Binning, Herzog — I Couldn’t Find Your City

Gouache on mat board
2013

A small gouache drawing that synthesizes the work of B.C. Binning (1909-1976) and Fred Herzog (1930-2019), two artists who documented the city of Vancouver and its vernacular forms. Their artwork captured a pace that would become my home, but before I was born. I look at their artwork trying to find something that I know, even though many of those places were gone before I could see them.

In this work I conflate two losses - that of a past place and of modernism’s idealism of artistic pursuit. The barber stripes of Fred Herzogs Main Barber From Sidewalk, 1968 collide with the geometric shapes and pallets of B.C. Binning’s Fair Weather Signals, 1949.