Mom Luvs Art (MLA) is a playful and irreverent take on a very important and pretentious topic.
About
I’m Tina Orr, an art critic based in Toronto. I’m also a mom with a bunch of plants, two kids, one and a half cats and a husband.
After spending many years studying and writing about art in an academic setting, I decided it was time to get out and have some fun.
The art criticism you’ll find here avoids jargon. Neither will I judge a work of art to be good or bad. Good or bad is a moralizing opinion and not a very interesting one at that. I trust that people can decide for themselves whether they like something or not.
Art is for everyone. It is also a quintessentially peculiar and mostly wonderful thing that humans have made up and, thankfully, cannot stop doing.
Art criticism, when done with care, is a form of writing that supports a connection with art and the different ways it can be practiced and perceived.
With that, join me as I engage with the many forms of art happening around me. I’ll be visiting galleries, museums, theatres, studios, cafés, homes, libraries, alleys and streets, parks, bridges, waiting rooms and anywhere else art may exist.
Carousel
The carousel is a curated slideshow of art that’s caught my eye. I’ll be changing it up on a semi-regular basis with a new crop of art and an accompanying critique.
Yes, Etobicoke!
New year. New vistas. The show featured art by emerging artists.
Adeeba Aslam, Genesis, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 cm. Dreamy and enchanting. Saint-Seans' Aquarium playing in my head.
Detail view. Love all that texture and movement. Reads much larger than its modest size.
Detail view. Cracks in the blue paint giving way to bright hot red. The title, Genesis, makes sense.
Chloe Serenko, September 19th, acrylic and sand. Likely a nod to the city of Toronto clearing away encampments in several public parks over the course of September 2021.
Grace Vali, Lakeside Haven, screenprint. I like that the show included prints, which, despite looking very current here, is one of the oldest forms of art.
Emma Goudie, Foraging Bracken Fern, 2024, wood, gouache and thread. I'm a sucker for dioramas, pop up books, and the paper arts in general.
Della Vaz, How I Love You, oil on canvas. This painting, like so many of the artworks shown, was NFS (Not For Sale). This added a very personal feel to the show.
Jasmine Vanstone, Persephone's Panganat-Coolie, digital collage. The reordering premise of the collage speaks to me. It creates a new grammar out of preexisting signs. Ties in well with the show's theme.
AJ Mitchell, Northern Ontario, mixed media. "NORTHERN ONTARIO is broken. no one belongs, not even the hicks, it's suffocating."
Heejung Shin, Passerby, acrylic, pigment and hanji. Hanji's a special type of handmade paper from Korea. The pulp's derived from the mulberry tree. The use of this tree in paper making dates back to antiquity.
Detail view. I love how this looks ultra-careful and chaotic at the same time.
Heejung Shin, Passerby. The layers of sheer and opaque remind me of watercolour, fancy fabrics like chintz, woodblock prints, and blue and white porcelain.
Detail view.
Klara VY, Urban Fabric.
Can't recall ever seeing carpeted wall at a gallery. Not a bad idea...no scuff marks to deal with on pristine white walls.
How fun and fitting is this! When you get up close, Urban Fabric is made up of many colours.
Aquil Virani, Our World Is Made Of The Stories We Tell Ourselves, photography. Digital technology has done interesting things for collage. It's all one surface. No cut edges or glue.
Hadeel AlZoubi, Bridging Ages & Spaces No.1, mixed media. This was another piece of many that was Not For Sale. I'd love to know if what's pictured is an actual place. Feels very nostalgic.
Bridging Ages & Spaces No.1, detail view. Gold ink, carefully painted into the cracks.
Vanna Nguyen, Pith Meditations, ink transfers on tangerine peels. They appear so delicate, I almost walked right by them.
Rachel Del Bono, Fruity as Fuck, oil on canvas. I agree. How do we rid ourselves of those fruit code stickers.
Zara Garcia-Alvarez, Two Generations of Love, mixed media. Had to include this.
Angela Hoang, 1:52pm, oil on canvas. What happened at 1:52pm? I'm intrigued by art showing scenes at home.
Parastoo Haddadi, Let’s Dance. "Put on your red shoes and dance the blues..."
Parastoo Haddadi, Let’s Dance, detail view. Exquisite. This must have been done by hand. It's hard to tell sometimes.
Malariny Murugathas, Kadhale, acrylic on canvas. I'm digging the call out to Fragonard's, The Swing (1767). Google telling me kadhale is the Tamil word for 'love'.
Gallery View
Confessions and Criticism
Jack Chambers (1932-1978), Diego Reading, 1976-77, oil and synthetic paint in natural resin varnish on plywood, Art Gallery of Ontario
28.11.24
Prior to starting this blog, I used to study and write about art, among other things, as a PhD student. There was a time when I thought I wanted to become a professor until I could no longer convince myself that that was true. I eventually walked away from graduate school with two Masters degrees. Nobody needs two Masters degrees. Having two Masters degrees is about as necessary as having two middle names. That said, there are worse outcomes in life than being overeducated.
I first got the idea for Mom Luvs Art after attending art exhibitions with my kids when they were very little. Even though I was surrounded by art, I’d barely have a a chance to get a good look, let alone engage with the exhibits in any considerable way. I was too busy following around my toddler and being in constant motion with a baby strapped to my chest. I thought, this is an exasperating and relatable situation. I should write about this — the thoughts and feelings of an art lover doing her best to keep up with her interests while momming at the same time. It’s true. Moms are people too and they enjoy other things besides tending to their children. Depending on the day, or the hour, they would rather be doing anything else.
One day, I thought, I would visit and absorb an entire show, at my own pace, for no other reason than because it was enjoyable to me. That time is finally here! Sort of. Every so often, you’ll find me at a show alone or with a friend for 20 minutes to a whole hour. It’s a short and protected amount of time that feels like a getaway.
Mom Luvs Art is the answer I gave my kids when they’d ask me why I would ever pawn them off to their dad so I could go paint with watercolours at the local community center. Moms love their children more than anything. They also need moments of peace, self-discovery and doing whatever they damn well please.
If you’ve ever taken an English course, you’ll recognize MLA as the Modern Language Association. That MLA provides the proper rules for writing a formal essay. There are no rules or associationing here. Here is just me, my thoughts and respect for a complete sentence. Incomplete ones are welcome too.
Art critics deal in expertise and judgment. Typically they do a lot of research and have extensive knowledge about the art they critique. This has all the makings of being a very serious endeavour. There is also no real barrier to entry for doing art criticism other than a passion for art, the impulse to have an opinion, an ability to communicate and a willingness to sit with people’s dumbfounded silence after telling them you’re an art critic. Most people know a dentist or a teacher. How many people know an art critic.
Art criticism sounds hoity toity. With all its deep expertise and insider references, it can be an esoteric and self-involved form of writing. At the end of the day, art criticism is a celebration of art that could use a bit of an unclench.
There is plenty of room for an art criticism that is approachable and delivered by someone other than who you’d expect to be an art critic. I don’t know of many art critics who spend a lot of their time helping their kids with homework, cleaning the house and making cake pops and pies for the school fundraiser, among other things. Then again, maybe this is what art criticism needs — a frank point of view that considers art as much as it does motherhood. I can’t think of two more deeply felt and misunderstood topics.
Tell me something you love about art.
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