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Happy Canada Day!


Cultural Mess

(with Peter Kovacs)
15" x 22", watercolour, 1988

This painting goes waaay back to the very beginning of my watercolour experimentation. It's my second watercolour ever (and I still have it!).
This was done in my high school art class as a collaboration with my friend, Pete Kovacs. I don't remember why we chose the Canadian flag to paint or why we chose to work on the same painting together, but we did one more after this under the collective name, The Group of Two Cubists (and signed the painting G23 (with the 3 in superscript as in "cubed")). I don't know why we gave it that title; it doesn't refer to anything I can think of us thinking about.

The foundation of my "stained glass" (or, as another friend, Ian Anderson, called it at the time, "Matrix" -because he actually thought that's what it was called, and this was eleven years before the movie of the same name) technique is evident here. I had been making lines and colouring them in this pattern for years, but this is the second appearance of this in my watercolours (my first watercolour painting may be posted here in the future --it's a jumble of abstract nonsense (just playing around with the medium) but it also has the Matrix motif).

As Douglas Coupland noted in his Souvenir of Canada documentary, the maple leaf on our flag is clearly very tricky to draw from memory.

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