KIMOTO Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia

KIMOTO GALLERY, Vancouver, BC

I am excited to be represented by the KIMOTO Gallery. The newest art destination on Gallery row in Vancouver. Drop by to meet the owner, curator and artist Katsumi Kimoto and see the Artist's work his gallery showcases.

Ted Harris Paints: An Icon Closes on Hastings Street

PAINT  |  30 x 30  |  Oil on canvas

Photograph: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun

Bob Harris, son of local landmark paint retailer Ted Harris outside the landmark East Hastings store on the last day of business, Wednesday Sept. 30, 2009, in Vancouver, B.C.

By John Mackie, VANCOUVER SUN October 2, 2009
The Harris family has run a store at 757 East Hastings for nine decades.
No more. Bob Harris closed Ted Harris Paints Wednesday, 62 years after his father Ted made the switch from selling bicycles to paint. The younger Harris - also 62 - has decided to retire, and his sons David, Michael and Richard don't want to take over the business.
Which is sad, because Ted Harris Paints was one of Vancouver's last classic independent retailers, a throwback to the glory days of Hastings in the 1940s and 50s.
Harris picks up an old colour chart.
"Retro is in," he notes with a smile. "People look at this colour card and say - 'Wow! You're really on top of things to have a retro colour card!' What they don't know is that it's the colour card we used in the 1950s. We just brought it out and now we're using it again.
"People don't know what retro is until they come here," he laughs. "This is the real thing."
Indeed. Ted Harris Paints has been selling tints like Yukon Gold, Pearl Frost and Green Whisper since 1947. Even if they have never been inside the store, most Vancouverites remember the business for its giant neon sign, a landmark that blazes "paint" in multi-coloured letters - cream, teal, burnt orange, royal blue, and rusty red.
'Neath the neon is another sign that boasts "10 to 50 percent off!," with "comparative prices" in small print. To hammer the message home, the front of the building is a glorious hodge-podge of hand-written lettering reading "Ted Harris, Paints & Wallpaper, Wholesale and Retail." There's even a painting of a giant paintbrush.
The interior is just as cool, with an old-style high ceiling, banks of paint cans and a battery of paint mixers and shakers that look like they've been around since the industrial revolution.
The building dates to about 1910, a decade before Bob¹s grandfather Joseph Harris showed up from Montreal and opened up the East End Excellent Service Second Hand Store. (He's listed in an old city directory as a "junk pedlar," which was a common vocation for Jewish immigrants in the early 1900s - Joseph's birth name was Moishe Rosen.)
Joseph Harris died in 1926 and his wife Fannie married a man named Kaufman.
But the family fell on hard times during the depression, and Ted Harris and his two brothers were sent to an orphanage in Winnipeg.
Ted eventually came back to Vancouver, and by 1938 had taken over 757 East Hastings for a bicycle store. Legend has it you could rent one of his bikes for 15 cents an hour.
"They would rent them here because we were so close to Stanley Park," relates Bob Harris. "People would bring them back late sometimes, and would hammer on the door, because they didn¹t want to pay the rent the following morning."
This would work, because Ted Harris lived in the back of the store in an apartment he tacked on to the original building. There were another three apartments for rent upstairs. None of the apartments have been occupied for decades, but their tile kitchens and bathrooms with clawfoot tubs are intact.
Bob Harris lived in the back of the store until he was 10. The Strathcona neighbourhood - or the East End, to someone of Bob's vintage - was a far different place in those days.
"We used to go down down to the docks and get the turnips and potatoes when they fell off the conveyer belts transferring the food from the trains to the trucks," he recalls.
"We got a chicken once, a chicken got loose. We kept it in [my friend's] basement as a pet, until one day when they invited me over for chicken dinner. I had no idea I was eating my pet."
Ted Harris thrived in the paint business, even starting up his own line of Harritite and Ted Harris paints. Harris didn¹t actually make the paint - it came from a large manufacturer which allowed Harris to put his imprint on its product.
"They might make 2,000 gallons," says Bob Harris.
"The first 1,500 with their label, the last 500 gallons with our label. It's exactly the same product, we just sell it at a cheaper price."
Walking through the building with Bob is like taking a heritage tour. Up on a shelf in his office are some old bicycle tools from the 40s. Below them is an antique "partner's desk," which had two sides - the partners would face each other.
This one has been modified, however.
"When they became out of fashion 40 years ago, my dad took a chainsaw and sawed it in half," Bob says. "We still have the other half in another office."
He points out another ancient artifact, a five-foot-tall safe made by the Hall Safe Company of Cincinnati. The patent is from 1906, and the safe is used to this day.
"It can still hold money, so why not use it?" laughs Bob.
The basement is where he cut his teeth in the paint business, at the age of six.
"I used to sit down here and package dry colours," he says. "I used to get a 50 pound bag of raw sienna or whatever and repackage it in five pound bags. For a month after that I'd sneeze raw sienna or burnt umber or whatever I was packaging."
Hard work ran in the family. Ted Harris worked in the store until he died at the age of 88.
"He worked all his life here, pretty well," says Bob, who was an only child.
"One Friday while he was working in the store and he didn't feel very well. I took him to the hospital and he passed away two weeks later."
Bob has decided to take another path, retiring while he's still relatively young.
"We put a notice in the Vancouver Sun that we were retiring, and people came rushing in to buy [the remaining paint stock]," he says.
"Now it's almost all gone. A friend of mine phoned up today and said he wanted two quarts of paint, but I didn't have it. So I offered to give him a gallon for nothing. He said okay" - he pauses - "but he wanted me to deliver it to him."
What will happen to the landmark neon sign? Good question. Bob offered it to the Vancouver Museum, which has a neon sign collection, but it turned him down.
"They said it was too big, they just couldn't store it," he says.
"It would have been nice if it had went to the museum; it would have been something you could take your grandchildren to show them. But they're not interested."

