Another show that opened last week was Audrey Capel Doray’s How I Became A Solitary Noisemaker: works from 1965-1966 at blanket gallery.

The show’s title, I’m guessing, speaks to the artist’s particular relationship to the local Sixties scene, which Doray arrived in advance of, from Montreal, in 1957. That she came to Vancouver a mid-20s wife and mom, and as teacher at the Vancouver School of Art (Doray studied at McGill), no doubt had bearing on the nature of her participation.

For those younger, Doray is best-known for mixed-media sculptural works Wheel of Fortune (1968) and Electronic Seascape (1969), two notable entries into the city’s Sixties sensorium. The work in this show (eight or so paintings, the largest of which measures around 3’x5’) precedes such experiments, highlighting the artist’s technical achievement in colour and form, her careful arrangements of figuration and abstraction, her integration of the graphic and the fine.

According to the blanket press release, this will be the first of three shows, the work in Solitary Noisemaker representing the middle period. Looking at the paintings in relation to Doray’s more ambitious later works provides a new layer; guessing what came before it, well, I guess we’ll wait and see.