No matter how basic or refined your taste in art, you get one central first impression from the new book by Keith McKellar: wow, that is colourful. All other views jump off from there.
There's really no other way to depict his subject matter. When your muse is the neon sculptures climbing the walls of Vancouver's downtown eastside, shouting out the names of their storefronts and theatres, then only the poppiest and proudest palette will do.
McKellar is known by an artist's pseudonym, laughinghand, and he puts the humour of his brushstrokes into this tribute to a neighbourhood that grew from grit into sadness and despair but now that this is fading, there is a mourning process even for that, and laughinghand caught it in the pages of this art book like a news photographer snapping a slow motion riot.
McKellar knows the nooks and cracks of the downtown eastside so affectionately because he chose it, after moving from his town of upbringing and formation. That would be Prince George. Before he was laughinghand there, he was inquiringmind here. Now he can turn that page.
By authoring this book, entitled Revolving W and Flying Pigs: A Neon Journal, by investing so much painstaking time into each painting of the neon landscape of Hastings Street and its neighbours, McKellar washes the feet of that besieged neighbourhood. There is a dignity granted to the once handsome subculture trying hard now to spark pride despite its black eyes and broken teeth. McKellar found a nobility under the grime. He followed the electric rainbow and did not find a pot of gold, but he did find other radiant colours buzzing inside their glass tubes proclaiming the places within the place.
Any examination of the neon signs of that neighbourhood would be laughably incomplete without one in particular. The Smiling Buddha Cabaret is so iconic to Vancouver that the band 54-40 made that sign the cover art and that name the title of what is inarguably one of the best rock albums ever made by Canadians, and part of its zeitgeist is that Smiling Buddha anchor. McKellar has it on page 14 of the 60-page book, establishing early how relevant this display of memories is.
It covers a lot of the concert venues that pumped the heart of Vancouver through the halcyon years of Vancouver's emergence onto the world stage. McKellar has immortalized the Commodore Ballroom, The Yale, the Railway Club, the Orpheum, the Vogue. He has also included the mythological Stanley, Ridge, and Park Theatres among others.
He goes deeper, though, into the strange markets like Save-On Meats, BC Collateral Pawnbrokers, and the Sunrise.
He gets the social spots and independent businesses like Seymour Billiards, Cates Towing, The Elbow Room, Sun Tower and the Naam Restaurant (well outside the downtown eastside, but well inside the point he was making) that can't be unseen if you walked that neighbourhood over the past few decades.
He also stares right into the come hither eyes of the seedy bars of the area: Balmoral, Niagara, Astoria, and Cobalt.
There is a special berth given to Chinatown. Vancouver band Doug & The Slugs had a hit with their song Chinatown Calculation, a colourful ode of the same kind. It was the same magnetic combo of little greasy spoon cafes, newspaper building, bakery, and corner stores that drew in McKellar for his colour tally. Vancouver's Chinatown is apart as much as it is within, like a moon whose planet is the one in orbit.
Along with their brilliant likenesses, McKellar also painted them in words. Each painting is accompanied by a poetic essay that deepens the presence of each building. Of the thuggish Cobalt rooming house and bar he said it was "a hard and brittle place with a long catalogue of calamities and troubles etched in its walls. A huff and a puff away from falling down in a heap of torture, tears, and hysterical laughter."
These are the words of an artist who's lived the neighbourhood, not just walked through with a camera.
So much of this Vancouver is as charming and as vital as a newcomer off the boat from some faraway homeland, but its stitching has come loose, its colour has faded, its shoes are worn and there's no repairing it. Only through the tough love of an artist can the beauty of decay be preserved as an artifact before it falls to the knockout blow of eviction notice and gravity, not necessarily in that order.
It might only be possible to paint such a vividly humane and unblinking likeness of a place if you've fallen in love with it, as the sailor falls in love with a favourite harbour.
