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Robert Amos: A remembrance of galleries past

As I walk the streets of Victoria searching for the perfect Christmas gift, I am haunted by the shades of galleries that, in their time, offered so many treasures.
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A Rachel Berman Christmas card from 1983, showing Winchester Galleries in their original location at Fort Street and Oak Bay Avenue.

As I walk the streets of Victoria searching for the perfect Christmas gift, I am haunted by the shades of galleries that, in their time, offered so many treasures.

I began writing a weekly art column in 1982, and at that time Stones Gallery on Government Street just north of Fisgard Street (now a grocery store) introduced me to Martin Honisch, a marvellous painter from Chemainus. On Fisgard near Fan Tan Alley, the long-surviving Dales Gallery had whimsical etchings by Graham Clarke from the southeast of England. Dales’ original owners were succeeded by a new owner, and I enjoyed the work of artist and framer Stephanie Harding, until renovation of the building forced her out this year.

Government near Fisgard was, back in the early 1980s, the home of Gallerie Untitled, Casey Tebbutt’s live-in showplace, where Norval Morrisseau exhibited during the time he lived here. Up on Cormorant across from city hall, Grant Leier and Nixie Barton opened their first gallery, before they moved up to Yellow Point and Nanaimo. Their space is now operated by Martin Batchelor Gallery, across the road from a vast construction project.

For many years, the major art outlet in Victoria was the Fran Willis Gallery, located between Fisgard and Pandora Avenue on Wharf Street. Willis represented a vast number of artists in her huge loft space, and Michael Williams bought a lot of art there for his Swans Hotel and Pub. Swans is still at Pandora and Store Street, and now belongs to the University of Victoria.

Another of Williams’ properties, at Broad and Yates streets, was the home of Starfish Glassworks for 10 years. That location then became the site of the university’s downtown art space, now extensively renovated and operating as the Legacy Gallery.

Across Broad on Yates is the Deluge Gallery, an evolution of Rogue Fine Art, once a challenging and non-commercial gallery on the ground floor of Market Square, and then in what was the Eaton Centre (now the Bay Centre). Now director Deborah deBoer continues her good work in a more elegant space upstairs on Yates, where many of UVic’s fine-arts professors have presented their projects.

A block away at View and Broad Streets, West End Gallery (which also operates a successful enterprise in Edmonton) is home to painter Peter Shostak and many others. Down on View Street toward Government you’ll find Madrona Gallery, where owner Michael Warren makes a specialty of the newest and best in Inuit art. Madrona has a back door just across from the Trounce Alley Gallery, where this year I discovered Canadiana painter Tim Hoey.

In my early days, Leafhill Gallery occupied the corner of Bastion Square and Langley Street, and presented the fine oils of totems by Nell Bradshaw. Down in the square toward the waterfront, John Boehme bought a building and filled it with his impressive collection of Oriental antiques and contemporary European art. Boehme then moved to Superior Street on the tip of James Bay, a location now closed.

Open Space is still going strong at 510 Fort St., an enterprise created in the early 1970s by Gene Miller (who also started Monday magazine). There was a gallery on the ground floor and a theatre upstairs, and part of it was the home of Tom Gore’s Photo Secession Gallery.

As the Open Space Society owns the building, its future seems secure, but in the beginning it was a craft market, and was seen as a challenge to the Quest, Victoria’s main craft store at Fort and Douglas streets. In the east end of the Quest was the Gallery of the Arctic where the redoubtable Alistair Macduff offered the best of Inuit art.

When the Quest closed (and became Birks jewellers), Macduff lent his expertise to the Stephen Lowe Gallery. It had moved from a shop in the side of the Empress Hotel to take over the corner location in the conference centre development at Humboldt and Douglas streets. Eunice Lowe maintained a remarkable shop there for some years, bringing to Victoria fine painters such as Zhang Bu and Mian Situ, and remarkable Chinese objets de vertu. The gallery lives on in a different form under her daughter Anna’s guidance in Calgary.

Nearby on Courtenay Street, Kym Hill opened Mercurio next to her silversmith shop Le Soleil, and brought us paintings by the late Jack Wise. Hill was forced out by rent increases 10 years ago, and took her business to Metchosin, and eventually closed its public front. Around the corner from Mercurio on Gordon Street, I used to visit Eagle Feather, where I discovered the artist Ice Bear (now at the Peninsula Gallery in Sidney). Alcheringa was just around the corner on Fort, with its world-class selection of aboriginal art from B.C. and Papua New Guinea. It continues in business at a new location on Fort, just a block to the west.

Close by, at 1010 Broad St., was Winchester’s first downtown location, managed by Peter Redpath. It then became Couch, a short-lived gallery showing painter Blythe Scott (now of West End) when Redpath moved with Winchester Modern to Humboldt Street, a block from the harbour. There I took in Ken Lochhead and Claude Tousignant. At one point, Winchester also maintained another location four doors away, managed by Elizabeth Levinson, who now is an important part of their flagship Oak Bay location.

Valerie Pusey had Northern Passage on lower Government, a combination gift shop and gallery where Ted Harrison met his public. The street frontage of the then-Eaton Centre had a gallery devoted to cartoon animation cells, and in Market Square you could visit a holographic art gallery. Those were just a few more of the hopes and dreams no longer viable.

 

Robert Amos has more memories of Victoria art galleries next week.