In the mid-80s, I had a studio in an old hardware store at 70 Ossington Ave. here in Toronto.  A few of my old pals who visit this space may remember it. We had some good times there. It had pegboard walls from the hardware store that made it ideal for hanging paintings. Back then, it was a laid back somewhat run-down street, populated by kitchen remodeling places, a few artists, a drunk tank, a booze-can and at the bottom of the street, the Queen St. mental health facility (the street has changed a lot since then, but that’s another story). I really enjoyed my years there very much, although I’m sure time has erased many of the lower points of that studio experience.

At the time I was making a group of paintings that I guess you might call industrial ruin paintings, although I hate to pigeon-hole them that way. I only know the whereabouts of one painting from that set – hanging in my friend Jill’s office. I recall working on another one, which I called the New Murphy Power Plant. I gave that one to a friend who liked it. I hope she kept it as I really liked that painting and I don’t even have a picture of it. If I remember it correctly, I made a strange and funky frame for that picture. Anyway, I digress.

Wait – I should digress more. There were two studios, mine in the front that used the front entrance and one in the back that used that alley entrance. Another artist rented the back space and we shared the kitchen I constructed in between. It wasn’t fancy, but it worked.

So anyway, I was working away on one of these paintings. It might have been The New Murphy Power Plant, I don’t know. I do remember it was going really well. I recall that it had a smoke stack in it and I was working on painting toxic nasty smoke emitting from the stack, and I had this incredibly intense experience with this painting. I thought in fact that I was having a synesthetic experience – the toxic smoke I was painting was so vividly descriptive that it invoked another sense, the sense of smell. I could smell the smoke coming out of that stack. Man, was I ever a great painter at that particular moment. I was amazed that I could paint something that would so clearly evoke another sense.

Then suddenly I came out of my artistic reverie and realized that my studio mate had put some bread in our ancient toaster and went back to her studio to chat on the phone. I ran into the kitchen to find smoke and flames shooting out of the toaster. I had been smelling the fire in the kitchen. Fortunately, we didn’t burn the place down. So much for my brush with synesthesia.