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From the Globe Real Estate section:
THE ARCHITOURIST: ART AND ARCHITECTURE
The intricacies of Toronto's bay-n-gables
Linda Goldman's watercolours are rich with the details of Victorian homes
DAVE LEBLANC
The next time the light strikes your sunburst spandrel, carved corbel, "paper doll" balusters or any other piece of gingerbread at just the right angle, a bicycle may pull up so its rider -- an energetic woman with short, dark hair and a wide smile -- can whip out her camera and snap a few shots.
If you've lived in the Annex or Kensington Market for any length of time, however, you'll know it isn't a thief casing the place or a real estate agent making a rogue assessment. It's just "architourist" and artist Linda Goldman gathering material for her next project, something she's been doing for the past 35 years.
Lately, Ms. Goldman has been aiming her lens -- and her artist's eye -- at the way sunlight can wash a home's exterior in golden hues or how a gable's intricate trim can stretch interesting shadows across a façade.
In Windows, Gables, Gingerbread & Gargoyles -- an exhibit starting tomorrow and running until March 26 at the Market Gallery in the St. Lawrence Market -- the fruits of these bicycling forays are spread out like a vast, colourful tapestry, as rich as Toronto's architectural heritage itself.
On display are her many delicate watercolours of Victorian houses, photographs of gargoyles, and -- speaking of tapestries -- her large, bright pieces of textile art.
As the earliest paintings in the exhibit demonstrate, she has been fascinated with Toronto's bay-n-gables for a long time -- starting in her teenage years, when she used to hitchhike from her home (which she calls "a Monopoly house" because it was square and small) at Bathurst and Sheppard to Yorkville's hippie hangouts. And with the first flick of her brush as a student in Central Tech's three-year post-secondary art program in the early 1970s, that interest only grew.
"When the weather got warm, [the instructors] would send us outside to sit around the school," she remembers. (One of her teachers was the legendary artist Doris McCarthy.) "There was this little store and this little house and that was my first [painting]."
These early works mingle easily with more than 50 other pieces, mostly watercolours painted within the past two years.
The first thing that will strike visitors, however, is the large 1987 triptych on loan from the Baycrest Centre, since the three large fabric panels have been deliberately placed across from the elevator for maximum impact. The amount of detail is staggering, with shop signage, pedestrians, window treatments and even an old TTC "red rocket" in one.
Backpacking across Europe in 1972, Ms. Goldman "collected this blanket and some beads and a couple of dishcloths and a few shmattes," she says. While living on a kibbutz, she did a piece of textile art with these items. It turned out so well that when she returned to Toronto, she thought: "I love these old houses so much, why don't I try one out of fabric?" This led to her abandoning watercolours for almost two decades to do these kaleidoscopic collages, which are stitched and assembled from bits of felt, burlap and denim, and painstakingly embroidered.
Eventually, they proved more time consuming than they were worth. (The Baycrest pieces alone took her six months to complete). "I don't think I have the patience" to do it today, she says with mock weariness.
By the 1990s, she was trying her hand with watercolours again, and in 2002 she joined the Toronto Watercolour Society.
The recent watercolours show Ms. Goldman's maturation as an artist. Among them are representations of homes on Augusta, Kensington and Baldwin, one of 81 Borden St. with the dramatic reflection of bare branches in its windows, as well as portraits of the Flatiron Building and Spadina House.
There also are three different views of 71 Spadina, including one in which the observer looks through a window, then through a narrow room and out another window, an effect that intrigues Ms. Goldman.
Her use of a so-called "resist" to prohibit paint from going onto certain parts of the paper is evidenced by the intricate representations of stained-glass transom windows in some of her works.
In most of her work, there is a melancholy and ordinariness that recalls the work of American painter Edward Hopper, who, Ms. Goldman admits, influenced her.
Rounding out the show are archival photographs from the Toronto Public Library and the City of Toronto collections, an illustration by Lawren Harris as well as a few select oil paintings by Gerald Lazare and David Seaton-Smith.
And accompanying the exhibit is the sound of barker's calls for produce and peameal bacon, rising up from the ground floor.
It doesn't get much more Toronto than this.
On a related note, I'd like to do a future column on Toronto artists who paint the complete opposite of Victorian Toronto: 1950s suburbia. If you've shown in galleries and have a body of work that consistently features repetitive tract housing, strip malls, gas stations, modernist architecture or all of the above, please e-mail me.
Dave LeBlanc hosts The Architourist on CFRB Sunday mornings. Inquiries can be sent to dave.leblanc@globeandmail.com.
