Richard was more affected by the modernist aesthetic I was. Actually, I was affected by it, too, but not as purely; I was heavily into cartoons as well (an interest starting in childhood), particularly political cartoons and what back then we called "underground comics" (that's graphic fiction to you, 21st Century kultur-kampfer). He'd had a show at Concordia, where he studied. His works were giant paintings: neo-expressionist self-portraits and animals. Come to think of it, I was strongly interested in neo-expressionism as well. But his work was very uniform in its aesthetic -- he'd put down lines in large bold strokes. I don't remember that he experimented much with different media when painting -- he stuck to acrylics, and a similar style. (Later, he became interested in sculpture and ended up doing a lot of line drawings -- I think by this point he just didn't want to buy paint.) He also during this university period did drawings in india ink, which were, looping back again, similar to his paintings. In effect, he was drawing rather than painting -- the paintings were drawing-like. Many painters have this tendency, and it's simply one way of solving one's visual subject-matter: one uses lines of colour rather than blocks of them. Lines always materialize in representational work, no matter how abstracted. But some artists use them as a primary visual element, and Richard and I both fell in that category. We were both -- as we had been when kids -- drawers.
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