“Children should learn to draw as they learn to write, and such a mystery should not be made of it.” — An admirable ideal expressed by the American painter, William Morris Hunt (1824-1879). Whenever it comes up in conversation that I went to York University for visual art, the inevitable question follows: “So, what kind →
One mid-December afternoon, when I was still gap-toothed and too short to drop my own fare in the collecting box for the subway, I found myself in a dollhouse supply shop with my grandmother and my slightly older cousin, who I thought was the very definition of cool by virtue of the fact that she’d →
Werewolves: A Journal of Transformation by Alice Carr is not actually by Alice Carr. Of course the back cover blurb claims that the contents of Werewolves faithfully reproduce those of a journal found by hikers on the outskirts of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio. In place of the usual author’s blurb, a “publisher’s note” details →
Most everyone starts learning to read with books in which pictures vastly outnumber words. As we become more comfortable with the alphabet and its myriad combined forms, we edge our way through wordier, less illustrated books until the ratio of words to pictures is reversed, and we are ready to graduate into “chapter books.” Not →
The other day, while pawing absent-mindedly through an old cardboard box of miscellanea, I happened upon a treasure trove of Children’s Record Guild 78s. Dressed in garish, dog-eared sleeves, and bearing titles like, Mendelssohn’s… A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Swing Your Partner, and Said the Piano to the Harpsichord, the actual records themselves are no great →
Kate Beaton is the kind of artist that makes my job difficult. You see — she’s awesome. So much so that it’s difficult to write anything at all about her work without merely waxing poetical about said awesomeness ad nauseum. That is, without descending into a fangirlish quagmire so thick with praise and adoration that →
Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893–1910) is among the most well-known and widely reproduced icons of Western art. Given the four versions (in paint and pastel) plus a lithograph made by Munch himself, The Scream has been a somewhat promiscuous and democratic image from the start. Over the last fifty years, everything from fine art prints →
“Banksy came to Toronto!” Ah ha (I think, too groggy for an exclamation point) so I didn’t leave my cellphone set to “loud”— I merely dreamed the obnoxious ring-tone, and now for the surreal conversation. No doubt the scene shall soon shift without warning to a seaside resort or Santa’s underground lair or somesuch. “… →
Ambling up Ossington Ave. the other day (which, up-and-coming-neighbourhood status notwithstanding, I rarely do) I came across an establishment called Meta Gallery, located in a white-painted building built like an auto-mechanic’s garage and set back from the side walk. The adjoining building’s northernmost wall stretched out, painted black-on-black with a peculiar clouds-shaped artefact of more →
As this past January came to a close, the webcomic Axe Cop went pandemic over the internet. Of course a great many viral pandemics are sweeping the internet at any given moment, and under closer scrutiny they by and large develop little past the “How funny! I laugh!” first impressions (yes, I’m looking at you, →
In matters of art on the internet, conceptual artists have a habit of getting there first and leaving behind little more than tedious ghosts of their abstract inspirations. Sometimes it takes an artist from the commercial world to build something truly awesome on that old territory, something destined to do more than just stick around →
It’s a given that any review is going to hand the reader a pair of expectacles to wear when sallying forth to view the object in question with their own eyes. It’s a rare thing to come across an object where that taint could make a significant difference in the experience—but so help me, the →
Since encountering those flip-books from the bins in the kindergarten classroom, I’ve always had a soft spot for mix-and-match monsters. Surely you know the ones: sectioned like three-piece barn doors, the upper section bears images of various animal heads; the middle, torsos; the bottom one, legs. Flip to different pages in each section and a →
I’d wager that for most everyone reading this, the Art Gallery of Ontario is one of the last places you’d think of when I say the words “horror,” “ghostly,” “creeptacular” or “Halloween.” Since its recent reconstruction (what with its slick modern architecture and interiors so brightly-lit that shadows tell tales of it to their little →
Screens of all sorts consort with art these days. For instance, as you read this, computer-based media are forging mind-bogglingly new aesthetics and new ways to interface with viewers… but screens and art go back way before the Commodore 64. The kind of screen I’m about to discuss here is the kind that clogs-up, rips, →