AoD
THE ARCHITOURIST: ART AND ARCHITECTURE
The intricacies of Toronto's bay-n-gables
Linda Goldman's watercolours are rich with the details of Victorian homes
DAVE LEBLANC
The next time the light strikes your sunburst spandrel, carved corbel, "paper doll" balusters or any other piece of gingerbread at just the right angle, a bicycle may pull up so its rider -- an energetic woman with short, dark hair and a wide smile -- can whip out her camera and snap a few shots.
If you've lived in the Annex or Kensington Market for any length of time, however, you'll know it isn't a thief casing the place or a real estate agent making a rogue assessment. It's just "architourist" and artist Linda Goldman gathering material for her next project, something she's been doing for the past 35 years.
Lately, Ms. Goldman has been aiming her lens -- and her artist's eye -- at the way sunlight can wash a home's exterior in golden hues or how a gable's intricate trim can stretch interesting shadows across a façade.
In Windows, Gables, Gingerbread & Gargoyles -- an exhibit starting tomorrow and running until March 26 at the Market Gallery in the St. Lawrence Market -- the fruits of these bicycling forays are spread out like a vast, colourful tapestry, as rich as Toronto's architectural heritage itself.
On display are her many delicate watercolours of Victorian houses, photographs of gargoyles, and -- speaking of tapestries -- her large, bright pieces of textile art.
As the earliest paintings in the exhibit demonstrate, she has been fascinated with Toronto's bay-n-gables for a long time -- starting in her teenage years, when she used to hitchhike from her home (which she calls "a Monopoly house" because it was square and small) at Bathurst and Sheppard to Yorkville's hippie hangouts. And with the first flick of her brush as a student in Central Tech's three-year post-secondary art program in the early 1970s, that interest only grew.
"When the weather got warm, [the instructors] would send us outside to sit around the school," she remembers. (One of her teachers was the legendary artist Doris McCarthy.) "There was this little store and this little house and that was my first [painting]."
These early works mingle easily with more than 50 other pieces, mostly watercolours painted within the past two years.
The first thing that will strike visitors, however, is the large 1987 triptych on loan from the Baycrest Centre, since the three large fabric panels have been deliberately placed across from the elevator for maximum impact. The amount of detail is staggering, with shop signage, pedestrians, window treatments and even an old TTC "red rocket" in one.
Backpacking across Europe in 1972, Ms. Goldman "collected this blanket and some beads and a couple of dishcloths and a few shmattes," she says. While living on a kibbutz, she did a piece of textile art with these items. It turned out so well that when she returned to Toronto, she thought: "I love these old houses so much, why don't I try one out of fabric?" This led to her abandoning watercolours for almost two decades to do these kaleidoscopic collages, which are stitched and assembled from bits of felt, burlap and denim, and painstakingly embroidered.
Eventually, they proved more time consuming than they were worth. (The Baycrest pieces alone took her six months to complete). "I don't think I have the patience" to do it today, she says with mock weariness.
By the 1990s, she was trying her hand with watercolours again, and in 2002 she joined the Toronto Watercolour Society.
The recent watercolours show Ms. Goldman's maturation as an artist. Among them are representations of homes on Augusta, Kensington and Baldwin, one of 81 Borden St. with the dramatic reflection of bare branches in its windows, as well as portraits of the Flatiron Building and Spadina House.
There also are three different views of 71 Spadina, including one in which the observer looks through a window, then through a narrow room and out another window, an effect that intrigues Ms. Goldman.
Her use of a so-called "resist" to prohibit paint from going onto certain parts of the paper is evidenced by the intricate representations of stained-glass transom windows in some of her works.
In most of her work, there is a melancholy and ordinariness that recalls the work of American painter Edward Hopper, who, Ms. Goldman admits, influenced her.
Rounding out the show are archival photographs from the Toronto Public Library and the City of Toronto collections, an illustration by Lawren Harris as well as a few select oil paintings by Gerald Lazare and David Seaton-Smith.
And accompanying the exhibit is the sound of barker's calls for produce and peameal bacon, rising up from the ground floor.
It doesn't get much more Toronto than this.
On a related note, I'd like to do a future column on Toronto artists who paint the complete opposite of Victorian Toronto: 1950s suburbia. If you've shown in galleries and have a body of work that consistently features repetitive tract housing, strip malls, gas stations, modernist architecture or all of the above, please e-mail me.
Dave LeBlanc hosts The Architourist on CFRB Sunday mornings. Inquiries can be sent to dave.leblanc@globeandmail.com.
AoD