Bienvenue, uh, Canada
Back in my rocket-salad days as a reporter with a smalltown newspaper in southern Ontario, Canada, I did a writeup on a local store called Art Effects that was doing a whale of a trade in limited-edition prints by the likes of John Seery-Lester, Terry Isaac, Carl Brenders and, as I couldn’t resist putting it, the “aptly named Trisha Romance”, who lived perilously close to my printed disdain.
These were the popular crop of Canadian painters who specialised in woodland idylls and just plain corniness. It was all the rage back in the property market’s boom years, when “decorative yet cheap” was a sales pitch and probably still is.
Trisha Romance (”Generous Heart” seen here) was, I wrote, “winning converts by the score with painting after painting of old-fashioned houses, each brick distinct and a whimsically nostalgic family scene played out in the front yard”.
I was clearly reining in my bile, I suppose, but I’m still sniggering 16 years later. Let’s continue.
“In the years BB (Before Bateman), limited-edition prints customarily numbered fewer than 200. Now, 1,000 copies are not uncommon, and La Bateman, Audubon to the Stars, generates tens of thousands of ‘limited-edition’ prints at a single bound. See the rest.
