blue | as I walk Toronto

Posts Tagged ‘blue’

blues – looking at the blues

Posted: October 26, 2021 in galleries
Tags: AGO, art, Art Gallery of Ontario, blue, Blue View, exhibition, Frugal Repast, galleries, Matthew Wong, Pablo Picasso, paintings, Picasso, the blue room, The Soup

Two exhibits at the Art Gallery of Ontario feature the colour blue. One is “Blue View” consisting of paintings created by Canadian artist Matthew Wong between 2017 and 2019. The other is an exhibit of Picasso paintings at the beginning of the 20th century especially his “blue period” 1901-1904.

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Matthew Wong (1984-2019)

below: “Starry Night”

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Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

below: Nudes painted before the Blue Period… and when Picasso was only 19 or 20 years old.

In 1901 Picasso was given access to Saint-Lazare prison-hospital in Paris where he painted many of the inmates, especially the women who were there as a result of their participation in the sex trade. They were impoverished and forgotten women living in deplorable conditions, often with young children. Picasso painted them in shades of blue and green and in his paintings sex work, motherhood and syphilis become intertwined. They can be compared to images of the Virgin Mary with an infant Jesus, a secularized Madonna.

below: “Mother and Child by Fountain”

below: “Woman and Child by the Sea”, 1902

below: “The Soup”, 1902

below: “The Blue Room”, 1901

below: “The Frugal Repast”. Not in blue but still with the theme of the working poor. This was an etching that Picasso first made in 1904. Later, in 1913, he printed 250 copies of it.

With thanks to Alice and Arlene for spending a couple of hours looking at paintings with me.

“Picasso, painting the blue period” continues until 16 Jan 2022.

Matthew Wong paintings are on display until 18 April 2022

GAWD’s animals

Posted: May 18, 2019 in graffiti and street art
Tags: animals, birds, blue, Christopher Ross, dragonfly, GAWD, mural, mushrooms, paint, pigs, pink, Runnymede Road, underpass

Just south of St. Clair West, Runnymede Road runs under the CP train tracks. In the summer of 2017 the wall on the west side of the underpass a mural was painted by Christopher Ross (aka GAWD). It is a collection of animals, mostly in shades of pink and blue – dragonfly, pigs, birds, and more. Most of the animals are in pairs.

At one end of the mural, this little engine sits on a tree stump.

Waterlicht at the Bentway

Posted: October 15, 2018 in events, locations
Tags: Bentway, blue, Daan Roosegaarde, dark, event, fort york, lights, night, people, show, smoke, Waterlicht

Waterlicht is a large-scale light installation by Daan Roosegaarde, a Dutch artist. It showed at the Bentway, in front of Fort York, for three nights this past weekend.

below: Light, like water flowing under the Gardiner.

below: The fluid patterns of light and smoke created waves and angles of blue.

below: One of many selfies

below: From above

metamorphosis in the lane

Posted: June 28, 2018 in graffiti and street art, locations
Tags: alley, Anya Mielniczek, blue, braes, butterflies, caterpillars, Christine Mazzulla, cmazzulla, David Suzuki Foundation, Drippin_soul, Elicser, Felstead Park, fences, garages, Kalkidan Assefa, lane, mska, mural, mushrooms, nature, Nick Sweetman, oriah_scott, P.S, Phillip Saunders, spyone, StART, streetARToronto, tensoe, toadstools, wales

Caterpillars and butterflies is the theme of the latest laneway painting project. A year ago, Nick Sweetman led a group of street artists who painted garage doors in a lane near Garrison Creek park with pictures of butterflies. These murals appeared in blog post in June 2017

This year’s project was similar. Many of the same artists were involved again this year. They used garages, fences and gates in a lane near Felstead Park (a block south of Greenwood subway station) as their canvas. Once again, the theme was butterflies as it too was part of the David Suzuki Foundation’s butterflyways project. This time, a similar blue background was used in all the murals which has given it a more unified appearance.

