Skip to content

Painter brings beauty to desperate neighbourhood

One of the poorest neighbourhoods on Canada’s west coast has been painted in a different light by an artist living right in the heart of it. Painter Jeff Wilson has lived in the poverty-stricken Downtown Eastside in Vancouver for 12 years.
Vancouver painter Jeff Wilson depicts a unique perspective of Vancouver’s poverty-stricken Downtown Eastside in his exhibit Back in Eastside at the Okotoks Art Gallery.
Vancouver painter Jeff Wilson depicts a unique perspective of Vancouver’s poverty-stricken Downtown Eastside in his exhibit Back in Eastside at the Okotoks Art Gallery.

One of the poorest neighbourhoods on Canada’s west coast has been painted in a different light by an artist living right in the heart of it.

Painter Jeff Wilson has lived in the poverty-stricken Downtown Eastside in Vancouver for 12 years. He has turned the infamous community into a thing of beauty for his exhibition Back in Eastside.

“The Downtown Eastside is the poorest postal code in Canada,” he said. “It’s been a historical disadvantaged part of Vancouver going all the way back to its foundation. In the last 30 years it suffered from a lot of urban poverty and it’s gotten worse. A lot of people either know the Downtown Eastside in person or by reputation.”

The area is notorious for its open-air drug trade, homelessness, mental illness, infectious diseases and crime.

While the neighbourhood, which dates back to the 1860s, has a national reputation as Vancouver’s poorest and has seen little recent development despite the rest of downtown undergoing fifty years of development, Wilson wanted to captured the qualities of the people and the beauty of the original Edwardian urban landscape.

“It’s got a lot of beauty,” he said. “A lot of time people tend to dwell on the negative side. I try to represent the everyday beauty I see around me.”

Wilson received a grant to create the project from the Vancouver Foundation a couple of years ago.

He spent time taking pictures in his neighbourhood to create his own artistic interpretation.

“I would do a walk about with my camera,” she said. “I would look for chance things that would strike me. I would take a photograph and take them back to the studio.”

Twelve of the paintings will be on display in the Okotoks Art Gallery’s small gallery until April 1.

It is part of Exposure, Alberta’s Photography Festival, which features 40 exhibitions across the province.

Wilson, who grew up in Scotland, moved to Vancouver in 2004 after landing a job as a mining geologist.

“I’ve lived in different places around the world,” he said. “Even though you feel a lot of poverty here, I’ve lived and worked in the third world and it’s nothing like that here.”

Despite the reputation and condition of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Wilson saw it as an ideal home for both its affordability and beauty.

“It was within walking distance of where I’d be working,” he said. “It’s right in the historic heart of Vancouver. I’m a sucker for North American history and special western history and it’s right where Vancouver started. It’s got fantastic history, the architecture is fantastic.”

Three years after moving to Vancouver, Wilson enrolled in an evening acrylic painting class at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, but did little painting for the next three years.

It was in 2010 that he began to delve into it.

“I got tired of going into galleries and seeing stuff on the wall for too much money and thought I could do better than that myself,” he said. “I just started doing it evenings and weekends, then it got more and more serious and I started to exhibit in public galleries.”

When Wilson was let go from the engineering firm he worked at the following year due to the global downturn in the commodities, he decided to take up painting full time.

“I thought I was already doing the painting very seriously on the side,” he said. “I thought I will push it as far as it goes. If I can make of go of it I will keep going.”

Over the years Wilson has painted various projects including heritage neon signage, animal portraits, working vehicles and the Shetland Islands in the United Kingdom.

While embarking on these earlier projects, capturing the beauty of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside remained in the back of Wilson’s mind.

“I did a couple of paintings of urban things of the Shetland Islands and developed a colour palette that was suitable for this subject,” he said. “It just gave me the focus to do a lot more of these.”

Wilson’s work has been featured in six touring exhibitions and various solo shows, but Back to Eastside’s appearance at the Okotoks Art Gallery will be his first exhibition in Alberta.

“It’s the first time I’ve shown in a Canadian, grade-A gallery,” he said. “It’s a great honour to show at this gallery. This is probably the most prestigious show of my career so far.”

Wilson said he’s working to get his art in more galleries across the country.

“I’m applying for everything I can,” he said. “I’d like to show more in Alberta and across the prairies.”

The Okotoks Art Gallery is open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

push icon
Be the first to read breaking stories. Enable push notifications on your device. Disable anytime.
No thanks