by Laura Zerebeski

Artwork Description

Color of Industry

0.0 x 0.0

Acrylic on canvas, 50" x 20" I did this one for myself to match and uplift my mostly mundane black, white, and beige décor at home. This painting is a blend of my two styles: one of whimsical personification and the other of textural abstraction. The cranes are the most lifelike elements in this painting because the cranes are an omnipresent feature in Vancouver, particularly in East Van. You see them from every street and every level in every building. They're huge and easily personified. Many people think they look like an orange-red version of the Star Wars snow walkers. Vancouver was built on industry. Much of the reverential sculptures around False Creek pay tribute to our industrial past, even though most people would just as soon that past never existed. It took years for False Creek to recover from the industrial sludge that killed most of the wildlife. But in the "Hope" category, False Creek now gets visiting whales looking for food! Still. It's a hard thing to look back on our industrial past with our present environmental view and not feel squeamish. I remember working for a certain forestry processing place that determined water was okay to re-enter the ecosystem if they threw 20 salmon into the recovery pool and three of those salmon lived. Three. That said, this one was done with a sort of fossilized texture on the city of Vancouver. The sails look like bones, the cracks in the sky appear to be years of washed-over grime. Meanwhile, the orangey-red cranes persist in chromatology, vibrance, and motion.

Artwork Details

Medium:

Genre: