Sometimes the area around Queen and Leslie and all the way north past Danforth is referred to as Leslieville.  Leslie Street is one of seven large arterial thoroughfares in Toronto. The city is organized in a grid pattern dating back to the plan laid out by Augustus Jones between 1793 and 1797 and streets do not follow a typical north south arrangement due to some extreme landscape in this part of southern Ontario. Toronto has deep ravines and two major rivers, Don and Humber, which have their own unique topographic features.  In summary the heart of the city today is the Yonge St corridor, and that’s along way from Leslieville, but connected by the relatively straight streetcar line along Queen St.

So it happens that Leslieville is on the rise. New condominiums have been built along Carlaw at Dundas St East and these have helped populate the area with a younger and more financially capable breed of urban professionals.  These people are streetcar shoppers, and prefer good local grocery stores and quaint shops over long car trips.  They also seek relaxing experiences and look for friendly pubs, cafes and art galleries.  The street scene here is not crushing like The Beaches or Queen St W and my friends sometimes remark how refreshingly easy it is to find parking.

On Thursday May 3rd evening, I attended a unique exhibit of photography by a young Artist named Davide Luciano.

Here are some shots of the Sheep Nation exhibit at Pentimento Gallery.  The accompanying literature reads, “Sheep Nation explores a society that is desperate for uniqueness and originality but ultimately succumbs to following the herd.”  In this presentation, the artist made human subjects into a race of sheep-like people complete with odd looking hoof-like hands and feet, and animal faces, and in some cases, horns.  Its also significant that the females are all wearing matching designer dresses.

Here is picture of Smojoe giving his business card to a tourist from Niagara Falls Ontario that he met while mingling around the beverage table.  Davide also has a six page spread in ZOOM Europe’s preeminent Fine Arts Photography magazine. The show has been blogged about already from as far away as Australia and Italy.

Pentimento Fine Art Gallery is located at 1164 Queen Street East Toronto, and open from Weds to Sunday each week.  John Rait opened the venue in July 2006  to offer local artists more multimedia promotion including, but not limited to, representation on the Pentimento blog.  Rait offers commissions, installations, consultations, and private viewings.  The gallery shows contemporary Canadian artists at all stages of their careers.

The word ‘pentimento’ refers to any alterations in a painting. Upon completing some research into the etymology of the word, I rediscovered that it means “an alteration in a painting, evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed his or her mind as to the composition during the process of painting.” And there are many famous examples and perhaps most representative is The Lute Player by Caravaggio which has inspired a great deal of discussion about that Master’s creative process and vision.

The true etymology of the word Pentimento is Italian for repentance, from the verb pentirsi means ‘to repent’.  Art historians are always looking for pentimenti as glimpses into the artist’s process and they are considered especially important when investigating whether a particular painting is the prime version by the original artist, or a second version by the artist himself, or his workshop, or a later copyist.

The word ‘pentimento’ has also been adopted by a subculture that studies the decaying hand-painted signs on old buildings – fading sign murals and product art. esp when two representations of the same advertisement are present on the same section of bricks. In the photo left you can see a bad example because you can barely see the ad below on the fading white paint exterior of a Vancouver gold buyer brick building in historic neighbourhood of the old city. The capitol of British Columbia is Victoria and that island town has a lot of old buildings and its possible to see the ghosts of some of British Columbia’s biggest selling brands painted on their sides.

John Rait himself told me that he named the gallery after the second volume of Lillian Hellman’s autobiography Pentimento.  She once wrote, “Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter “repented,” changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.” – Lillian Hellman

MONTE CLARK GALLERY was visited by Monte Clark