By Gary Michael Dault

I was reading in bed last night, as I always do before I sleep, and in the middle of p. 12 of John Livingstone Lowes’ endlessly charming and often dangerously intoxicating book about the means and methods of aesthetic invention, The Road To Xanadu (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927)—gratefully bought at the Trinity College Book sale on Monday for five bucks—the learned and witty professor Lowes notes in passing that “Chaos precedes cosmos” (The Road to Xanadu, which, at its centre, is an epically-scaled attempt to understand the making of just two poems by Coleridge, is subtitled “A Study in the Ways of the Imagination”.)

He goes on to insist that “every expression of an artist is merely a focal point of the surging chaos of the unexpressed” (p.13).

For some reason, this led me to muse not on Coleridge but rather on painter Harold Klunder, whose latest exhibition, now at Toronto’s Clint Roenisch Gallery, is such a endless delight. I wrote about Klunder’s exhibition last Saturday in The Globe & Mail, but there’s more I want to add about his work—and it’s specifically about paint.

Paint—pigment—is, as we all know, a presumably beleaguered medium with which to make art. It is always under siege, regarded as a substance, now five hundred years old, that has outlived itself a useful means to any expressive end. Paint, so the clichés of animadversion upon it run, is mostly a matter of overly-hedonistic play: paint leads to a kind of finger-painting for adults, a therapeutic messing-around that may well be relaxing, but can scarcely be significant.

And yet artists, who wish (who demand) to be taken seriously, continue to paint. Why?

Harold Klunder, who came to Canada from The Netherlands in 1955 and is now sixty-three, has been painting for forty years. For him, paint is as hedonist as it is for any other painter—considerable more so, I’d say, judging from the lushness, the generosity, and (to quote myself for a moment), the “full-stop plenitude of his pauseless inventiveness with the brush…”. I encourage the viewer (in the Globe piece) to “look up close and revel on the poolings, clottings and vortices of the artist’s painterly worlds-within-worlds”.

Klunder’s paintings may look fast at first glance; they may look like the broken, convulsive aftermath of some abstract-expressionist storm that has broken over them and moved quickly by. But Klunder is no action-painter. Look closely at this detail (above) from one of his current paintings, and you’ll see straightaway the degree to which the artist has been deliberate in his adding of colour to colour, layer over layer: see how daubs rest heavily on previous daubs? How a twist of a red-laden brush (at the upper left) deposits its redness on a previously positioned disc of pink which has, itself, been carefully bounded by yellow—which yellow has further occluded a swabbing of coral at the very upper left. You can see how deliberate—almost ponderous—all this is—the process is as much like building as (...read more...)

Our apologies to Reading Toronto fans for the site down time. Technology! We are back though and will be posting a Gary Michael Dault blog later this morning.

We are at the MaRs Centre at the intersection of College and University to blog Alphabet City’s “Garbage Town Hall.” As most Torontonianss know, Alphabet City is a respected publication that covers urban issues both intelligently and thoroughly. The series is published and edited by John Knechtel.

Today’s event uses structured, group brainstorming to investigate novel ways to manage Toronto’s garbage. In other words: We’re all talkin’ trash!

We will update the blog a few times during the course of the afternoon’s session.

Rod Muir, of Waste Diversion Toronto (and a candidate for Mayor), is here to help facilitate the afternoon’s event. He says:

Cost is a key driver. It costs the city $2 to $3 per home to physically pick up the garbage. Separation is a key issue and must take place. It can be diverted for recycling or burn and bury.

Our group represents an interesting cross-section of the city’s citizens. There are two design students, one industrial design Prof from OCAD, a graphic designer, an organic farmer, two MBA students who are helping facilitate the group and, yours truly.

Update 2

Here is how Toronto’s waste breaks down in terms of sources:

Private sector waste	610,000 tonnes	34%
Durham & York Regions	318,000 tonnes	18%
Agencies, departments	100,000 tonnes	6%
Small commercial	86,000 tonnes	5%
Residential collection	697,000 tonnes	37%

Total 1,811,000 tonnes

Update Three

Table one’s team consisted of the following involved citizens: Marcelo Affonso, Mauricio Affonso, Jules Goss, Charles Ritchie, Megan Griffith-Greene, Gilbert Li, Janice Keil, and Azadeh Sabour. Together, they pulled apart the key issues of trash management in the city. Their main focus: education, education, education.

Alphabet City is calling on students, activists, researchers, and concerned citizens of every stripe to come to MaRS and help us answer this most critical question for the city: what should we do about our garbage? The Town Hall will be facilitated by a team of MBA students from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, members of the Net Impact club, which works to advance corporate social responsibility (http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/netimpact). The event will be connected live to the larger community through an on-site blog operated by Robert Ouellette of the Reading Toronto website: http://www.readingtoronto.com.

Admission to the Garbage Town Hall is free. Alphabet City no. 11: TRASH will be available at the door ($20, tax included). TRASH is your ticket for free admission to all TRASH festival events.