jmackie@vancouversun.com

Courtesy of: © Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Last call at Vancouver's Yale Hotel…for now

Yale Hotel  |  30 x 36  | Oil on canvas  |  2013

After 123 years, the Yale Hotel is closing for a year and a half for renovations
By John Mackie, Vancouver Sun November 11, 2011
The late Robbie King was the master of the Hammond B-3 organ; he played it on countless recordings and live gigs with acts like Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, The Poppy Family and Diana Ross and the Supremes.
It didn’t make him a lot of dough, though. For the last few years of his life, he lived in a small room directly above the stage at the Yale Hotel at Granville and Drake.
But that was his choice. The Yale bills itself as “Vancouver’s home of rhythm and blues,” and King loved being upstairs, listening to the music of legends such as Charles Brown, James Cotton and Charlie Musselwhite through the floor.
King had no patience for bad performances, though. “He’d hear something not being played correctly, and he’d storm downstairs in his house robe, bump the guy to the side and start playing,” Yale owner Waide Luciak says with a laugh.
That’s the kind of effect the Yale has on people. It’s a true blues palace, a beautiful old brick building that has thrived by eschewing the latest musical and cultural trends to concentrate on what it does best.
That is what bassist Jack Lavin envisioned when he established the blues format in 1985.
“[Then owner] Sam Sorich was looking for somebody to host a jam there,” Lavin says. “I had just left Powder Blues, so I was somewhat high profile. We hit it off pretty good. I said, ‘I’m from Chicago. I love blues, and I think this should be a blues club. If you serve the same plate every time, you’ll have a guaranteed crowd.’ ”
Lavin used his contacts to bring in legends like Otis Rush, Lowell Fulson and Joe Duskin for weeklong gigs. “Since we began it as a blues club, it was inarguably Canada’s best blues bar,” Lavin says.
Lavin left the Yale in 1993, but the blues played on. Over the years a who’s who of blues musicians have played there, from Pinetop Perkins, Johnny Winter and John Hammond to Jeff Healey, Jim Byrnes and Long John Baldry.
But the landmark bar is about to go silent. The Yale will be closing Nov. 20 so it can undergo a heritage renovation. It will be closed for about a year and a half, but will still feature the blues when it reopens, although not exclusively. “It’s going to be the old Yale, but a modernized old Yale,” says Luciak, who has co-owned the bar since 1987. “We found that the people that really enjoy the blues are getting old, [and] we can’t survive off what those people are drinking. So our target over the last year or so has been, as the night goes on, to put on a band that gets a little bit younger [audience]. We think we can survive into the future if we make some subtle changes.”
The Yale will be marking its exit with a week of multi-act gigs featuring headliners such as Chilliwack (Nov. 17), David Gogo (Nov. 18) and Dal Richards (Nov. 20). Luciak also has also a new space at 1050 Granville, which he hopes to open in the new year to accommodate many of the Yale’s acts. But it’s a new building, which just won’t be the same. Part of the Yale’s aura is its age, which gives it soul.
It was built in 1888 — when Vancouver was only two years old — and cost $9,000. It was originally called The Colonial, and was designed by Noble Stonestreet Hoffar (yes, that’s his real name), a prominent architect who also designed the Cordova Street side of the Army and Navy department store.
When it was built, The Colonial was out in the sticks: Vancouver was centred in Gastown. The Canadian Pacific Railway was developing rail yards nearby in Yaletown, and The Colonial catered to CPR workers. Some lived there; many more drank there. “This was out at the end of Granville Street, and law and order was a little bit iffy,” says heritage expert Don Luxton. “When it was raining and the streets were muddy, [the clientele] loved to party it up, because they knew the police couldn’t make it.”
In 1907, new owners changed the name to The Yale, and two years later tacked on an addition at the back. The addition gave it 44 rooms upstairs for rent, while the bar was extended over both buildings.
You can tell where the buildings meet because there’s a slight dip in the floor.
The building is so old Luciak says they found some horseshoes in the basement, a remnant of a stable in the early days. The basement features one of Vancouver’s nicest mosaic tile floors, and retains vintage equipment like an old wooden “keg lift” they still use to roll down kegs of beer.
A more recent addition is the stripper poles from the Cecil, the hotel next door that was recently torn down as part of the Rolston condo development.
The Yale is being refurbished as part of the Rolston, a $75-million project by Rize Atlantis. The 23-storey, 186-unit condo tower may turn out to be Vancouver’s most startling new building — the design by Busby Perkins + Will architects features a series of “ribbons” that jut out of the building.
Rize Alliance will spend about $5 million fixing up the Yale as part of the development. It will restore The Yale’s Granville Street facade to a glass storefront, fix up the hotel rooms upstairs, and do some seismic upgrading. “It’s a wood-frame building, with what they call a single-lace brick veneer,” explains Luke Harrison of Rize Alliance. “We’re restoring all the brick, making sure it’s attached to the building in a good manner, and repointing it and cleaning it up. The seismic upgrading we’re doing is to the wood frame — you’re basically tying in the vertical and horizontal elements of the building.”
It’s a complicated deal. Luciak says he sold the Yale to Rize Alliance on the condition they will sell the bar back to him. But he won’t own the upstairs; Rize Alliance is handing that over to the city, which will be renting the rooms to low-income earners.
Luciak’s son Joe has run the bar for several years, and promises the new Yale will be like the old one, only better.
The ugly dropped ceiling panels will be removed, restoring the bar to its full 14-foot height (albeit with some special drywall that will dampen the sound that travels upstairs to the residents). There will be a new, longer bar, and a larger wooden dance floor. The basement will feature spiffy new dressing rooms for the bands, and there will be a kitchen to serve food.

