X-ray vision

X-rays have been ordered. Yay! (Double yay because they're routine ones for monitoring purposes; nothing to worry about). While one of us gets X-rayed at the hospital outpatient department, the other will sit in the waiting room, viewing a particular piece of donated art that once evoked a visionary experience.

The pre-vision began in my final working years when I rode the bus to and from work, passing through Vancouver's oldest streets -- now part urban decay, part tourist mecca, part controversial gentrification. I have a thing about old buildings, and this route made for an an exciting ride. Boarding the bus, I'd dash for a window seat, take out my small sketchbook, and each day record a passing glimpse.

I love the varieties these early 20th century buildings offer of windows, bays, mouldings, columns, "elbows" (the V-shaped supports beneath roof overhangs), decorative stone, terra cotta, and brick. Many of these buildings have been designated "protected" and many others preserved in photos, thanks to the organization Heritage Vancouver. Some of my bus-ride buildings can be seen in one of their albums here. And closer to home on a more stable stretch of Main Street, I've recorded my own examples of the kind of things that catch my eye.

In the photo below, the small strip of "beading" at the top of the moulding, I learned coincidentally from the dictionary, is a design called "egg and anchor".  Seen close up, that's just what it is -- alternating rounds of "egg" divided by tiny "anchors."

As my sketchbooks developed, I started to imagine a series called "Downtown Details" -- although I was never quite sure how I'd use these fragments in a finished piece. One studio morning, I decided to do a purely experimental combination of architectural elements, each segment in a different mix of media -- pencil, coloured pencil, ink, pastel, oil pastel, watercolour, acrylic.

It was not long after this, now about three years ago, that an earlier X-ray brought us for the first time to the hospital outpatient department. There, in a little used waiting room, I happened on a magnificent framed engraving (lithograph?) by the 19th century master printer André Durand  from what I later learned was his collection entitled Album Toscane.

It showed a fantastic imaginary building/cityscape that combined architectural elements of notable buildings from all the cities of Tuscany -- "my" concept taken to an elegant, expert level. What a vision!

But now the double yays have turned to double disapppointment. First, the hospital has reorganized some spaces and we were sent to a different building for X-rays. Second, despite extensive searching, I cannot find Durand's Cities of Tuscany on the internet.

I'll just have to hold the vision and eventually see what I can see.