27th Street

I have two woodcut prints in the Summer Salon exhibition at Yumart, 101 Spadina. These were part of a series I made in 1987. At the time I was living and working in a storefront studio on Ossington Ave. Ossington was different back then. I know some people just discovered the street recently as it has become a go-to place for trendy restaurants. It wasn’t so trendy in 87. There were some Portuguese kitchen shops, a couple fish stores, there was a donut shop that everyone called Galaxy Drugs, a garage, a sign shop, and a place that made tofu in buckets.

The neighbourhood changed at the end of the 80s and much of the stretch of Ossington between Queen and Dundas very quickly became all Vietnanese all the time. Many dark Vietnamese coffee joints popped up. At one point there were over a dozen of them in that stretch. One opened next door to my studio. They played a tape on a loop all day and most of the night that featured mostly 70s music, including Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks. I could hear it through the walls every 73 minutes.

At the time I made the woodcuts I was also making large paintings, some acrylic, some oil. A few of them are in private collections. Some others no longer exist. I remember there was The Bad Inventor and The New Murphy Power Plant.

Here’s a painting from that period…
This painting (whose title escapes me just now) has a good home. It’s oil and unfortunately you lose much of the surface quality in the photo, but you get a glimpse at least of a painting from that time. This one is about 6 feet wide.