*jan's studio:: pulpifying on

*This post will be the first in a series of photo essays on artists' studios in Vancouver [and hopefully beyond] that I plan to have published in book form one day. 
As my home has always been an ever (r)evolving studio for my varied projects, I am also intrigued by the environs where other artists' creative lives are manifest, and I feel that their milieux should be documented somewhat more as "art installations" in their own right and not just as functioning work spaces where tangible art is birthed. And as such, they may reflect the artistic personalities of the occupants more profoundly than even their own art can.

This idea is inspired in part by a book that I had found in France many years ago titled Entrails, Heads & Tails by Paola Igliori [colour photography by Paola Igliori and black and white photographs by Alastair Thain] published by Rizzoli, 1992.
"In a world where everything is analyzed, fragmented, crucified, we seem at times to lose ourselves in the process. Artists, like children, are the most absolute in creating, materializing their own world. The small everyday things that cover the space between the person and his work chart at times in the simplest way the ground of inspiration."  
[from Paola Igliori's introduction to her book]

 +++

Jan MacLeod is the first artist to have kindly let me into her studio and given me permission to shoot what I wanted. She has been making paper and artwork from plant materials that she gathers herself for over 30 years now in these two adjoining rooms in a heritage office building in downtown Vancouver.
Jan's dedication to her artform has seen her prodigious creations grace many homes, offices and luxury hotels. She is a long time member of the Circle Craft Co-operative on Granville Island.

 

Jan MacLeod

www.plantpapers.com 

I would like to thank Jan for her gracious welcome into her plantpapersphere.

downtown westside:: the sexy sixties [episode one]

Soaring glass behemoths squeeze around the odd oldie still holding out on its tiny piece of developer's baitlot...
they may be sleek and shiny, with self-contained promises of high efficiency appliances and measured to the millimeter space-planning illusions, but these 21st century luminous colossi have none of the idiosyncratic sexiness of some of the modernist structures implanted on downtown soil in the oh-so-long-ago 1960's when Vancouver was nary a blip on the world map of architectural avant-gardism...

The well-hung Westcoast Transmission Building at 1333 West Georgia Street [1968-69, by Rhone and Iredale] has ridden out the decades in suspended glass-sheathed immutability...and has recently been transformed into a QUBE-full of too-cool condos for dark shades wearing sophisticates...

The virginal white and coquettish detailing of the East Asiatic House building at 1201 West Pender Street [1963, by Gerald Hamilton and Associates] still marks her as a delicately alluring stand-out amongst the leggy glamour-glazed models now posing all around her...and almost half a century on, her proportional compactness and fineness of features have been left relatively unmolested by over-excitable upgrade casanovas!

[after all, her corner stone had already once been laid by a suave and elegant danish royal!]