This has been a week for talk about food security. As I leave for some of the travels that come upon me from time to time and find their way back into the Okanagan Okanogan, I would like to leave you with a thought: artistic security is as valuable as food security. In a society based on exchanging labour for monetary capital, artistic work gains monetary value and can be traded, shipped, packaged and displayed in special vaults and stock market trading floors called art galleries. Despite the suggestion that art is a specialized project, to be produced by specialists and appreciated by the educated, I offer you the street art of Vernon.

Note the intricate line work in the lower middle span of the image, an the exquisite sphere around the iron sewer grate. First class. The concept has many variations. Here’s one where the concrete has been jackhammered away to reveal the glacial river gravel it is made from.

Note the exquisitely placed cigarette butt. Another great motif is the leaf drift. Motion and stillness, organic line and industrial line meet and merge.

The energy can get quite intense.

And quite spare.

Note how two triangles and a rectangle just barely manage to balance one dark snowplow gouge starting to grow some good weeds. This is not just art made by the earth. Humans can take part in this art as well, as hundreds of their footsteps have done below.

A society can exist without an art gallery, but it cannot exist without the eyes to find art in every moment. Note that the art I have showed you here exists outside the capitalization of artistic labour and, in fact, outside of labour itself. This might make it nearly invisible to contemporary culture. It is no less valuable for that.