Anderson Pisaniello sent me a note that deserves some attention.

I just read that the City of Toronto international design competition for the revitalization of Nathan Phillips Square is open for any nationally or internationally registered professionals in the design field, what naturally includes foreign Architects living in Canada.

As you know many foreign Architects, including me, have been facing a long and obscure way to have our educational and professional background recognized in Canada.

What gets my attention in the case of the Nathan Phillips' revitalization project is that a proposal made by me or any other foreign Architect living in Canada should be evaluated and eventually considered as valuable and at the same level to the local registered professionals.

In other words, when convenient to the city/province our concepts and designs can easily be analyzed and eventually considered. However, when it is related to our professional practice the matter gets another mean.

Of course, local architects have long grumbled about the bureaucracy that is the OAA. Anderson's complaints join a long list of others. But he has a point. Why, as a profession, are we more than happy to bring in foreign, super-star architects to design some of our most important civic landmarks but when accrediting qualified, foreign architects we do everything possible to impede their acceptance?

We all know the answer why. Protectionism. That truth does not make the hypocrisy of our professional agencies more palatable. Canadians have long lived in a trans-global business environment that is making innovative ideas available to cultures everywhere. The longer we continue to put barriers up to protect our profession locally the more likely it will be that our major building projects will go to foreign architects who have joined the fray of global competition and won.

Elements that disrupt the flow of light through a lens - like sun flare or rain - often make the subject of the image more compelling or, at least, appear different enough that we understand it in a new way. This is an example. The ROM Crystal is made more organic in this image and the transition is compelling. The Crystal becomes a hybrid between Libeskind and Gehry.

By Gary Michael Dault

So busy was I this week meeting writing deadlines and preparing for the exhibition discussed below—which opens tomorrow (Thursday, October 12) at the G+ Galleries at 50 Glsdstone Avenue—that RT editor Robert Ouellette kindly agreed to my suggestion that, in lieu of a new column, I reproduce here one of the 1-minute Cereal Box landscapes of which the exhibition is made up, and a short text outlining the origins and method of their production. I do hope this doesn’t seem too self-serving.

I’ll write a normal—if that is the word—Angle of Incident for next Wednesday morning.


AN HOUR OF LANDSCAPE PAINTING: NEW 1-MINUTE PAINTINGS ON CEREAL BOXES: A Reminiscence


I began to make 1 minute cereal box paintings when my son, Alexander, was still young enough to enjoy cereal for breakfast. I’d call him to get ready for school, and he’d come down to the dining room twenty minutes later to find me pondering how best to use this fugitive twenty minutes in some constructive way. The idea of painting on the boxes came out of the need to implement those hovering, hitherto unemployed shards of downtime.

I don’t remember at what point I first noticed that the cereal-photos on the boxes of Corn Flakes or Muslix or Crispix could be seen to be vaguely landscape-like, and could probably be assisted into looking even more like landscapes with the application of a little pigment. It seemed to me—if I let myself drift a little—that bowls of flakes looked earthy, beach-like, forested, faceted, like distant shores and middle-ground shoals and foreground beaches, all toasted brightly with some raking sun shining from beyond the perimeters of the boxes. In truth, the paintings seemed almost made already.

And there was no plan, at the beginning, that I should limit the time of my working on each of these cereal-paintings to one minute. The fact is that a thick brush, laden with acrylic pigment, covers a lot of cereal box in a very short time. It was pretty clear that a minute was simply all the time each painting was going to require.

Making the paintings was more pleasurable than I could have imagined—partly because I was continually astonished and delighted by how much scenic, atmospheric effect could be wrested from the simple act of swiping a heavy brushful of grey pigment, say, across the upper part, say, of the box. A couple of dark stokes across the top half of the box afforded me a brooding, lowering sky. A few more strokes across the lower half of the box turned up a respectable sea.

A few horizontal incisings with my fingernail across this new, wet “sea” gave me waves, swells, breakers, ripples, or turned the sea into a snowfield or a forest floor—depending on the ferocity or the delicacy of my sweep. A single twist of a loaded brush provided a moon—if a moon were required. Heavy jabs of white paint made stars. Which left the cereal in the middle—mounds (...read more...)

She is not beautiful but in the fall she becomes luminous
like golden leaves in this glowing season, lit from within.
She is like a brown dog nosing at the smell of earth
and sniffing at voices above the folded hillsides rising
like smoke, and the moon echoing in cobbled walkways
tread by leather shoes, and the smell of work horses,
and wooden barns filled with sweetly sleeping swallows
that startle and rise like leaves cast by the wind.

And on these fall days her voice is strong and a little rough,
like newly sawn pine, and she will look right into your eyes
as if you were the landscape reflected in a silent lake,
as if you were the season turning in a single storm and she
the dawn slanting across the brown and broken fields
on a chill November morning. And she will stride through the
rows of rattling cornstalks, gathering and spilling light because
she is not beautiful but in the fall she becomes luminous.

(From Archaeologies of Memory, a work in progress.)

The above image of High Park in the fall was taken by Neil Lee and is used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.