Kingston, Ontario. January 1998, Mark Beldan.
I went to art school in Kingston, Ontario.
From the name down – the king’s town – there’s a kind of colonial imposition. Rather than any big industry, it’s a city built around a series of big institutions. There’s a university, a teaching hospital, a college, a military college and a military base. There are also nine prisons. The old institutional buildings are made of local grey limestone.
I was there from 1995 to 1999. Kingston isn’t that far from Toronto or Montreal but I felt isolated from both. It’s a small city. There wasn’t much radio or internet. The only local TV station showed bingo every Saturday, endless hours of one person calling out numbers.
So culture came through friends. We’d lend each other books and music. We’d watch films together. Something would come up in conversation and I’d write down a name or a title.
Over Christmas 1997 I was visiting a friend in Toronto. She gave me a cassette she’d made. Nico’s The Marble Index on one side, a compilation of shoegazey things on the other side. She handed it over casually, maybe I’d like it.
At the start of January 1998 I listened to it driving on the 401 back to Kingston. Some of the music made me feel anxious, like it was out of sync with itself, like it was going to lead me into some sort of hideous car crash. The words of ‘Frozen Warnings’ were another caution. But the music under those words felt hopeful, coalescing into a sort of harmonious pulse as I drove across the flat grey landscape.
Frozen warnings close to mine
Close to the frozen borderline
That week it was cold in Kingston. Too cold to rain but it started raining. And then it kept raining. It was an ice storm, a rare weather phenomenon where precipitation falls as liquid but freezes on contact with the ground. Or a tree branch. Or a power line. If conditions stay cold the ice just builds up. On the third day the electricity went off around 9pm.
I was on my own, everyone else in the house had left town or crashed with friends. Even our cat had been put in a carrier and taken to a parent’s house. But I’d been too slow to get away.
I managed to find a candle and a lighter in the kitchen and make my way upstairs. There was nothing to do so I put out the candle and got into bed. My room was on the second floor, facing onto Montreal Street. Everything was invisible in the darkness now, but there was a small churchyard with tall trees opposite. I guess the ice just got thicker and heavier and eventually each branch had a point where it couldn’t be supported. I listened to the trees falling down.
I never imagined a disaster would be like that. There were no sirens, no screams. Just things collapsing under a few centimetres of ice. The world stopped by slow processes of relentless accumulation. It was dark and somehow I fell asleep.
From without a thousand cycles
A thousand cycles to come
The next morning was grey but bright, the rain had stopped. The entire city was encased in ice. Completely hazardous but also beautiful. The front steps, the railing, the sidewalk all like glass. On the street the safest place to walk was down the centre of the road. Hedges crystallised, every twig encased. Birch trees arched double, their top branches touching the ground. Cars crumpled under fallen maples. I took detours to avoid the power lines draped across the road.
At the university campus there was electricity. I had some coffee and hung out at the art building for a while. A few people had stayed over on sofas in the studios. I found my camera there, and took some photos on the way home. By the time I got to the house the power was on there too.
The house wasn’t too cold. I put on the tape of Nico in my room. As it got dark again I remember ‘Ari’s Song’, so terrifying and reassuring all at once.
Sail away, sail away, my little boy
Let the wind fill your heart with light and joy
Somehow the unknown didn’t seem that bad. For the past year I’d had a profound feeling of being stuck. Maybe I was in the wrong town. The wrong university. Some of the people on my course were my closest friends – they still are – but maybe it was the wrong course.
In a roundabout way, Nico had led me there. In school I’d seen pictures of her with Andy Warhol in books about Pop Art. I loved The Velvet Underground & Nico album instantly. I’d imagined art school as one long Exploding Plastic Inevitable. But happenings weren’t really happening in the small art department of a conservative university.
Too often our professors had that peculiarly Canadian censoriousness – that anything sexual was pornography, that weirdness and vulnerability were kinds of weakness. It’s so unhelpful when you’re 21 and trying to figure out what you want to do. I’d swing between different reactions. Sometimes I’d paint a perfunctory still-life. Other times I’d write expletives across my studio wall. Neither approach really lead anywhere.
I’m not sure I believe in self-expression, but any sort of sustained work has an element of obsession. You set yourself a problem you can never completely solve, and the joy is in coming at it from different angles again and again.
Can you follow me?
Can you follow my distresses?
The winter became a normal winter. The ice melted and branches were cleared away. It snowed and that snow melted.
I started making paintings of Kingston. I walked around taking photographs of all the buildings that I found oppressive. The Plaza Hotel strip-club on Montreal Street. The Econo-Coin Laundromat where I’d have to wait for hours. The concrete bulk of the Princess Towers looming over town. The canvases were primed in black gesso, then oil paint, building up layers of cold earth-tones and sludgy greys. All the skies the colour of dirty snow.
I even started driving around the city looking for other buildings to paint. One day I kept going into the country and found myself in a strange place. Along one side of the road, what had been a pine forest, but with every tree snapped off at the base. Now a field of jagged stumps. On the other side there was a steep gravel embankment falling away. At the base of the slope where the gravel met the grass there were about a dozen coyote skeletons. The bones clean and white so not so new.
Back in the studio, I listened to The Marble Index on headphones as I painted. Music is great while working but it’s not like the painting will necessarily transcribe a mood or translate sounds into pictures. It’s just a way of tying up those verbal and rational bits of your brain that might get in the way.
In the morning of my winter
When my eyes are still asleep
Across the songs there was a weather in the lyrics – frozen and windy, with rain and snow. The same weather as Kingston. Sometimes the music almost seemed medieval, but then the strings would screech like car alternator belts on a cold morning.
I loved the album so much but for some reason I never played it for anyone there. It was a private space. I didn’t want anyone to laugh at its extremes, and I don’t think I had the language to defend it. No-one else ever coyly mentioned that they’d been listening to Nico.
Walking home one night from the art building I found our cat a few streets from the house. She was wandering around in the middle of an intersection. It was quiet. The traffic lights were just flashing because it was so late. I scooped her up to carry her home. She settled into my arms and purred.
When I finished the new paintings of Kingston I put them up in the hallway outside the studio. I was happy with them. They’d started in frustration but they’d become more open than that. Maybe they still looked like student work. But there was something there, something that relates to the paintings I make now. The simple volumes, the tonal palette, the specific and familiar buildings.
There’s nothing more to sing about
Not now or when they carry me away in the rain
Now, all these years later, I really want to find the tape. The cover made of a folded photograph of clouds, the titles written inside. My fingerprints in oil paint on the clear cassette. But maybe it’s long gone. I did find a box with my photographs of the ice storm. Shot on colour film, a little underexposed. They miss some details but catch the disorder and the cold of that day. There was also a photo of the cat in my room, and this reminds of how that winter term of art school ended.
One morning in April, we heard a horrible yowling right outside our house. Our cat had been hit by a passing car. She was conscious and alert but unable to stand up. The next few hours were a blur of getting her inside, phone calls to vets, trying to make her comfortable, driving to one vet, then another, and then finally the tough decision to put her down.
Afterwards we drove to the spot with the broken pine trees. We parked on the side of the road. The three of us made our way down the embankment awkwardly, carrying the cat. We found some branches to serve as a marker. We dug a hole at the edge of the gravel and buried our cat beside the coyotes.
Mark Beldan is a London-based painter originally from Toronto, Canada. His work explores the strangeness of familiar places and things. Often painting small houses, in 2025 he also made a stage set of big flowers for the dance company Corali.
Photograph taken by Jon Archdeacon.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 