Homeless in Vancouver: Another brush with Fairview art

Hooray! The long drought is finally over!

I haven’t had one of my throw-away art posts for a while but fortunately on Wednesday while I was looking through recycling bins in the Fairview neighbourhood for returnable beverage containers, I happened upon four discarded sheets of artfully marked watercolour paper.

What caught my eye was that each sheet was brushed with six different strokes of tempera colour, suggesting that an artist or designer had tossed the sheets off (and then tossed them out) as part of some kind of exploration in colour relationships.

And I do so like to look at someone else’s colour choices!

Different strokes for different folks

Personally, I like everything about these sheets. If they were four gargantuan canvasses, I might even feel the need to toil for years in the pits of capitalism just to start a corporation so that they might have a boardroom to hang in. That’s how strongly I feel about them.

And what’s not to like? First of all, brushstrokes are cool to look at. Just like snowflakes, no two of them are alike. They bring life to a flat surface and they’ve helped breath life into human art for a very long time—over 1,700 years if we’re talking about Chinese brushes.

Secondly, it’s fun to look at someone else’s colour swatches; it’s a little like reading their diary, in the sense that colour choice is so personal and subjective.

Of course, we can only ever guess what the person who made these brushstrokes was actually thinking but that’s part of the fun.

Ultimately though, all we can really say for sure is what we think of them. Do we like them? How do the colours compare, individually and collectively, against our own colour biases? Do they, for instance, inspire us to paint something a certain colour that we otherwise wouldn’t?

Another way to look at these sheets of colour swatches would be as a kind of sheet music (assuming you can read musical notation). This is very subjective but colours can evoke feelings just like music can, though not exactly like music can.

I don’t know about you, but no matter how I look at them, I feel very good about these swatches. They’re bright and catchy. They have a nice beat and I can dance to them.