The project was curated by Nick Sweetman and it had the support of Start aka StreetARToronto

below: Felstead Park, by @braes_ack

below: In the shadow of the weed are the letters CTR

below: Mural signed by Kehoe, the face of David Suzuki

below: Green and yellow toadstools by mska

below: Mural by @oriah_scott

below: butterfly among the pink and red flowers, by P.S. aka Phillip Saunders

below: A sombre dark piece (is it finished?) by @poserabm

below: Three butterflies by Serina

below: Collaboration – A monarch painted by Nick Sweetman and a wonderful rose by Wales

below: A bright and busy mural by Spyone and Tensoe

below: The hookah-smoking caterpillar from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is crawling across the fence. Painted by elicser

below: Red panda out on a limb, perhaps chasing the butterfly, by Ted Hamer (@The1astRonin)

below: A butterfly in the garden; the work of Anya Mielniczek

below: Two flowers, one pink and one blue, by Chris Perez

below: It looks a lot like a skull on the back of this butterfly painted by @cmazzulla aka Christine Mazzulla

below: A curled up caterpillar in pink and black, very larger than life!, by Spud.

below: By Dezed, a butterly, mushrooms, and a bit of water

below: Reaching out to the butterfly, giving the butterfly a helping hand, painted by @drippin_soul (Kalkidan Assefa)

below: On the right, Emma, the property owner’s dog who died recently. Nick Sweetman painted the dog while @mr_tensoe2 painted the dog’s name

Li-Hill on a garage

Posted: September 18, 2017 in alleys, graffiti and street art
Tags: Aaron Li-Hill, alley, blue, garage, lane, Li-Hill, mural, scene, tree, women

Tucked away on a garage in an alley near Brunswick and Harbord is a garage with three murals, at least two of which are the work of Aaron Li-Hill.

below: This mural is not new but I am not sure how old it is. I am not even sure if I have seen it before. I can’t believe that I found an alley that I haven’t walked before in this area, but anything’s possible. This mural is by Li-Hill for sure.

below: This too is the work of Aaron Li-Hill as you can see from the signature.

below: This seaside town scene has no signature. I like the little people, one with a surfboard, some playing in the water, and a couple hand in hand.

One more reason to wander the lanes and alleys of the city!
(With thanks to Anita for walking with me and showing me this garage.)

halls transformed

Posted: March 1, 2017 in galleries
Tags: A wall is just a wall, art, art gallery, blue, clerestory, contemporary art, Cross Fade, hall, Horses and Man, Jonathas de Andrade, Kapwani Kiwanga, Latifa Echakhch, lightbulbs, lights, Maria Hupfield, men, On Fishes, pink, plaster, posters, power plant, sky, skylights, The One who keeps on giving, window

There are four exhibitions at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at the moment.

One of the exhibits is “A Wall is just a Wall” by Kapwani Kiwanga. Here, a hallway has been transformed with pink and blue lights. If you walk down this hall, you’ll find an entranceway to another section of the gallery with more of Kiwanga’s work. The gist of the thought behind her exhibit is the affect that architecture and design (such as colour) has on the behaviour of those exposed to it. It’s a bit disconcerting to walk through the lights – they affect your perception of space and make you feel a bit dizzy. Or at least that’s what happened to me!

Another hall. Another exhibit. This time, an installation by Latifa Echakhch called “Cross Fade”. You can see it in the Fleck Clerestory which is the long, high hallway that runs down the middle of the building. For the installation, the walls were painted light blue with white cloud shapes. Chunks of the outer layer of plaster were then removed and pieces left on the floor. The sky is falling! I can just see Chicken Little running around. The sky is falling! But in this case, he’d be right.

When I first saw the installation, I only saw the lower portion and I assumed that it was a neglected wall. It looks like many of the walls you find in lanes and alleys. To me it represented the cycle of building and decay that plays out all around us. I struggle with the idea that painting it to look like the sky changes how the piece should be perceived. Are we supposed to be upset that the sky is broken and lying on the ground? Is the use of the normal (plaster falling off a neglected wall) to try to show the abnormal (the sky falling apart) on purpose? If so, to what purpose?

below: Looking up towards the skylights. It is more apparent from this angle that the walls are painted to look like the sky. By the way, cross fade is the technique in sound or movie editing where a picture or sound gradually appears at the same time as another disappears.

From the online description of the exhibit: “…. Cross Fade evokes the remains of an action that has already taken place. Echakhch’s wall painting of the sky appears to be falling apart. Fragments of the sky still exist intact on the upper sections of the walls, out of reach, reminding us of its beauty. However, large parts of the sky lie on the ground, creating a peculiar feeling that something beyond our control is either happening or has just happened. The technique employed here references the classical fresco, a second skin that usually leads the viewer into a painted world, a trompe-l’œil, rendering the two-dimensionality of the wall invisible. On the contrary, Echakhch’s work shatters this illusion, rooting us in the present, which like a cross fade, is caught between the past and the future.”

