Hosta 'Midas Touch ' 2 August 2026

From kindergarten until 1956 I drew and painted. In a 1955 Mexico City my mother entered me for painting classes with English artist Robin Bond (he had been an expert on camouflage in WWII). I invariably arrived home with paint in all my clothing. It all stopped when I told my mother I did not want to paint anymore. She became very angry and would have spanked me had I been younger (I was 13). My artistic activities had to wait until 1959 when I purchased a Pentacon-F SLR in 1956 when I was at a boarding school in Austin, Texas.

In 1962 while going to Mexico City College my friend Roberto Hijar, who was getting a MFA in the art department, convinced me to go with him in the middle of the night to the school darkroom. He taught me to process film and to make prints. I was hooked even though the darkroom was unventilated.

By the time I returned from my military service in Buenos Aires in 1967 I managed to have some sort of darkroom (all unventilated). Until 1975 in our Mexico City home in Arboledas, Estado de México, my darkroom was a bathroom. When we moved to Vancouver in 1975, in our Burnaby home, I had a darkroom that had a bathroom that was separate. The same occurred when we moved to Kerrisdale. Nine years ago when we moved to Kitsilano I no longer had a darkroom and I learned to print in my perfectly ventilated and comfortable oficina.

I have been giving a thought to the idea of dirty art and clean art. My friend designer (now retired) Ian Bateson, was one of the best editorial illustrators in Vancouver. He used an elaborate and painstakingly complicated pointillistic style.

Suddenly to me, he discovered something called Procreate using his iPad. I could not understand how something could be easy (to my eye) and clean.

I have now seen the light.

By 2001 I was using an Epson scanner to scan my garden plants. It was easy, clean and fun. But I could not print them in my then conventional darkroom. That had to wait until we moved to Kitsilano 9 years ago and I bought a Canon printer and then an Epson.

Working in my nicely ventilated and lit oficina what I was doing was clean and almost easy. Could it still be seen as art?

I now see Bateson’s Procreate work with far more respect.

I wonder what my former teacher, Robin Bond (now dead) would think of clean art?