-scenes photos and commentary, can be found on his blog.

Causeway Bay, Hong Kong

More

The Mystery is Solved

Back in July I asked if anyone knew who was painting the manhole covers of Mile End. Slowly but surely, readers started offering some leads. One mentioned that she had heard the artist being interviewed on CBC Radio, but couldn’t remember which show; another suggested that it might have to do with an arts collective that has recently established itself in the neighbourhood. Sure enough, this week brought with it confirmation that a Dutch artist named Franck Bragigand was responsible for the manhole covers, in a project realized by DARE-DARE, the Consulate-General of the Netherlands in Montreal and Montreal’s municipal electrical commission.

DARE-DARE, it turns out, is responsible for a slough of innovative public art in Montreal. I’ve noticed many of them before, but simply assumed they were unsanctioned street art, not art created with the blessing of the city’s authorities. One project, funded by the provincial government, had the artist Karen Spencer describe her dreams on cardboard, in English, French and Spanish, for an entire year. She then mounted the cryptic cardboard passages on walls around the city. I came across one last winter that read: “I dreamed I criticized J.J. for falling improperly.” Another sign began with the inscription, “Soñé que mis dientes estaban wen mi boca” — “I dreamed my teeth were falling out of my mouth.”

DARE-DARE is headquartered in what has come to be called the Park With No Name, an vacant patch of greenery next to the Van Horne Viaduct at the corner of Clark and Arcade. In true Montreal fashion, the group is not just bilingual, but trilingual — it seems that, for many organizations, Spanish has become Montreal’s de facto third language, perhaps to ease the tension between French and English — and it has hosted some pretty swell get-togethers at its Mile End home, including two big outdoor dance parties in June. A wood-fired pizza oven has even been built in the Park With No Name, ostensibly for community use, but a conflict with the city has restricted its use and might even see the oven demolished altogether.

More

Fine Art Street Art

This summer the National Gallery in London has brought the fine art to the public, by lining the streets of West End with reproductions of some of its paintings. The campaign is clearly a comment on street art culture — and of course a way to draw people to the gallery. It also raises interesting questions about the importance of authenticity and context.

Who is Painting the Manhole Covers?

I’m not just asking — I really want to know. Over the past month, somebody has painted dozens of manhole covers around Mile End, on Park Avenue, Bernard Street and St. Viateur Street. It’s quite a lovely endeavour, adding a bit of colour to the sidewalk while drawing attention to an overlooked but essential piece of civic infrastructure.

The City, Alive On Canvas

Montreal: The Old Port, oil on linen, 2007

I’d seen images of John Hartman’s work before. Great bird’s eye views of landscapes and cities in autumnal reds and blues. But it wasn’t until I stood before one of the canvasses from his new Cities series of paintings, that I fully experienced it. I was reminded of the hours I had spent, as a kid, pouring over every detail in aerial photos of cities from around the world. Hartman’s paintings are like those old images, only better: sensual and exhilarating, they bring the city to life in a way that is impossible to achieve by photograph.

Hartman, a native of lake country Ontario, has been painting natural scenes for decades, but in the early 1980s, he started to experiment. By combining a variety of perspectives, he created complex works that brimmed with nuance, detail, information and historical narrative—all of them presented in the form of an aerial image. “When I was a teenager, I used to have dreams I was flying over landscapes,” he tells me from his studio in Lafontaine, Ontario. “They would roll underneath me just like I was a movie camera.”

His move from painting natural scenes to cityscapes was gradual but, in a way, inevitable. “I had always been painting communities in the landscape in my earlier work. I sort of went from little outport communities to towns to cities, so it was a fairly natural kind of progression.” In 2006, Scotiabank, looking for a way to mark its 175th anniversary, commissioned Hartman to paint Halifax, the city where the bank was founded in 1832. The end result was a triptych that weaved narrative and historical threads into the city’s fabric; a dense, captivating work in which Halifax appears visceral and alive.

More

Purgatory on the C-Train

“No Name” by Jason Mark. Digital composite

I first met Jason Mark when he came to live in my apartment. Actually, I should be more precise—I met him when he came to sublet my apartment. I was living in a cheap studio on Park Avenue near Fairmount, pleasantly appointed but also quite small and dark. When the opportunity arose to move up the street into a bright two-bedroom place with my girlfriend, I put out a call for subletters. Jason answered and, not long thereafter, he settled in with a few boxes of stuff and some leftover furniture I have yet to reclaim from him.

Jason is an artist, born and raised in Saskatchewan, where he received a degree in fine arts from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. When he moved into my old apartment, he set up an easle in the corner of the kitchen and hung some of his paintings on the walls. It wasn’t until last week that I took a closer look at his art, though, and I was surprised to find a lot of public transit imagery and themes of cultural confusion and hybridity.

“Purgatory.” Oil on canvas

More

Metatourism in Alexandria

I stumbled upon these unloved old tourism paintings on a neglected building in the back streets of Alexandria, Egypt. Somehow they fed my enthusiasm about Egypt, yet newer promotional material would have had the opposite effect. How long does it take for marketing to become heritage?

More

Portraits of a Neighbourhood

They stare at you—seven faces, their expressions ranging from jubilant to amused to vaguely perplexed. They are portraits of Café Olimpico’s employees, pasted above a bookstore at the corner of St. Viateur and Waverly Sts., right across the street from the well-known Mile End café (also known as Open Da Night). They first began to emerge last winter, with a portrait of the baby-faced Phil; he was soon joined by the rest of the Olimpico staff.

The man responsible for them is Francisco Garcia, an artist whose posters have, over the past year, become fixtures in Mile End and the Plateau. “I’ve always liked doing faces,” Garcia said on a chilly November evening, sitting outside on Olimpico’s terrasse. “I guess I just thought it was funny.”

He explained his process for making the portraits. First, he took a photograph of each staff member. Then he reduced the image to two tones in Photoshop, projected it onto canvas, drew an outline and filled it in with shades of grey paint. After transferring the portraits onto recycled posters, he pasted them on the empty plywood space above the bookstore L’Écume des jours, opposite Café Olimpico, over a period of seven months.

The end result is seven striking paintings that draw the eye to an otherwise unremarkable white brick building. “It’s tough, you know. I’ve got to find the right shades of grey and everything. It’s not just paint-by-numbers,” insisted Garcia, smiling self-effacingly as he fidgeted with a cigarette.

More

The Art of Francisco Garcia

Mile Enders are used to street art, so it takes something special to catch their collective eye. Lately, people have been noticing the work of Francisco Garcia, a thirtysomething artists whose painted black-and-white posters have appeared above storefronts and on alley walls all around the Montreal neighbourhood. In an article published last year, Reading Montreal praised Garcia’s paintings for their “restrained composition, muted greyscale shading” and “honest depiction of unstylized unadorned people.” Most recently, those people have included the entire staff of Open Da Night, an Italian sports café on St. Viateur Street, in a series of six posters mounted across the street from the café. It’s a cheeky and poignant homage to one of Mile End’s most beloved institutions.

More