Leaving the hall theme behind, the last two exhibits are:

below: Part of “On Fishes, Horses and Man” by Jonathas de Andrade

below: And “The One Who Keeps on Giving” by Maria Hupfield

All exhibits continue until mid May.

Flotsam and Jetsam and others

Posted: February 21, 2017 in people, public art, waterfront
Tags: art, beach, blue, bottles, boys, chairs, clear, Collective Memory, empties, evergreens, families, flotsam, Flotsam and Jetsam, girls, interactive, jetsam, kids, Lake Ontario, lifeguard stations, messages, North, notches, ovals, paper, pine, plastic, recycling, reflections, reflective, reusing, studio PERCH, The Beacon, The Illusory, trees, University of Waterloo, water, Waterfront BIA, waterfrontTO, winter stations, wood

Two empty chairs sitting in the sun. This photo is only a half truth; it suggests that the beach was sunny but empty yesterday when I took the photo. Sunny yes, empty no.

Back in the winter of 2015, I discovered the first “Winter Stations” event on a day when the temperature was -20C. There weren’t many people there that year! In contrast, yesterday was a beautiful and unseasonably warm February Sunday. Temperatures hit the double digits and lots of people come out to take advantage of the weather. It was also the first weekend of the 2017 version of ‘Winter Stations’. Although the installations officially opened today, all but one of them were completed and ready for the public yesterday.

below: One of the installations is “North” which was designed by studio PERCH in Montreal. Yes, it’s Christmas trees hung upside down. They are prickling to walk between. This year there seems to be a recycling and reusing theme in a lot of the installations. At least I hope these trees weren’t cut down specifically for this project.

below: Another installation is “Collective Memory” designed by Mario Garcia (Barcelona Spain) and Andrea Govi (Milan Italy). People are encouraged to leave messages in the bottles.

below: Paper is provided as are the bottles. The walls are constructed of horizontal empty plastic water bottles with the openings all on the inside of the structure.

below: The sun shining through the plastic bottles makes for some interesting effects.

below: Like most of the installations, “Collective Memory” encloses a lifeguard station.

below: The installation that wasn’t ready yet is “The Beacon” designed by Joao Araujo Sousa and Joanna Correia Silva (Porto Portugal).

The installation in the background in the above photograph is “BuoyBuoyBuoy” designed by Dionisios Vriniotis, Rob Shostak, Dakota Wares-Tani, and Julie Forand (Toronto Canada).

below: One of many photo ops!

below: Notched ovals made of wood and clear plastic were used to build this installation. The wood pieces were either painted white or covered with silvery reflective material.

below: More reflections, this time in “The Illusory” designed by a group from Humber College School of Media Studies & IT, School of Applied Technology.

below: Someone has already written on (scratched?) the surface.

below: “The Illusory” in front, “Flotsam and “Jetsam” behind, and lots of people in between.

below: “Flotsam and Jetsam” was designed by a team from the University of Waterloo. It consists of cubes made of wire cages. The cages on the bottom are filled with empty plastic bottles of different colours and shapes.

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The Winter Stations will remain until the 27th of March.

carpets and ice

Posted: December 8, 2016 in galleries
Tags: blue, carpets, false guide, faucets, faux guide, Geological Time, Harbourfront, ice, Morocco, museum, natural history, people, pipes, Plumbers Assemblage, plumbing, prints, red, rink, shower heads, skating, skyline, taps, the power plant, urban, Yto Barrada

Yesterday afternoon I wandered into The Power Plant Art Gallery. It was late enough in the day that the sun was already low in the sky. It shone through the large windows in the main gallery and cast a warm glow on the current exhibit, works by Yto Barrada titled ‘Faux Guide’ .

The first thing you see when you enter the rooms is a collection of carpets. This is ‘Geological Time Scale’ and it consists of bright and bold red, blue, and green carpets – Beni Mguild, Marmoucha and Ait Sgougou pile rugs from Western Central, Middle Atlas, Morocco. It’s definitely eye catching and it definitely draws the viewer into the exhibit.

