Today I received an e-mail from a post-graduate (MFA) student at the University of Alexandria, Egypt. He's doing his master's on "The 3-D Illusion Effect in Printmaking". This is one of those cases where the Internet is such a wonderful thing - thanks to the web my artwork is getting scholarly attention in Egypt.

It's an interesting leftover of colonialism that Westerners continue to look India and the Far East for "authenticity". This fetishised Orientalism is particularly bizarre in the local context of greater Vancouver where over one third of the population has ethnic and cultural roots in these "exotic" locales, yet somehow the notion persists that in order to touch some sort of authentic spirituality one must travel to India or the Far East. What authenticity did the people who moved here lose by doing so? Did it happen to me? Is my European heritage less authentic for being here?

The local aboriginal cultures here are no less rich and equally far removed from Europe as the Far East - and one need only go the lower east side to find these authentic, exotic (from a Eurocentric point of view) people living in a colonial squalor no less real than the slums of Calcutta or Hong Kong. But it is the colonial mind-set itself that precludes this. The local cannot be authentic, only the exotically far-away and foreign. But Paris is as far from Vancouver as Tokyo or Beijing. Rome is even farther. And from the colonial perspective British Columbia is as far from Europe as India or China (and harder to get to).

Yet Europe, especially the prosperous parts of Western Europe, are excluded from being exotic and "authentic" for having been the colonial source. Only impoverished areas that fell under colonial oppression like Scotland, Ireland, the formerly Soviet controlled areas and the like manage to achieve some aspect of "authenticity". Still though, the commonly noted motivations for travelling through the great cities of Europe are "culture" and "education" but never the sort of enlightenment that motivates people of European ancestry to travel to more "exotic" countries.

Europe is no more or less authentic than anywhere else on the planet. I've never understood why someone of European descent living here would be inclined to try to find personal meaning in some place that has as little to do with their ancestry as this place right here. The very word "authenticity" implies looking to the author, the source. The source of European culture and history is Europe.

And even at that, what is so inauthentic about right here? Why should any of us living here, regardless of where our ancestors hail from, be trying to copy from, report back to, catch up with, seek the approval of, etc. of any place other than here? Isn't it about time the colonial mindset of even looking for "authenticity" elsewhere was done away with entirely so we can go about simply being Vancouverites and being our own authors?

If you've been reading here for a while, you might remember me accidentally running into an ancestor at the Art Institute of Chicago a couple of years ago. I had an idea today that inspired me to have a look around for more images of his work (I found a three good high-resolution images on-line, two from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and one from a private auction site). Then I started looking for work by his cousin Jacob and found a couple of fun things:

While this image isn't large enough for my purposes, it struck my fancy from a Canadian perspective and a literary perspective. Jacob Huysmans moved from Belgium to England and became a fashionable painter in the court of King Charles II. This portrait is of His Highness, James, Duke of York, while he was the second governor of the Hudson's Bay Company from 1683 to 1685. In 1685 he ascended to the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland as King James II of England and King James VII of Scotland. On the literary side, one of my favourite books is "Captain Blood" by Rafael Sabatini. This would be the James that Peter Blood was accused of treason against. BTW, if you have never seen the film adaptation with Errol Flynn (it was his first movie), find it and see it. It's the pirate movie that started all pirate movies ;-)

The winning find of the night, however, is the image below. A portrait of Bridget, Lady Kilmorey, painted sometime around 1664 (give or take a year). The image is a wonderful tie-in with what I've had in mind behind the Red Chair series, anchoring what I'm working on not only in general historical context I had in mind all along, but pulling it right back into the family. I'm very pleased with this.

These doodles came out of an idle moment sometime in the summer of 2001. I was doodling and started thinking about ( Hogarth's line of beauty )



As you can see in the circled bits I began to think about refinement to the idea. Just what proportions would create the most beautiful curve? Note the spirals between the two areas I've hightlighted with circles - I'll come back to those.



So I started with simple proportions and forced a curve into them and wound up with a curve that, as Hogarth would characterize it, was clumsy. This is where the spirals on the other side of the page come back into play. I decided to look at golden sections inside a rectangle of simple proportions and came up with this:



The bounding box is three times as high as it is wide, and then bisected along the long axis. The remaining subdivisions are all golden section subdivisions of the original rectangle. It could stand a little more refining. The line I settled on stikes me now as a little bit clumsy still. I believe at this point it would work better if the bounding box itself was based on the golden section in the same proportions as a person's shoulders are to their height (height/φ/φ/φ).