Nostalgic memories of the gone landscape painters; John Snow, Maxwell Bates, and Buck Kerr (best known as Prairie Expressionists - not Impressionists) setting up their oil paint easels, beyond expressionist studios, in the ditch; to paint road scenes near Priddis in the foothills of Alberta for fun and companionship - like fishing? There is a culture, difficult to imagine, possibly impossible to reunite: fragments of our lives.

Yes, much like fishing and hunting and farming and hewing and hauling in an unknowable land.

And like Joel Weishaus wrote:

"I guess I still think in terms of the responsibility of the artist to pursue the making of  a  "masterpiece." Not to make it, which is impossible, as every piece of art is ultimately a failure; but to pursue it as if you're starving and you're tracking prey you've never seen, and you don't know exactly what it is; only its tracks are there, and they're like nothing you've seen before." 

-Joel

I arrived at the gallery at the appointed 11 am hour, took the nine paintings down, put corrugated cardboard corner protectors on the canvases, and stretch wrapped them for transport back to the vault for storage until the next show:

23rd Annual Watson Exhibition

Homer Watson & Frederick Varley
Barry Smylie
Bill Schwarz

June 29 – August 17, 2013

I received some fun bling.

A day later, I'm going over it. The young high school student seems to have managed to publish his interview or, at least, the notes of his interview in Kawartha Lakes This Week. There are some things in the review that I told only him... student stuff, I thought. The only correction I can supply is that my work is not hanging in contemporary art galleries in Tokyo, Madrid, Istanbul, Brazil, Portugal, and New York; it is located within the galleries' digital file collections and may or may not be posted online interacting at their web sites.

And... maybe mixed media (graphite and chalk) down under but: all united by polymer coated, preserved with UV blocking plastic media transformed chemically unified.

I was also given photocopies of the comment book.

Click on it for a readable size sequence...