Downtown’s beer-forward restaurant, The Magnet, is a trove of quirky details from bar to bathroom; you just need to know where to look. The mounted art is a good place to start. At first glance the colourful abstract canvases seem like beautiful – if innocuous – wall decorations. Not so. In actual fact they are repurposed t-shirts, originally worn by artist Perrin Grauer while creating the gorgeous mural on the wall across from the bar. Pretty cool! Perrin explains:
“When I paint, I use my shirt as a rag (that way, I never forget where I’ve wiped my palette knife). All the paint marks flow in
in the same direction because I’m right-handed. I’ve somewhat instinctively been saving my old paint shirts for years, even when I get rid of the paintings. Nigel was watching me go through shirt after shirt at Magnet and suggested we try framing them. Turns out, something magical happens when they’re mounted on a stretcher; all the same colours as the mural, expressed in a completely different way. This trick has since become a regular consideration for my paint practice.”
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Originally published in Scout Magazine | Jan. 17, 2020. By Thalia Stopa.
