I started hanging around the east side galleries looking for a fix. Bronski’s, The Layabout, Front Street. Small places, usually a single room, cheap lighting, often with a single lean attendant that would unlock the door to let me in and then linger in the darkened back room while I stared at the canvases until something either took or it didn’t. These spaces usually showed local artists who lived in the neighbourhood. Their stuff full of lurid colors, angular representations of architecture, the nearby alleys, dumpsters and graffiti, the night sky spiralling in the classic manner. This stuff didn’t get to me. I knew it too intimately, I walked these streets and alleys and even scored smokes for some of them. Worked with them on odd jobs for local merchants, installed some drywall, laid a coat or two of paint in the main room of a soon to be open salon. They were good people, covered in paint and dirt, their jeans would stand up by themselves if they ever took them off. Which they did, probably, sometimes. But what got to me, what slipped up under the conscious latch that protected me from whirling into the wide expanse of memory were the ambient sub-Rothko paintings, primarily Eastern European or Asian painters, who didn’t need much in the way of figurative imagery. They relied on another sense of order something dangerously simple, supple, and sincere.