New Paintings @ The Ian Tan Gallery

These two images are the latest in my series of vintage neon sign paintings.
















~Barber Shop~
24" x 30"
oil on canvas, 2009
(Seattle, Washington)


















~Annabelle's~
30" x 36"
oil on canvas, 2009
(San Francisco, California)

John W. Waterhouse @ Montreal Museum

John William Waterhouse, Rome 1849 - London 1917
The Lady of Shalott, 1888, Oil on canvas, Gift of Sir Henry Tate, 1894
The Tate Gallery, London

John William Waterhouse
"Garden of Enchantment"
From October 2, 2009, to February 7, 2010
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

For the first time ever, all of Waterhouse’s paintings of the Lady of Shalott are exhibited together. This propitious gathering provides a unique opportunity to contemplate the artist’s exploration over a thirty-year period of the celebrated poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The Tate’s Lady of Shalott is the best known of all Waterhouse’s works, a highly sophisticated piece of painting that evokes a magical world of dream-like romance. But the picture and its subject touch on a range of serious and troubling issues, including female sexuality, gender politics, the relationship of the artist to society, as well as a ferocious contemporary aesthetic debate around naturalism and narrative. Waterhouse closely followed Tennyson’s poem, which enjoyed enormous popularity through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. His verse treatments of the legends of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were probably admired most of all. First published in 1832 and revised in 1842, Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” was one of his earliest excursions into Arthurian myth. It was inspired not by Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Morte d’Arthur, but by Donna di Scallotta, an Italian fourteenth-century story.

In “The Lady of Shalott,” a fairy woman is confined to a tower on an island up-river from Camelot. How she got there, or the nature of the curse which holds her prisoner, is never revealed. This curse forbids her to see the world other than reflected in a mirror, and she weaves “the mirror’s magic sights.” It is not until Lancelot rides by that, stricken with love and lust, the Lady turns, unleashing the curse. She embarks on a voyage down the river, and dies, the curse fulfilled. The taste for Arthurian subject-matter in the 1880s and 1890s can be related to social and political shifts in Victorian society, and Waterhouse was not alone in finding the Lady of Shalott’s story attractive. This is now seen as connected with the shifting position of women in British society, and in particular, male concern about the growing economic and social independence of the “New Woman.” The sexual and social dynamics of the story of The Lady of Shalott should not be underestimated.

The story is an allegory of longing, repression, fear and punishment, and Tennyson’s lyrical text adopts an erotic rhythm. The poem’s image of the Lady in a tower was a traditional symbol of chastity and containment. Its appearance in Tennyson’s poem can be seen as a metaphor for the constraints of nineteenth-century home life. The poem seems to warn of the consequences of acting on physical compulsion, while also recognizing the inevitability of giving in to such temptation.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts


© 2009 The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. All rights reserved.

Happy 100th Birthday Nick Sopoff...

Wish you were here...

Beautiful Minds: Stephen Wiltshire

Summer Group Show @ The Ian Tan Galery

~Dairy Queen~
36" X 30"
Oil on Canvas, 2009

I am honored to be exhibiting my new works in The Summer Group Show at the Ian Tan Gallery in Vancouver from August 8th - 27th, 2009.

This painted neon sign is from an original Dairy Queen that still operates and sells only dairy products at corner of rue de Bellechasse & Avenue Christophe Colomb, Montreal.

The Only Seafood Cafe

~The Only~
36" X 30"
Oil on Canvas, 2009

Two Survivors: A Seafood Place and Old Neon
(Reprinted with permission.)
By Robert Boyd
The Only Café is Vancouver’s longest surviving restaurant in the same location. It has changed very little over the years. It has never been a fancy place. There is no maitre d’, and definitely no valet parking. It is rather plain looking both inside and out. It has an ornamental tin ceiling which is still the original, as well as a full-length wall mirror. There are seventeen chrome button swivel chair-stools on a horseshoe-and-a-half counter and two booths at the back, making for a maximum capacity of twenty-five. Its specialty is seafood, which is where the name was derived from. When this establishment was first opened, it was the only restaurant in all of Vancouver that served seafood, hence its name. It retains an old-fashioned sense in the fact that payment terms are still cash only. No credit cards or Interac. For all patrons, the rules are very simple: no undesirables allowed, and service is refused to anyone who is too drunk to sit up and eat. But to gain a better perspective of how the Only has stood the test of time, let’s turn back the clock.

Vancouver, 1912. Vancouver is a bustling city. Hastings Street is at the heart of the downtown core. It is the place to “see and be seen”. The city’s most popular theatres, restaurants, dance halls, and hotels are all located in the first three blocks of East Hastings Street. In that year, Antonio Demetry establishes a restaurant in the brand-new Craftsman’s Building at 20 East Hastings and names it the Vancouver Oyster Saloon. At the same time, Nick Thodos is working as a cook in the English Kitchen, five doors down at 30 East Hastings. The two Greek men eventually become the most popular cooks in all of Vancouver. In 1916, Nick’s brother Gustave joins him at the English Kitchen, and later that year, they purchase controlling interest in the Vancouver Oyster Saloon. They immediately renamed the establishment the Only Café.

(Click here for the entire article on "The Only," by Robert Boyd.)

Spring Group Show @ The Ian Tan Gallery

~Magee Grocery~
30" X 30"
Oil on Canvas, 2009
(Vancouver, British Columbia)

I am honored to be exhibiting my new works in The Spring Group Show at the Ian Tan Gallery in Vancouver from June 13th until June 26th, 2009.