In Christopher Hutsul’s world, kids playing street hockey in an alley rub shoulders with the guys who change your oil, while the homeless line up outside the shelter waiting for that magic moment when the doors open. Recognize this place? Downtown Toronto served as inspiration for rising local artist Hutsul’s recent exhibition at Anoush Gallery in Kensington Market. Metrospective grouped together several of Hutsul’s recent urban-themed artworks, including a series of paintings created for a recent Toronto Star report on life in city shelters (Hutsul is also a reporter and columnist for the newspaper).
Hutsul has had a handful of solo shows since graduating from OCAD several years ago, all curated by Anoush Gallery’s Rafi Ghanaghounian. The gallery’s current space on Baldwin St. is like a sparse white oasis worlds away from the gritty hustle of the Market.
“For us, it was just a matter of locating a place where we could curate the show ourselves, we could organize it,” said Hutsul. “So it wasn’t like a Queen Street West gallery, where all the decisions are sort of at the mercy of someone that owns and runs the gallery. A lot of my artwork reflects these neighborhoods, reflects the kind of feeling that the Market has. It’s a really special place to me.”
That appreciation of the urban permeates Metrospective—Hutsul’s strength as an artist lies not just in his line quality or use of colour, but in his ability to tell a story. Large black-and-white print “Breakaway in the Alley” is the showstopper of the bunch, a fantastically-detailed drawing of kids playing hockey while the city rises mammoth all around them. It sounds pretty basic, but then your eye catches the details that bring the cityscape to life—a man barbequing on his roof, a cat looking down from a patio, a woman gardening below.
“The process is seeing something, remembering it, experiencing it,” Hutsul said. “When I drew that picture, I didn’t go out and look with my eyes. It’s unscientific, and it’s the difference between reporting and doing art. When I draw a picture, I can just be free and try to go through that mental exercise of remembering not only what it looked like but what it felt like. And that’s the different between what I do and photo-realism. And people who put an emphasis on realism—that’s a valid form of art, but I say, where’s the magic in that?”
Hutsul says he developed his precise, comic-book style not by mimicking his favourite cartoonists, but by practicing and experimenting until he found what worked for him. The series on homelessness is vintage Hutsul—the characters may be cartoons, but he finds their underlying humanity and renders it on the canvas in gouache (a pigment-heavy paint that produces vivid colour). The narrative-based aspect of his work is especially evident in the way humour and pathos collide—in “Harboured by Day, Adrift By Night,” a man reading the newspaper looks beaten down by the drudgery of his daily routine, but a headline in his newspaper winks, “Eves Likeable.” In the surreal, dreamlike “The Soupy Air is Stirred Only By Thunderous Snores,” a room full of men sleep row upon row save for a withered, bearded guy eating Sun Chips.
While Hutsul’s art has been used frequently in the Star, he stresses he’s at the newspaper as a writer, not an artist, and only draws a piece for an article if the assignment lends itself naturally to it, as with the homeless shelter series. But while he enjoys being able to communicate on a mass level as a writer, his first love is the pencil, not the keyboard.
“I love to draw and paint—that’s who I am and that’s what I do. If I was just on my own path in life, I’d probably be somewhere with a sketchbook, drawing as opposed to writing,” Hutsul says. “In art and writing, I still have so much to learn. I feel like such an amateur at both. Right now it’s just finding the balance, trying to get better as I go. And finding the energy to do both.”
