10.
But accounts of Kiyooka's pedagogy reveal that he was effective because his approach was holistic, not because he promoted a party line. It is true that Kiyooka took seriously issues of scale and flatness and introduced the post-painterly vocabulary of "hard-edge" into the local practice of painting. He himself credited the source of his hard-edge ideas as his Emma Lake encounters with Newman and Will Barnet. Kiyooka's formative years as an abstract painter took place in Regina, and he knew the Montréal painters, who had been painting hard-edge since the fifties.14 And, like everyone else, he would have been aware of the work of Frank Stella. Kiyooka's arrival in Vancouver augured the emergence of a new generation, many of whom had been his students, protégés and friends (distinctions he did not often make). It also signaled the end of the dominant regionalism of the Vancouver art scene. Kiyooka was an internationalist whose Canadian artistic world was rooted in Regina, Montréal and Vancouver.

He began to move into hard-edge around 1960-61, when simple geometric elements superimposed themselves on the painterly field that had been established in his 1959 Hoarfrost series. Kiyooka's hard-edge paintings were imbued with his somewhat troubled awareness of himself as culturally and racially alien to the Canadian mainstream. Besides pushing Vancouver painting toward the hard edges of New York and Montréal, in the local context the paintings contributed to the idea that Vancouver looks to Asia as well as to Europe. They were self-consciously "eastern," deploying a sense of balance and a vocabulary of shapes, notably a reiterated oval that invoked a hybrid space between east and west. The oval shape does evoke the arches of the Granville Street Bridge, as Kiyooka suggested, but the ovals -- or circles, as in the Magic Ring series of 1965 --

also evoke mandalas and tantric geometry. Some of Kiyooka's students took up his vocabulary, inventing their own "researches into the harmony of values."15 All of the students learned to work in series. Perhaps more surprisingly, by the mid-sixties, older artists such as Gordon Smith, B.C. Binning and Takao Tanabe moved to reinvent themselves in mid-career as hard-edge abstractionists, working in series.16 Kiyooka was the leading hard-edge theorist, and his importance to Vancouver painting in the sixties is hard to overstate. In 1965, just as the new generation was taking centre stage, he left Vancouver for Montréal, but even then his involvement with Vancouver remained crucial. He was instrumental in the choice of Yves Gaucher as a juror for the controversial 1967 BC Annual (see below). But one imagines that, had Kiyooka lived in Vancouver during 1966-70, he would have been the very epicentre of the "scene with no scene." Perhaps it was his very abdication from the central role on the local stage that made a space for his former students to come to the fore.

In Kiyooka's absence, the most watched of the young hard-edge painters . . .