- Transmission Difficulties
- Vancouver Painting in the 1960s
- A painting is a pitiable thing . . .
- The experience of a work of art . . .
- A painting is mediumistic . . .
- By Scott Watson
16.
What Breeze did share with some of the hard-edge painters was a hot palette of fully saturated colour. Some painters even introduced day-glo, fluorescent and metallic paint, most notably Joan Balzar, who introduced neon elements in her large-scale optical works in 1967.
Joan Balzar, Fusion, 1967-1968
The sixties was a decade of change in pigment and pigment-bearing media for easel painters, who almost to a person shifted from oil to acrylic paint. Acrylic has distinct properties and introduces new pigments. It does not hold the ridges of thick impasto the way oil does. The surface tends to be more matte, so acrylic was the ideal medium for hard-edge paintings in which the paint is applied with a roller. The flat, low-sheen surface was easy to reproduce. The retinal overload that hard-edge painting (as Op) aimed to induce was related to the multimedia presentations of music, performance and projected images that began as art events but established a style for rock concerts that persisted for decades. The psychedelic and the McLuhanesque met in a series of multimedia spectacles, of which the three-evening Trips Festival (1966) with its fifty-plus projectors was the grandest realization. The festival and its sensorium, meant to induce altered consciousness through sensory overload, was the work of the filmmaker Sam Perry, who had studied Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet in the late 1950s. The local history of these events, largely undocumented, began at the University of British Columbia with David Orcutt's experiments, culminating in an environment staged for the 1965 Festival of Contemporary Arts (Orcutt, Iain Baxter, Sam Perry, et al.) and included the Sound (later Motion) Gallery (1965-67), the Intermedia Nights at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1967-69) and the hilarious anarchic multimedia environment organized for a Liberal Party fundraiser with Pierre Trudeau, organized by Intermedia (1971).28 One of Breeze's best paintings from the sixties, Epitaph for Sam Perry (1966), was painted shortly after Perry's suicide and re-creates in acrylic paint the multilayered, kaleidoscopic imagery of the sensorium in acid hues.
One of the artists most dedicated to the psychedelic movement . . .
What Breeze did share with some of the hard-edge painters was a hot palette of fully saturated colour. Some painters even introduced day-glo, fluorescent and metallic paint, most notably Joan Balzar, who introduced neon elements in her large-scale optical works in 1967.
Joan Balzar, Fusion, 1967-1968
The sixties was a decade of change in pigment and pigment-bearing media for easel painters, who almost to a person shifted from oil to acrylic paint. Acrylic has distinct properties and introduces new pigments. It does not hold the ridges of thick impasto the way oil does. The surface tends to be more matte, so acrylic was the ideal medium for hard-edge paintings in which the paint is applied with a roller. The flat, low-sheen surface was easy to reproduce. The retinal overload that hard-edge painting (as Op) aimed to induce was related to the multimedia presentations of music, performance and projected images that began as art events but established a style for rock concerts that persisted for decades. The psychedelic and the McLuhanesque met in a series of multimedia spectacles, of which the three-evening Trips Festival (1966) with its fifty-plus projectors was the grandest realization. The festival and its sensorium, meant to induce altered consciousness through sensory overload, was the work of the filmmaker Sam Perry, who had studied Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet in the late 1950s. The local history of these events, largely undocumented, began at the University of British Columbia with David Orcutt's experiments, culminating in an environment staged for the 1965 Festival of Contemporary Arts (Orcutt, Iain Baxter, Sam Perry, et al.) and included the Sound (later Motion) Gallery (1965-67), the Intermedia Nights at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1967-69) and the hilarious anarchic multimedia environment organized for a Liberal Party fundraiser with Pierre Trudeau, organized by Intermedia (1971).28 One of Breeze's best paintings from the sixties, Epitaph for Sam Perry (1966), was painted shortly after Perry's suicide and re-creates in acrylic paint the multilayered, kaleidoscopic imagery of the sensorium in acid hues.
One of the artists most dedicated to the psychedelic movement . . .