A series of small exhibits are arranged around the room and most of them are the result of the artist’s research on Moroccan dinosaurs, fossils, and the industry that has built up around them including the trade in fake fossils sold to tourists and museums. I have not shown most of these exhibits – I will leave it up to you to discover them.

below: “I am not exotic I am exhausted”. I suspect that this comes as Barrada’s response to living in a place (Tangiers Morroco) where tourists come to see “exotic things”. But it is also the lament of anyone trying to live and work in a place that is also a “tourist attraction”.

below: The whole of ‘A Modest Proposal’ and ‘Faux Guide’, 2015. A set of 48 posters loosely tacked to the wall. A mix of humorous and poignant. One is an alphabetical listing of all the types of dinosaurs found in Morocco. One says “Miss Colorado and Miss Finland are Moroccan” – which did happen in 2012.

below: ‘Plumber Assemblage’ by the window, with skaters outside in the fading light.

There are many, many things that you can take from this exhibit. Many things to think about.

An article in the Toronto Star claims that Barrada “explores the cultural heritage of her homeland through a colonial lens” and how that heritage has been used to make money from tourists. But…. Is this the making of money by exploiting one’s culture and history? Or the exploiting of Moroccan culture and history by the tourists?

Tourists go searching for the foreign and the exotic. Many of them are souvenir hunters – Sometimes it’s a selfie in front of every “famous” place (or interesting building or whatever) and sometimes it’s a “find”. But we live in a world that is full of ‘made in China’ souvenirs and we are a people that don’t care to distinguish between the real and the fake. We just want a story to tell the folks back home.

There were once dinosaurs living in a tropical land in what is now Morocco…. how the world has changed, and is changing. Insert your opinions on climate change here.

Because it is a collection of exhibits under one umbrella, it has been compared to a museum. Very trendy. One description of the exhibit claims that it is “Meant to make us question the ways in which museums confer value on things”. Can I take that one step further by asking, how do art galleries confer status on art and artists? Museums make curatorial choices and so do art galleries. Barrada too has surely made choices as have I.

You are probably wondering what carpets on the floor have to do with all those words that I just wrote. Good question. I think that Yto Barrada is on to something – an exhibit that has visual appeal, offends no one, and is flexible in its interpretation (i.e. it says something different to everyone and fits nicely into most people’s narratives). You can agree with me, or disagree. Best to go and see it for yourself and form your own opinions…. mine just might be fake.

below: People skating on the frozen Natrel Pond beside The Power Plant.

Yto Barrada’s exhibit will be on at The Power Plant until the 2nd of January.

north and south, blue and green

Posted: July 20, 2016 in galleries
Tags: AGO, arctic, art, Art Gallery of Ontario, artists, blue, Caribbean, cold, greens, group of seven, Hurvic Anderson, ice, ice bergs, Jamaica, Lawren Harris, leaves, mountains, painters, people, snow, Trinidad, tropics, welcome

A comparison of sorts. Two painters from two different time periods. One looked north and the other looks south. The north with its barren cold and blue in comparison to the south and its lush greenness. A famous anglo Canadian painter who went searching for simplicity and a relatively new British painter with Jamaican roots who explores complexities.

Lawren Harris and Hurvin Anderson. You should know which is which!

I didn’t purposely set out to compare them. I saw the ‘The Idea of North’ exhibit that features the Steve Martin paintings of Lawren Harris first. As much as I like the Group of Seven, Harris’s minimalist snow and ice paintings have never been my favorite. Still, it was an interesting collection to see. After I finished there, I headed up to the contemporary art floors. The fifth floor is still closed (new installation opening later this week) but I discovered that the fourth floor is devoted to the works of Hurvin Anderson. As I walked around the Anderson installation I kept thinking of similarities and differences between him and Lawren Harris.

below: Mountains in Snow: Rocky Mountain Paintings VII, 1929. One of the many famous Lawren Harris snow and ice paintings. Light, reflected light, shadows, and contrasts. The elements reduced to their simplest form. The landscape itself is almost secondary. Or the landscape is the medium, not the message.

below: The large painting on the right is ‘Pic Island’ painted about 1924. Pic Island is an unpopulated island along the north shore of Lake Superior. Today the island is part of Neys Provincial Park.

below: Two of Hurvin Anderson’s paintings from his Caribbean landscape collection. On the left is ‘Beaded Curtain – Red Apples’, 2010.

below: ‘Constructed View’, 2010. Anderson’s Caribbean paintings have grilles incorporated into them. These are the security features prevalent on houses and businesses in the Caribbean (and elsewhere in the world), metal fixtures over windows and doors to keep out the unwanted. They contain what’s inside. They are a barrier. They intrude on the landscape and cut it up. Again, the landscape is almost secondary. The message, or emotion, is more important. [aside – There is a grille in the painting above (right) but it’s more subtle.]

