25 April 2024 – I asked, and someone very dear to me answered. All the way from Oz (aka Australia).

My previous post ended with this 2013 Toronto mural detail…

plus my request for help in identifying the artist, after all this time.

I assumed any answer would come from a Torontonian, but how silly of me! In this digital age, help is not geography-based. You just give that nice Mr. Google a descriptive phrase, and — hey presto — you are on-site with award-winning contemporary artist EGRart.

The link, as sent to me and here repeated for you, is for her Murals page.

Scroll down, scroll down, and there it is …

a larger view of the dandelion mural (including the male head done by collaborator Elicser).

The photo pitches me back a decade-plus in time. I am again walking west on that street, pausing at that alley, enjoying that mural and all its elements.

And then, back here in 2024 Vancouver, I continue to scroll the Murals page. Down-down-down.

Suddenly… whump! I see this.

Oh, I do remember that garage door. Except when I saw and photographed it, it looked like this:

EGR has transported me back to the laneway behind Ossington Ave., just north of Queen St., on a very snowy day in 2014. Urban myth had it — perhaps correctly — local residents decided that, since their laneway garages were going to be graffiti’d anyway, they might as well invite good artists to come in and do it well.

So they did.

And artists like UBER…

and SPUD…

were among those who responded.

The whole laneway became an open-air art gallery.

A very cold art gallery, that particular day, and I soon skedaddled.

Enough 2014!

Here’s a right-now update, thanks to EGR’s News page. This very Saturday, April 27, she will join co-panelists in an Artist Talk at the Centre for Social Innovation on Spadina Ave. Topic: Women in Mural Art – Building Careers.

How pleasing, to dance through time & space and end, not with nostalgia, but with news of forward momentum.