Stantec Window Gallery: Day 2

When I look at what I wrote yesterday, specifically what I said I would write about today, I want to kick myself. In my bumbling haze after a day of coaxing pixels into place, I condemned myself to write some really boring explanations about things that really don’t matter.

Does it matter why I decided to draw stripes that look like a mysterious hallway leading through the building and off into a miniature world? Indeed, if I wrote such a text, I could show how smart I can be by using big words and making references to angles and lines of sight and architecture and scale and my aesthetic whim would sound justified.

For those who would actually read my explanation, some would be impressed. A few anti-modernists would be offended. Others wouldn’t believe my answer, would see my choice of portraying a long hallway as a) a cry for help, b) evidence of childhood physical abuse, c) the inevitability of death, or d) all of the above. Some wouldn’t care about my reasons, and would see inside the hallway traces of their own metaphysical angst or woe.

The truth is, even if I came up with a really great reason why I’ve proposed what I have, it’s not the real reason. The truth is, I don’t know the reason.

What do you do with a building that is so lopsided that it requires you to stand only on one side, thereby seeing everything on and within that building converge at that point? All I can see now when I look at my pictures of the building are the lines of fluorescent ceiling fixtures appearing to radiate through the building from the grand doorway. They look like the rays on a hand-drawn sun, the ones that children draw in the corners of a page.

Also in the haze of yesterday’s eyestrain, I thought the colour I chose for the drawing was resplendent. I wanted the colour of the stripes to be the colour of the maple blossoms of early spring. Brilliant yellow-green always reminds me of the smell I long to smell, especially in the dead of winter when all I smell when I walk outside is freezer burn. I could look at the yellow-green stripes of my drawing and trick myself that I am walking in a grove of maples bursting with life. I thought that my drawing would call to the maple trees of the city and entice them to bloom early this year, to shower us with their multitudes of tiny offerings that squish into the undersides of our shoes and wind up underneath our couch cushions.