behind gallery row

South Granville Gallery Row is "The number one destination for ART" according to its own proclamation -

and true, many of the city's most established and venerable art galleries are strung out along the west side of Granville Street between West 5th Avenue to West Broadway [with a few further south before West 15th Avenue]

Of course, the alleyway behind the galleries is almost as impeccably kept as their interiors, but I managed to expose some accidental art all the same - the raw and rapacious expressions of anonymous artists, unaware, and yet perhaps all too aware, that their rapturous creations may catch the oblivious attentions of dumpster divers pushing their rickety shopping carts as well as gallery owners parking their fancy european models alike...

primitive multi-pole pyro-peel mix-media studies - [also categorized as expressionistic torn-and-torch relief collages]...

[behind Granville Fine Art Gallery]

a partial figurative representation in somewhat random sequential multi-media narrative...

illusionistic photo-based pastiche on paper and wood post with graphic paint running-overlay...

large scale photographed architectural elements surface-collaged onto actual architectural elements...[so very clever indeed - truly brilliant!]

con-textual affirmations as desperate artistic gesticulations, thus provoking such pithy profound insight...as always...

[behind Monte Clark Gallery]

a minimalist study in graffiti-proof grays delineated by the faintly perceptible brick pattern and unexpectedly highlighted by a spot-splatter of "fowl-white" [from an all-natural organic digestive juice paint selection]*... 

[behind Equinox Gallery]

*please indulge me my oddly acculturated and floridly eccentric "artspeak"...just because ostentatious blah-blah-blah about art is almost as much fun as making the damn thing itself...

[Disclaimer:: "I was an art student once - but was never arrogant about my art student discoveries, because it has all been done before! - Really!!"]

terminal avenue

intrepid fleas from the Vancouver Flea Market can skip across Terminal Avenue 

to feast on pampered pooches at the Rex Dog Hotel & Spa...

or snuggle up cozily on acres of plush wool ply at Dream Carpets...

or hop onto rickety railcars and flee town altogether for greener pastures!

[terminally restless but avoiding extermination along Terminal Avenue between Clark Drive and Main Street]

brave face

bravely facing the inevitable...
[I posted about this house last October ["death of a house", Oct. 2009], and so far it is still standing and has even recently acquired a persona of sorts...at least he is grinning in light of his fate!]

marking my clark park:: part I

Clark Park...

where the buffaloes had once roamed...

where the salmon swam up a small creek...

where orchards fruited in the summer...

where Jean still lives in the house she was born in almost 80 years ago...

and remembers the crazy Russian family that ruffled the neighbourhood...

where we breathe in the green air from the old trees day in and day out...

and walk its shaded and meandering pathways...

and gather windfall branches for winter solstice warmth 

for many, many years now...

all because of a generous man named Clark who donated the land in 1889...

east hastings vestiges

If there is one street in Vancouver that I haven't ventured alone for a very long time, it is the much maligned East Hastings stretch through the impoverished downtown eastside, often demeaned in the media as "the poorest postal code in all of Canada"...and yet people survive and conduct business and feed and sleep - in perhaps not as safe, hygienic nor as comfortable quarters - but life continues pretty much as it has for quite a long while now...
In the last few years however, the long touted efforts to "clean up" the area has been yielding to the gentrification projects in the surrounding Gastown and Chinatown enclaves...and so a new generation of developers with design sense and of course, dollar signs in their starry eyes has finally encroached and con-descended [and so rises the anchor - a mightier and loftier cap-red-W Woodwards, with other aggrandizement projects following in its wake...]
Before every building and block is liberally dusted by the re-development vanity-wand, I decided to spend an afternoon biking through to find whatever traces still abound...especially vestiges of old advertising signs from the early decades of the 20th century painted directly onto the brick walls of multi-storey buildings...

the ubiquitous red and white Coca Cola logo very much fading away...

this building has already been renovated but they seem to be keeping the old sign intact, for now...

the signage is long gone, but the squiggly grime pattern presents a strangely subliminal-minimal canvas...

does the prominent sign of the old Ovaltine Cafe still light up at night... do they still serve Ovaltine drinks in the cafe... what kind of product is the large sign on the side advertising...

a little further east along East Hastings, the elegant façade of the Ferrera Court building announces itself quietly on this  block of mostly nondescript design and banal destination businesses, and the reach of the downtown eastside has loosen its grip somewhat as Hastings continues into East Vancouver's residential ethnic mix and  detached home equity...

railspur alley pictographs*

inscribed on a very short stretch of banged-up and rusty corrugated metal walls along Railspur Alley are some forgotten "pictographs" of unknown vintage that somehow escaped the great Clean-Up and Beautification Projects around Granville Island in fervid anticipation of the 2010Wilted O-LIMP-ics party date...

 

*post mortem:: almost all the above "pictographs" have since been painted over with a very bland shade of beige...

granville island grit

on Granville Island, that floating conglomeration of art, food and cement production, one can still walk into a dark and dingy industrial building [now converted into a parking lot] and find leftover traces of grit and grime from a past era in the shadows...

snowflakes of bird poo and feathers float onto a giant net above the bright shiny cars...

the complicated pattern of wood trusses and beams bearing the corrugated metal roof is calibrated and dignified by the leaf-green light...

a high bank of multi-paned windows stream in natural light and an underbelly view of the looming Granville Street bridge from above...

these weathered wood slats on the ceiling have not been freshened up, leaving the sketchy history in the worn patina...

and as I shoot this last image, a worker in uniform walked by and spontaneously informed me that this barn of a building used to house a chain-making factory...

emily carr grad show:: downspotting

because her name is art itself...

[wandering through the studios of the fine arts grads, accidental abstractions on the now immaculately clean floors also claimed artistic acknowledgement, especially that crinkled up candy wrapper under a display table and the blue pinhead by a plinth... and I pointed my camera downwards many times to the puzzlement of the other visitors!]