Lawren Harris painted his famous mountain pictures in the late 1920’s. In 1930 he visited Baffin Island and a few paintings resulted from that trip. I learned that although I associate Harris with icebergs and arctic scenery, most of his snow and ice paintings were from the north shore of Lake Superior or from the mountains around Banff Alberta.

The repetoire of both painters is not limited to landscapes. Harris painted many houses and street scenes from downtown Toronto including houses and streets that were demolished years ago. The examples of Anderson’s non-landscape work were interiors. Both men used bold colours but Anderson tends to show more detail in his paintings.

below: ‘Welcome: Carib’ The Welcome sign of the bar in juxtaposition with the red metal work covering the window. The picture beckons to us but keeps us out.

below: One of the paintings from Anderson’s Barbershop collection, ‘Flat Top’ 2008.

below: A selection of colourful Toronto houses in winter painted by Harris in the 1920s.

In the 1930’s Lawren Harris’s personal life went awry. The words on the wall at the AGO says that he divorced, remarried and moved to the states. That’s a bit of spin. He didn’t divorce his wife because that would be messy, apparently. Instead in 1934 he just married the wife of an old friend. And of course that turned messy and the new couple left for the USA for a few years before eventually settling in Vancouver BC. Harris’s post-1934 work is very abstract and was never as successful as his earlier paintings.

below: You can see the influence of the mountain paintings in this, ‘Painting No. 4’, about 1939, painted when he was a member of the Transcendental Painting Group. This was a collective of artists in New Mexico that Harris help to found.

below: Since I have no idea where the art of Hurvin Anderson is headed, I will leave you with one more of his present paintings (I’m not sure those two ideas actually go together!). ‘Foska Foska’, the interior of a shop behind yellow bars and black mesh.

The Idea of North – until 18 September

Hurvin Anderson – until 21 August

#HarrisAGO | #HurvinAndersonAGO

distress at Union Station

Posted: July 16, 2015 in locations, public art
Tags: art, blue, child, depressing, figures, grey, line drawings, man, men, northbound, paint, painting, people, phones, platforms, poetry, public art, red, red face, reflections, sadness, sitting, sketches, standing, subway, Toronto, TTC, Union station, watching, woman, women

A while back, I posted some photos of ‘Zones of Immersion’, Stuart Reid’s art installation at Union Station. Now that it is completed, I decided to revisit it. There has been some talk about how depressing it is.
I’ll let you decide whether it is depressing or not.

If you are on the ‘northbound to Finch’ platform you get a clear view of all the panels.
If you are on the ‘northbound to Downsview’ platform you can only see some of the glass panels.

I’ve now been back a number of times and this is what I saw:
1) Of the figures with discernible gender, 12 or 13 were male.
2) The males are of different ages and shapes.
3) The number of females outnumber males by at least 2:1.
4) Almost all (or even all?) of the women are young. They are all thin, if not gaunt.
5) There is one child…. with a finger up his/her nose.
6) Only two or three figures are smiling.

“the way we settle into a seat
the way we stretch when the train is empty
and retract as it fills
the way we deflect a glance and simultaneously present
language of the body claiming, relinquishing and balancing
personal space in the interstitial realm
halfway between the worlds of here and there”

The panels that can be seen on the ‘northbound to Downsview’ platform are seen as the reverse of those viewed from the other platform.

“slicing through the clay of the earth’s first skin
steel rails and electric lines
going from going to
slicing through time and distance
darkness and light
station by station
releasing us into the city’s fabric
stop by stop
after a days labour
taking us home”

(added in October) I got off the subway at Union Station today. There were three guys in front of me. One of them stopped and pointed to the nearest painting which happened to be the one above. As he pointed he said “See what I mean, if that doesn’t make you want to jump… “.

I’m happy to be corrected if you can prove me wrong.

as I walk Toronto

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