Painting
I have a hairdresser named Francis-James Hawkins. He was named second best hairstylist in the Mirror. He likes to chat while you're in the chair, so he told me about this art exhibition that he was doing.
I showed up today at Sky Pub, a bar on Ste-Catherine that has a lot of space. There was Francis doing a little painting in the corner while others milled about him and took photographs. They took photographs of him, they took photographs of the art, they took photographs of the patrons, they even took photographs of each other. Truly, it looked like this crowd knew itself very well.
Walking around the walls and looking at the artwork, I realised that his paintings really didn't connect very well with me. I very much enjoy renaissance and impressionist paintings, and his were very far from that. Not abstract art, per se, but they had a very simplistic and even childish feel to them. The colours were very flat and the lines tried hard to be even. I watched him paint and had to keep from wincing as he went over his strokes again and again, mashing his brush into the canvas. There was no fluidness to his brushwork; I couldn't sense authority in his hand.
I sat down at a table and wrote in my notebook for a while, before heading out the door and back to the office. I had hoped to find something more beautiful than this.