But it will still retain the brick walls, the neon signs and the Hammond B-3 organ that Robbie King insisted the club had to buy if it was to be a proper blues bar. “We’re going to spend a lot of money to make it look and feel the same,” says Joe Luciak. “I’ve been here since I was six years old, and there’s no way I’d let the city down [and change it]. The Yale is its own cultural landmark and entity; it means a lot to people.”

Mason Murer Fine Art, Atlanta

Golden City Cafe  |  31 x 48  |  Oil on canvas

Mason Murer Fine Art is pleased to announce our Spring 2013 show, opening on Friday, April 5 at 7:00 PM. Our Spring show will open with Robert Marx drawings, paintings by Jeanie Tomanek, Karen Hollingsworth, Craig Hawkins, and Will Rafuse. We will be welcoming paintings from new artists: animal portraiture by Ray Hare and urbanscapes by Valerio D’Ospina. Additionally, we will be showing photo based works from Robin Davis and sculptures from Steve Steinman and Todd Fuller. Finally, two groups from academia round out our exhibition: the Georgia High School Art Symposium and Damn Fine: a SCAD MFA Group Show. We will also be continuing the Cigar Box Art Project to benefit future art therapy programs at Mason Murer. The show will open with an artist’s reception on Friday, April 5, from 7 to 10 pm, and will run through May 11, 2013.

BIG Mac

BIG Mac  |  24 x 24  | Oil on canvas

Arden Galleries 25th Anniversary Exhibition

George  |  25 x 25  | Oil on canvas  |  2012

 (George Washington in Boston)

The Arden Gallery in Boston is celebrating its 25th year with a group exhibition from August 1 - 31.
Congratulations to Hope and her gallery consultants, Zola and Andy for promoting and supporting the Arts and Artists for 25 years!
Artist opening reception and gala celebration:
Friday, August 3 from 5 - 8.

Herbert Vogel, Fabled Art Collector, Dies at 89

Dorothy and Herbert Vogel at a Manhattan art gallery in 1992.

