A first collection of the Vancouver Cafe and Street Drawings. From Keith McKellar/Laughing Hand. The live jazz-line caricatures and expressionist portraits of famous cafes, theatres, the characters and the street. Street artist Laughing Hand has been quietly capturing Vancouver's last, crumbling antique classics, it's dives and haunts, for the last sixteen years. He catches a glimpse into the unravelling of the last hundred years through the metaphor of neon and it's days of glory. A humourist.
The works...poetic story. Romance of the broken heart of the city. A favorite motif is the cafe name as a word poem in a tangle of vintage neon. Such as the script Ovaltine Cafe established in 1943 on East Hastings Street. The Only Cafe seahorse, 1950, The Smilin' Buddha Cabaret, 1953. The drawings are the gathering of a thousand clowns.
The stories are anecdotal hearsays... tossed scraps of found memory, tacked together in off the wall, historical gossips. people stories. Ex-cabbie turned street artist, working from a push cart street wagon, composing on location and surviving in the vein of an itinerant artist. Laughing Hand surfaces in ripples with his speaking collection of historical works in tow. A poignant and wildly entertaining social comment from the journals of a bohemian sleuth, and the archives of a city, on the mythology of it's cafes and theatres and the changing world of Vancouver.