“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver.

“You can design a car so that every time you get in it,
 it’s a relief–you have a little vacation for a while.”
                     

Automobile Designer Harley Earl

It ought to be the same with a condo.…

Art we love: Sacred and Profane Love (Self-Portrait II) by Harold Klunder

Harold Klunder is everywhere regarded as one of Canada’s most powerful painters.  His latest exhibition, Black Sun, now at the Clint Roenisch Gallery is a remarkable experience, both for the majestic trio of paintings making up the Black Sun …

Art We Love: Ominous Footpath by Susanna Heller

Veteran painter Susanna Heller–Canadian born, educated at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and now living in New York City (where she has lived, in fact, for many years now)–is a maker of exceedingly vigorous, searching, …

“Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”

Michel Foucaul

…

Design we love: black cat lamp

We were both attracted and, at first, a bit put off by the funky directness of this little lamp. Its tasteful black shade is profoundly belied by the body of the map—which is a feral-looking black cat-made of fired clay!…

Design we love: Buddha machines

Maybe there ought to be a column in this blog called Design That Simply Catches Our Fancy—a place to explore objects that, while they may not kick the history of design ahead by much, are, nevertheless, attractive and pleasing.

Like …

“If we actually possessed one grain of knowledge, there would be no holding us back.”

Michel de Montaigne…

Design we love: the Duke lamp

This guileless-looking but somehow cheerfully forceful lamp–the Duke table lamp by Salgado Saucier of Milford, Pennsylvania–is made of resin with a silk shade. According to Hanson Tan of Industrial Storm you can have the lamp “in any colour in the …

“I have great love and respect for colour, just as I do for words. I find it very hard work to employ both effectively.”

Ettore Sottsass in The Curious Mr. Sottsass: Photographing Design and Desire, Thames and Hudson, 1994, …

Design we love: horse brasses at Index G Gallery

This personable cat is a typical example of what are known as horse brasses – that is, solid brass castings used as tackle fasteners and sometimes just as decoration for parade horses. They were at the height of their popularity …

“How one walks  through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.” 

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton University Press, 1999, p.15…

Art we love: Art Brownies

These hotly coloured, inventively composed mini-blocks of art activity are, in fact, Art Brownies: small, unique works of art made by various artists, both local and international, on one standard format, each Art Brownie being a mini-canvas consisting of a …

Design we love: the Solair chair

We were quite taken—or, I suppose, more accurately, re-taken—by the sight of two of these venerable chairs on the sidewalk outside of INabstracto, on Queen Street West, just a couple of blocks from the Art Condos building.

What was …

Construction Pics From on Site

Right now at the Art Condos site at Queen and Dovercourt, the team is wrapping up concrete work on the third floor and getting started on the fourth floor walls and columns.…

David Oleson of Oleson Worland Architects

David Oleson, of the Toronto firm Oleson Worland Architects, and longtime associate of developer Gary Silverberg, is the designer of the new Art Condos building.

Gary Michael Dault talked to him recently, at his Spadina Avenue office, about the …

Gary Silverberg: part I

In this, the first of a series of video interviews, critic and writer Gary Michael Dault talks to Art Condos developer Gary Silverberg, at his home in North Toronto, about the Art Condos concept and the project’s beginnings.

…

“Science is a hamper which is being filled with things and more things that no one can manage until Art puts handles on the hamper and takes from it exactly what is necessary to perform the deed.”

Antonio Gaudi…

John Petcoff of Little Lennox

As well as being a tireless and successful restauranteur–see our video about his seafood eatery, Oyster Boy–John Petcoff is also passionate about art and about running a gallery.

His former art gallery, Lennox International, was at Queen West and …

“The perfection of architecture is frozen music.”

Lord Byron
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John Petcoff of Oyster Boy

You’d never figure that a guy from northern Ontario, from Espanola–where there isn’t an oyster to be found anywhere–would become an internationally recognized expert on that most succulent of shellfish. But that’s what restauranteur and art gallery-owner John Petcoff has …

Art we love: About the River by Thrush Holmes

When a relatively unknown, soft-spoken, 26 year old artist with the lyrical name of Thrush Holmes (his full name …

Design we love: the Luna table

“We live our lives in the middle of things. Material culture carries emotions and ideas of startling intensity. Yet only recently have objects begun to receive the attention they
deserve.”
-Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (MIT Press, …

“A great building is the greatest conceivable work of art because it represents difficulties annulled,
resources combined, labour, courage and patience.”

Henry James…

Design we love: the GT rocker

We were struck by the clean, classic beauty of this modernist rocking chair at STYLEGARAGE on Queen Street West. We grew even more impressed when we found the sleek—and almost absurdly comfortable chair—was designed and built right on the premises.…