"Once a teacher, always a teacher", jokes Vancouver-area artist Wesley Anderson.

For starters, after so many years of teaching a broad swath of visual arts media (from commercial art to photography to graphic design) to his high school students, it should come as no surprise that his most recent body of work is so cross-disciplinary.

In fact, the 59-year-old visual artist embraces the post-modern flexibility built into the series of backlit photo-transparencies.

Anderson knows that his aluminum framed still lifes will evoke advertising references as much as fine art connotations and that his devotion to exploring less-than-traditional esthetics and subject matter might be jarring, but that's just part of the appeal of these pieces.

"I want to make the process transparent," says the dedicated artist, who took early retirement from the classroom to focus on his photography".

"Most of my objects are from the spring and the fall," continues the avid and dedicated gardener who has "no desire" to photograph pretty flowers.

"In the autumn you get that slender-but-lasting echo of former splendour that's so interesting to try and capture. I want subjects that can go beyond the obvious beauty of a plant or flower - strip the object bare and document what is unseen. I'll just as soon take a single Canadian thistle from the side of the road and give it new beauty."

"My work is certainly more about the micro that the macro," he says. His large garden in North Vancouver - the source of many of his photos - is a wild mix of tropical and native plants. Often working with seedpods, Anderson is less interested in having his plants represent the overt recognizable surface that in documenting the "changing forms found in the shifting of the seasons."

"Often it's the evolution of a single plant in transition that I'm trying to capture," says the photographer, who does most of his photograph late at night using long (up to 30 seconds) exposures.

"I feel I've only scratched the surface of this process and I'm having a lot of fun," Anderson says. "Everything you see in this show is a product of experimentation - the proportion, the light source, the amount of recess from the wall - and while I'm happy with this body of work for now, I'm by no means finished."

Excerpts from an article by Gilbert Bouchard for the Edmonton Journal, November 2, 2001, Visual Arts - E8 for full article.