I'm not going to brag, exactly, just give you the facts. I am very proud of these two delightful young women: my granddaughter the doctor and my granddaughter the sculptor, cousins, just a month apart. Through a fluke of divorces and moves, they actually ended up going to the same school for a time when they were children.and they have good memories and welcome times together, though these are infrequent. Their lives and schedules are very different. It's a bonus for all three of us when we manage to be together. The occasion yesterday was coffee before we went to see Jen's new show at a Toronto art gallery. Meg finished a clinic (I think) early and was able to join us. We ended up having a wonderful conversation with Georgia, the gallery owner, ,another delightful woman, who also knows my older daughter, Liz, mother of Jen, who is an art critic and a retired curator (Kelowna Art Gallery). Lovely, lovely minds! I am privileged to know them.

I'm going to reserve my thoughts about art - sculpture, Jen's sculpture in particular - after I have read, and re-read, the gallery's blurb about the current exhibit. It's ArtSpeak and I have to get my head around it before I can share it with you.

Most of today I was wrapping my head abound the rewrite I'm working on. More to come - in fact, why not do this now, when it really is January 20. If I tried to check separately today Blog would say the 21st. So,let us move on to:

ARTSPEAK:

"Georgia Scherman Projects presents Material Matters: Investigations into Place and Placement, a two-person exhibition featuring Jen Aitken and Margaret Priest [did I mention that Margret Priest is Georgia Scherman's mother, a very talented artist -drawing?].

The blurb goes on:

" This pairing is both oppositional (flat and in the round, descriptive and abstract) and comparative or akin (material driven, built world driven, cool and reserved)."

Got that? It goes on:

"Jen Aitken is an amercing artist of considerable promise...[who] strives after obscuring the particular...[and who] courts revelation slowly through a three-dimensional encounter, both personally in her initial response to place and then professionally as she endeavours tp shape her viewer's response to the objects she constructs."

SEE - I didn't know she was shaping my response. We were just chatting and looking and I liked (some of ) what i was looking at. I am reminded of a cliche-joke about an uneducated viewer (me) and her response to art she doesn't understand:

She says: "I don't know much about art but I know what I like," when what she really means is she doesn't know anything about art and she likes what she knows.

We just keep on learning.