Entertainment
Futures Market
By Michael Harris published May 2, 2008
The young painter Nick Lepard, who's graduating this month from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and is largely unknown to the art world, is waiting in his 10-by-10-foot studio space on Granville Island. Cubicle-height walls delineate his work area and are scarred by patches of paint and scrawled text taken from the lectures he listens to while painting. The more miserable quotations are Schopenhauer. One reads: "Men are only apparently drawn from in front when, in reality, they are pushed from behind."
While Lepard awaits his own push, a boxy Honda Element is parking outside. The vanity licence plate, like the well-dressed woman who now emerges, does not mince words: "BUY ART."
Diane Farris (of the eponymous West Seventh gallery) walks toward the studio all in curator's black, hugged by a thin, porous wrap; her nails, which move constantly, are painted purple. Usually fast-talking and boisterous, she grows hushed stepping into the studio space, asking passing students for the whereabouts of Lepard and cajoling them to swipe their security passes so that she can proceed.
The young artists are wise to give her entrée. Farris's connection with the Emily Carr school is in some ways more substantial than that of any single benefactor, for she serves as gatekeeper to a fleet of them. This year's Grad Show runs May 3 to 11, featuring Lepard's work as well as offerings from the others in his graduating class, any of whom would be thrilled to join the list of Emily Carr grads who've been introduced to the larger market through the Rolodex of the Diane Farris Gallery. These include some of our most bankable artists: Graham Gillmore, Derek Root, Angela Grossmann, Charles Rea, and Attila Richard Lukacs were all famously presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery's exhibit The Young Romantics in 1985 (the year they graduated), but all had already been identified by Farris and chaperoned into her Five Young Artists show, which ran the same year.
