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Jas Felter went to Barcelona in search of the post-Christian, neo-pagan culture of Spain. He returned to Canada with a bag of newspaper clippings, old cigarette foil and enough collages and frottages to stock an art show.
"It's unbelievable," he says, "I brought back all these newspaper clippings. If the'y ever looked in my luggage...they would have wondered what I was doing."
The 51-year-old Vancouver artist and his wife, contemporary dance teacher, Iris Garland, began a six-month stay in Barcelona last January to explore the contemporary dance and visual art scene of modern-day Spain.
But Felter also ended up exploring a new avenue of his own art - namely working with the images he saw repeated each day in Spanish newspapers or on the city streets.
The result, entitled Impressiones de Barcelona, is currently on exhibition at The Torres Gallery in Kitsilano.
Felter, who had worked for years at a style of painting he calls geometric expressionism, took his art in a new direction in Barcelona.
I do speak the language and I do read Spanish," Felter said, "But it's not a language that I'm familiar with every day, So I think when I look at a (Spanish) newspaper, I look at it more visually than verbally. And I think that's what got me involved in picking things out of newspapers that were visual."
Felter, who has presented 30 solo exhibitions in 20 countries since 1961, clipped from the papers repeated images; lips, logos, telephone-sex ads, the face of the Queen, the face of Italian politician and stripper Cicciolina.
"When I'd collected enough," he says, "I'd sort of see what I could do with them, see if I could put them together, see if I could do anything visually interesting."
The work soon took on an erotic quality due mainly to the strong sexual content of the display ads and personal columns in the Spanish papers.
Felter also incorporated used cigarette foil into his work, a technique he picked up in South American where a designer friend once covered his entire dining room in silver foil cigarette wrappers. "And it was beautiful," Felter says.
"So I've always collected them because I smoke. But there (in Barcelona), I got serious, and I began to find that each brand had a different color or a different texture.
"Then I began to take my plastic bag and go out on the street in the morning after Saturday night and collect all the cigarette papers."
So I have a whole chart of all the different brands - with a sample of the paper for each brand."
In addition to the collages, Felter also did a number of frottages - hand rubbings of the tile side-walks in Barcelona. Again, he was attracted to the shapes and patterns.
Lori Walchuk, director of The Torres Gallery, met with Felter after his return to Canada and agreed to exhibit his work.
I just thought it was so fresh," she says, "So unique and exciting."
Just don't ask Felter to explain any of it.
The whole thing is, I don't know what I'm saying. If I knew what I was saying, I'd probably write it.
"I do the work to find out what I'm saying, I'm not saying it literally; I'm saying it visually. That's the problem; I can't give it to you in words, or I would."
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