“I was sitting in the hot tub one day at Crystal Pool and I asked a photographer if he knew how to draw with a pen tool on Photoshop,” says Victoria artist Mary Conley.
And so began a journey that led to her latest book.
Conley has always been a heritage buff; once she learned how to navigate illustration programs such as Photoshop, she was off to the races with her latest book, The Artistry of Art Deco, an illustrated look at various art deco buildings throughout Victoria.
“I ended up drawing 91 of them,” says Conley, who found catalogues of all the art deco buildings in Victoria at the Oak Bay Municipal Hall.
The Hallmark Heritage Society originally commissioned the catalogues; Conley told them she would update the catalogues while doing this project.
“I just decided to go around and see if these places were still standing,” says Conley. “Then it occurred to me—maybe I should draw them.”
Conley’s book took her two years to complete, and depicts her illustrations of those 91 buildings; it also has sidebars of information including facts about the properties. (An art exhibit based around the book is happening at Fortune Gallery in October, with Conley in attendance on select dates; see below and fortunegallery.ca for details).
“There’s a sidebar that lists the characteristics of the style that this particular building has, and then it also lists the architect or designer, and maybe if there’s a little story,” she says. “Lots of time I have the name of the original owner.”
Conley is originally from the east coast and says when she moved here the architecture was drastically different from what she was used to at home, so it appealed to her.
“Most of the [east coast] houses had peaked roofs and shingle siding,” she says. “You come out here, they have flat roofs and stucco. I’ve never seen stucco before… it looks like Hollywood, what you’d expect Hollywood to look like in the ’30s and ’40s. At one time, Victoria had so many art deco buildings it was called ‘Hollywood of the north.’”
Conley says her drawings are extremely accurate; she says it’s because “a lot of these buildings are gonna go” and she wanted to keep a record of them.
“It’s kind of sad,” says Conley. “But I can understand. They were built during the ’30s and ’40s, and that was the time of the depression and the Second World War; there wasn’t a lot of money. Resources were really funnelled into the war.”
The book is laid out by municipality, says Conley, just in case anyone wants to go look at the houses that she has drawn. She drew houses from all over Greater Victoria, as well as Sidney.
“I drew maps of Oak Bay, Victoria, and Esquimalt, so you could go around and have a look,” she says.
Victoria is full of what Conley calls visual noise, which was the biggest artistic challenge for her. Some things that are present in real life had to be eliminated in the interest of clarity.
“There’s a lot of telephone poles, and basketball hoops, and garbage cans, that kind of thing,” she says. “All of that had to eliminated, and then I manipulated the photographs, of course.”
She manipulated the photos so they would appear to be standing upright on the page using vanishing points so she could get the visual perspective right.
“The hardest thing to draw was the curves,” says Conley. “A lot of these buildings had curves. Sometimes I would take six, eight times to draw the curves. That was the biggest challenge. I’m good at it now, but in the beginning it was hair pulling. It was a bit difficult.”
The Artistry of Art Deco art exhibit
Thursday, October 4 to Sunday, October 14
Free, Fortune Gallery
fortunegallery.ca