Photo; Fred R. Conrad  |  New York Times

New York City teems with questionable urban legends. But the fable about the postal clerk and his wife, a Brooklyn librarian, scrimping to amass an astounding collection of modern art, cramming all 5,000 pieces in a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment, then donating the whole kit and caboodle to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and galleries in all 50 states, is true. Herbert Vogel, who retired as a postal clerk in 1980 but kept collecting art, died on Sunday at 89 at a nursing home in Manhattan, the National Gallery announced. When he and his wife, Dorothy, gave thousands of artworks to the museum in 1992, J. Carter Brown, then the museum’s director, called their collection “a work of art in itself.” So too were the lives of the couple colloquially called Dorothy and Herbert (the order on which Mr. Vogel insisted). Shortly after their wedding in 1962, they bought their first piece of art, a small crushed-metal sculpture by John Chamberlain. Realizing that their own efforts at making art were not up to the standards of Mr. Chamberlain and other artists they admired, they began buying others’ works. Starting slowly, they bought what they liked — within the strictures of two civil-service incomes — with the only criterion that they be able to carry it home. Fitting it in their small apartment on the Upper East Side was no problem, as long as they didn’t mind devoting their closets to art, getting rid of their sofa and other furniture, and perpetually tripping over paintings. Mrs. Vogel told journalists that she did not — repeat, did not — keep art in her oven. “We didn’t set out to live bizarrely,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1992. Wandering around the mountains of art were eight cats with names like Manet, Renoir and Corot. Twenty exotic turtles completed the scene. But the art was what came to matter most, and the Vogel collection grew into a guidepost for an often austere school of art that followed Abstract Expressionism’s long reign: Minimal Art, which often examined monochromatic surfaces and essential forms. It was nowhere near as popular as Pop Art, which drew its colorful imagery from consumer products and arose around the same time. There was also a buyers’ market for conceptual art, in which the image is an idea. An example in the Vogel collection was a few inches of frayed rope with a nail through it; another was a black cardboard square with the definition of the word “nothing” printed on it in white. Their style was to make friends with the young, often little-known artists who were making the new art. Thus they bypassed galleries, a practice some in the art world later criticized as cheating the system. They bought on credit and were slow to pay. They had no car, took no vacations and ate TV dinners; a night out was a trip to the nearby Chinese restaurant. They sometimes did cat-sitting in exchange for art. Artists liked to be taken seriously by patrons eager to understand novel directions in art, and they particularly appreciated the Vogels’ pattern of buying artists’ works over a period of years to capture evolving careers. “You knew when you were selling them something it was becoming part of an important collection,” Chuck Close, who helped develop the painting style called photorealism, said in an interview with Newsday in 1992. Christo, whom the Vogels collected before he became famous for monumental works of environmental art, told The Miami Herald in 1989, “They passionately collect some artists, and they collect them from the beginning, before gallery or critical interest.” Among the artists the Vogels collected were Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Richard Tuttle and Donald Judd. In more recent years they collected works by Andy Goldsworthy, James Siena and Pat Steir, among others. Earl A. Powell III, the current director of the National Gallery, said in a statement: “The radical expansion of intellectual and stylistic expressions in many media by European and American artists since the 1960s is reflected in the diversity of the works that Herb and Dorothy collected over five decades.” Herbert Vogel was born in Manhattan on Aug. 16, 1922, dropped out of school and worked in garment-industry sweatshops. But he told Smithsonian magazine in 1992, “I knew there was another world out there, and somehow I’d find it for myself.” After a stint in the Army, he encountered paintings by the old masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That led him to contemporary art, and contemporary art led him to the Cedar Bar, the fabled artists’ hangout in Greenwich Village. There he listened in awe to Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and David Smith. “I was nothing — a postal clerk,” he told The Times. “But I respected the artists, and they sort of respected me. They would talk until 3, 4 in the morning, and I would be one of the people who just listened. I just remember it very vividly. I never even asked a question.” In 1960 he met Dorothy Faye Hoffman at a resort in the Poconos. On their first date, art did not come up. On subsequent dates, as they went to the movies and watched the presidential election returns together (Senator John F. Kennedy won), they fell in love. After their honeymoon in Washington, where they visited the National Gallery, they both took classes in painting. They soon realized they would rather hang other artists’ work on their walls. “I wasn’t bad,” Mrs. Vogel told Newsday. “I didn’t like Herbie’s paintings, actually.” In 1992 five full-size moving vans were needed to move their art to the National Gallery, where they were soon feted by William H. Rehnquist, the chief justice of the United States, and David Rockefeller. In 2008 the gallery announced that it would help them carry out their plan to give 50 artworks to a museum in each of the 50 states. The couple liked to work with the gallery because it has never sold a painting, and admission is free. In 2008 Megumi Sasaki directed a documentary about the Vogels, “Herb & Dorothy.” Ms. Sasaki had her camera operators focus on how Mr. Vogel’s eyes intensified and lit up when he liked something. In addition to his wife, Mr. Vogel is survived by his sister, Paula Antebi. In 1992 Mr. Vogel, whose highest salary at the post office was $23,000 before taxes, told The Associated Press that he and his wife could easily have become millionaires. “But we weren’t concerned about that aspect,” he said. (Article courtesy of The New York Times)