12.
Another Regina-Vancouver School of Art-Kiyooka-schooled hard-edge painter was Brian Fisher, who had achieved national recognition by 1967 at age twenty-eight, when he received a mural commission for Dorval airport in Montréal. His paintings, like those of Kiyooka, often used the mandala portal of an oval.

Like Pfeifer's paintings they created a spatial illusion through folding, replicating and reflecting--a kaleidoscopic effect that again referred to the sensorium--and they presage the effect of rapidly receding space as cipher for the vastness of interstellar space that became a cinematic cliché after Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969). Using a psychedelic language, Fisher once told the critic Joan Lowndes that his ideal viewer would concentrate on one of his paintings for half an hour: "After this tuning up of awareness everything you look at will suddenly acquire heightened definition and intensity of colour."20 His arrays of perspectival lines vanishing into infinity and criss-crossed with verticals to create moiré patterns, allied him with Op Art, an association he was eager to discourage, for his impeccable paintings also harboured contradictions. Their illusionism placed them in opposition to Greenberg's dogma of abstract art as uncommunicative and anti-illusionist. Fisher saw his work in terms of both "process" and icon. In his own words, his paintings were "visual analogies, signposts to a mental process which also feels and generates the sensibilities that created them."22 Sometime in the early seventies, Fisher came to a dead end with the research that had made him famous. In 1974 he moved away from hard-edge abstraction to working with sponged ink on paper, having introduced chance into his work.

Pop art, or a variant thereof, made its first appearance in local practice . . .