Welcome to Vancouver's downtown eastside alternative art scene. This artwork painted, drawn and scrawled by dozens of downtown eastside residents over the past decade is long gone, a bulldozers blade being the harshest of art critics. The admission was free, ambience was optional, and judging by the dozens of empty bottles strewn about, wine tasting was the de-rigeur of the day.
For posterity, the artwork was saved, thanks to my trusty Nikon, so they can one day be published. These art works likely unseen by many, unless one is attending this showing under deceased terms.
It has been said great artists suffer for their art, crack addict’s live and eventually die for their art. Their art is an expression of what their lives are all about, a transient life, fraught with the human frailties brought on by crack, most likely purchased with your spare change. Perhaps your way of supporting the arts?
This disturbing artwork will never grace the walls of the Louvre in Paris, Metropolitan museum of art, or even in our own Vancouver art gallery. Though after seeing a few art pieces in Germany drawn by the inmates of Auschwitz, perhaps suffering and dementia are a common medium?
It has been said that once an artist is dead their art appreciates in value, one wonders if the same can be said of crack art? Granted, these works of art are not drawn with choicest Parisian charcoals or painted with the finest sable hair brushes with a view overlooking a quaint french country hillside. No, these works of art are drawn much closer to home.
A crack addicts artwork is not painted on art grade canvas, but on the dank, cracked plaster walls they call home. Nor are the finest expensive oil paints used. Crack addicts use what is available in their world, feces, bodily fluids, blood, cigarette butts, syringes and urine.
Pablo Picasso once said, "I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!"
Vancouver 2010 Olympics, gushed by many who tout, "Vancouver is one of the most beautiful places on earth", a place to to be seen and heard as we all witness the spectacle of wonderment that is British Columbia. So perhaps the horror are the beautiful, hip, Vangroovians who choose to look away? Crack art is not in the eyes of the beholder, it is from the minds of many of the addicted, alive and dead who wish to be seen and heard, as the macabre artistic interpretation is clear, a “Skull Death Head”.
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