The impressionistic paintings are a continuation of the Year of Acrylic and had the working title "Impressions of Toronto". The expressionistic paintings are configured in my native style, Prairie Expressionism, and had the working title "Expressions of Montreal". What difference does it make? Click on impress and express flash in left frame.

We are in 2005 almost 30 years into the post-modern era and there are confusions. The academic community believes that performance, installation, and conceptualism founded upon the deconstructionist (existential) philosophies are post-modern. It is not true because those works were pioneered during the late 1960's. The movements to de-objectify art and distance visual art from commodity are late modern. In the mid 1970's it was architects who coined the phrase "post-modern" to describe a new type of architecture which while incorporating modern and a modernist functionality in new materials and technology also included traditional facades and load bearing devices and humanizing protections like arcades. The post-modern architects allow niches and walls inside and out on their buildings for the inclusion of the presently shunned art objects. The post-modern desire to include and integrate the old with the new and with the experimental opposes the modernist tradition of replacing (deconstructing) the old with the new as an act of social engineering through the iconoclastic non-objective as wreaker weapon. Modernism had become exclusive, minimal, premeditated, and self destructive. Post-modern is inclusive forming a synthesis of contemporary popular culture with the old modern, the traditional, and the ancient in a form that maintains an open, spontaneous free future unhampered by dogma for the young and unborn generations.

This is Chrysler's post-modern 2005 P. T. Cruiser juxtaposed with a modern 1964 Chevrolet station wagon. Both automobiles were designed for the same owner; someone who requires a small, protected cargo space and a family automobile in one machine.

The modern designers were attempting to make an automobile which was absolutely new within a tradition which had never existed before. The post-modern Chrysler designers conceived of an automobile which depicts a history. The P. T. Cruiser suggests a 1930's tradesman's van visually customized and mechanically updated during the late 1950's or early 1960's as a one of a kind "rod". The style incorporates a pop continuity based upon a decentralized hyper expensive cultural matrix, the hot rod from the past, now mass produced.

There are troubling cultural clashes between the post-modern and modern which are absurd if studied clinically. At the heart, moderns because of their title, "modern", are associated with "contemporary" long after their fashions have become history. Painting has existed and evolved and persisted for 65,000 years. Except for a few brief reoccurring iconoclastic and forced primitive hiatuses, visual art is always associated with our evolution. It is boldly foolish to declare such an ancient and resilient and memorable art dead. The late moderns, rather than educating masses of people, alienated themselves in their fortified cultural institutions with paychecks while the internet and the living culture and the reveling future grows. Painting will be with humanity until we evolve into something else. As long as we have eyes to see and hands to make commodities there will exist our primitive desire to paint. We artists have made, are making, and will make an objective continuity from our beginning to well beyond our ending.

The paintings are on canvas laminated with acrylic gel to ash or birch "Smart Wood" ply panels. The back of the panel and the edges are varnished with two coats of acrylic matte medium to seal the wood surface. After the painting was completed the front surface of the canvas and the edges were varnished three times with acrylic matte medium and the front completed with three coats of acrylic matte varnish (removeable with an alkaline solution - i.e. household ammonia 5% solution diluted with water). The resulting panel is encased in acyrlic plastic and is hardy, doesn't require glass protection, it is washable with a mild detergent, and made to last.