The paper has stuff on the visual arts (painting, photography, sculpture) almost every day but particularly on Fridays the arts coverage has two separate exclusive sections. The one on the visual arts has added to my knowledge of painters that I knew like Goya and Velázquez but it has also helped me appreciate American artists like Homer, Eakins, Sargent and Hopper.

But there is more via ads on Mondays by M.S. Rau Antiques in New Orleans. Recently they had an ad for a splendid pair of Crimean War British canon. This Monday's Kathy by John Kacere riveted my eyes. I now look forward every week to more from the New Orleans gallery.

The ad for this last week intrigued me and led me to check out an artist I had never heard of, John Kacere. Perhaps since I don’t have a formal art education this is why that is the case. The fact is that Kacere’s bio and his output is strange but attractive to my eyes. In all my photography of the female body I tended to avoid underwear (I don’t do lingerie).

My guess is that particularly in Vancouver (in spite of a rapidly diminishing minority of puritanical Scots) a most conservative city, where a contemporary version of Modigliani would be applying to employment insurance (Is that Amedeo I spotted working at the Robson and Thurlow Starbucks?) Kacere would horrify most arts patrons and connoisseurs. They would find him tacky, almost pornographic. They would say he is objectifying women, etc. (you know the drill)

I think that Kacere at the very least (he obsessively did these female torsos for at least 10 years) makes me feel that I may not be as unhinged as some people think I am with my penchant and love for the photography of the undraped female.

Photograph - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

A Photographic Imperative