ART BREATH - The Art of Darinka Blagaj
1986 Toronto - Queen Street West Days - The Fortress
many have I told the tales of the beginning of my art career- here I'll post as I write them...
The Mystery Dance is my original large painting: 82" x 58". Begun after university, it was my first big work on canvas. I had chosen not to paint much while at York U from 1982-86 as I was painfully shy and not intellectual about what came through me as my own vocabulary - I wanted to explore my own self within what i felt was a safety net of no criticism... and a free space without influence for my direction - a space of pure intuitive wandering.
The image appeared like the mystery it is... a dance between the body on the left and the Spirit on the right - in a dreamlike field of possibilities with unique playful characters. I did not plan out the painting - I just began to draw with oil stick onto the canvas which was attached to the wall with push pins... if you look closely at the original you see the there are many buildings in the black area close to all the feet. They are dancing on a city scape - huge larger than life beings... my first goddesses on canvas. I had been exploring Anthropomorphic Landscapes on French paper with oils sticks, oil & chalk pastels before this. They captivated me as large figures the size or mountains would be sleeping or dreaming landscapes.
The Fortress - Queen Street West in 1986
In 1986 I lived in a very large warehouse alone in a 3,000 sq ft studio on the 5th floor - a place I roller skated in to get to the bathroom or to the kitchen and back to the main studio. It was so big and I was one of the only people in the warehouse at night - it was a bit creepy at times as I wasn't supposed to live there. No one was supposed to live in any of the warehouse spaces that we all had - there were many of us who craved and thus carved out a new type of experience for our lives. a photographer had created the studio before me in Toronto's Queen St west zone, by blocking in a large open section with drywall that was 2 feet shy of the ceiling- with 15 huge windows mostly north facing - with a few east windows that lit up the space every morning... painfully early for me as I stayed up most every night painting and drawing and stream of consciousness writing. It was quiet at night - the psychic space was quiet, with most people in their dreamtime. I could finally let go of the tensions and distractions of the day - all that psychic noise - and immerse myself into presence. It was in the presence of a multi-level kind of reality that I lived in that was augmented many a night by listening to CBC's Brent Banbury - Brave New Waves until the dawn.
I invited 2 friends to move in with me, my boyfriend "M" at the time and my university bestie - Fly. We hung out together, Fly & I were the intellectual, conceptual creators. We talked philosophy, and wrote and drew in our sketch books... Michael was all about doing. He was into scrap metal - assembling characters with rusty metal he found at the Leslie Spit on the other side of town.
Fly was working on her Fly - postcard magazine which she began designing and putting out since our years at York. We all made art and decided to become a collective and called ourselves - "ism" - a group of - We liked the suffix by itself and we called our home - the Fortress - because it took 5 keys to get in from the street gate, to the outer door, to the service elevator, 5th floor hallway and our door. Groceries were a super long haul and unlike so many I actually cooked great meals as I was living on my own since I was 19, and a vegetarian at that!
You see, it was an overflow warehouse for dry goods for grocery stores - so things like Laundry soap, canned goods and toilet paper lived with us on the 5th floor. A few very noisey & nosey box movers would come in at 7am and start thrashing about right next to us. We slept on futons on the floor, and these guys were known to spy on us by stacking boxes on the other side of the "wall" and peering over the 8' drywall that was about 2' short of the ceiling so we actually heard e v e r y t h i n g that was happening on the 5th floor like it was inside our space! In the early mornings it sounded like it was in our heads too!
We lived with it. I didn't care - only art making and immersion in creating was obsessive to me, it was a sanctuary this massive space to be free in and I recognized that about it. Nothing was permanent then. We lived there for about 6 months - that seemed like forever.
The Fortress hosts an Auction
We could have music jams all night and all night paint-a-thons and creating parties. I did not want people drinking int he space, I did not want to be responsible for that kind of stuff - so we kept it very much to art making. Our lives were about art making 24/7... at least mine was. I could not stomach working for cafe's or bars - I didn't like coffee or alcohol, I didn't smoke - I was the odd ball. I decided we needed to have and host some art events - so we had an auction and a performance art night.
The show was called "ism- a group of" and it featured our works. I knew the most people so I invited my family members, my aunt and cousin came all the way from Agincourt - which was a very long way away! They brought some people and we had invited others from our daily wanderings.
I asked a guy i had met at another event to come and help and be the performance art act for service elevator. I did not know about ecstacy - well I found out much later that he was on it during that entire night. His performance art happened spontaneously in the elevator - he would turn of the lights - it would be moving in the pitch black, then he would suddenly stop it... pretending there was a problem. It took people a while to get upstairs and they came bolting out of the elevator. I think some people began having panic attacks - that's when he would turn the lights back on and say,
" - ahh... here we go! It's on again!"
I had no idea why everyone looked so relieved to get out of that service elevator! Some people walked all the way down the stairs so they didn't have to get back into that thing. Oh my.
I made up the auction, I just picked work and asked people to bid on it. My cousin was great - she just made up an amount and then my aunt would bid against her - it was hilarious! We also explained that the elevator event was a "show", people began to laugh and were relieved about that too. It was a fun night with a unique collection of people. We did a few other events, but mostly decided to keep the Fortress as our sanctuary. I just wanted to draw and paint and write and sing and dance. We were a focused group of artists and we lived well together.
Warehouse spaces all over Parkdale & today's Liberty Village
We, artists and musicians, sought out commercial spaces as an alternative to the social mediocrity of crappy basement apartments. We all knew the water was bad in most of the warehouse spaces we found, with the old lead pipes, and sometimes the heating systems did not work much and the landlords were mostly scummy, with a few exceptions. We had to pay cash, month-to-month no guarantees, no leases - they made it sound like they were doing us a favour, but whatever, we wanted the spaces, we cleaned them up every time, made them funky and fun, eclectic and we gave them cash or moved out if it got too expensive - because, of course, they would jack up the rent as we renovated their spaces and made them beautiful.!
Showing & Selling Art
I was focused on making money from my art as my livelihood and was already having shows and selling - because I decided anywhere and everywhere was good. I wanted my art to be part of the everyday - easily seen and accessed by many. After my gallery show at York, I showed in alternative office spaces, approaching mostly shops on Queen West which were on my bike route to Kensington market (where I got my groceries): hair stylist shops, and the inevitable cafes, restaurants, and bars. where people gathered. I made friends with local shop owners, they gave me their walls. Works sold, and I made more and more art.
I showed at Squirley's and the Squeeze Club next door owned by Michael and Marcus O'Hara, and a hair salon next to that and so on... the journey of an exhibition per month and sometimes 2 or three began. I worked around the clock, negotiating with myself how much french paper I could afford to buy for the next series.
more to come!
