Busy week last week.

A local business woman has offered me some space to show a few of my pics. How exciting!

Had a rant in here about deadlines and the generally slipshod habits and thinking applied to the arts by too many people nowadays on both sides of the equation. Cut that bit out and plugged in the mini-rant below.

Musicians, painters, photographers, and writers sell out every week in order to pay the rent and eat. Artists sell out because there is no such animal as an RSP in their world. There is no pension fund. There are no private health plans (although I am truly grateful for the provincial government drug plan, modest as it may appear to be).

Artists sell out because they have to do so. I would.

Besides, the slow march towards mediocrity by society at large still plods along. An ill-defined though now undeniable destination seems to be just around the next turn at every kink in the road.

In other words, more and more of the audience does not possess the acumen and/or the attention span required to 'grok' serious art. Pop culture has won the day for a generation or two at the very least.

At last, it would seem, we have Paul Simon as the seer, the medicine man who threw his magical McLuhan-esque word powder onto 'the fire that burns' 40-some years ago. "Andy Warhol won't you please come home" indeed.

Dylan? The jury is still out; history has not yet fixed a place in time and space for the thin wild mercury sound.

For all of that, a local business woman has offered me some space to show a few of my pics. So cool.

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This is my friend Sue from down around London way. We are both beginning to relax a little when we make portraits of Sue. I think it shows in the work, don't you? Glam retouch applied but as I told Sue, you can't do this without a photogenic face beneath all the magic.

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Le sacre du printemps

The square downtown is a great place to be when the first warm sunny days hit after a long grey winter. By July most people are less willing to have their picture taken. Early in the season it is rarely a problem. This is Marnie, a fixture on the square, who will busk for a few hours almost every day from spring till fall when the weather turns cold again.