We had to wait for some time before it blew and then it was indeed fascinating to watch.
It is fascinating to watch when it blows it’s musical whistle and sounds like a hissing Big Ben. As such it is not a very impressive structure, and we almost missed it but for the small crowd standing nearby. We walked in to Gastown from the Waterfront Station to have a look at the clock at the corner of Cambie and Water Streets. It was installed there to prevent people from sleeping on the grate in the cold weather. The clock mechanism is powered by the steam emanating from the grate of the distributed underground steam heating system of Vancouver. The Steam Clock of Gastown in Vancouver is an iconic monument of Downtown Vancouver. However, owing to the clock's high noise levels and inability to keep accurate time, since 1986 the clock has been powered by an electric motor that was originally intended solely as a back-up system. The steam engine that originally ran the clock is a Stuart #4 single expansion double acting 1" piston engine.This engine is still visible through the glass sides of the clock. Incorporating a steam engine and electric motors, the clock displays the time on four faces and announces the quarter hours with a whistle chime that plays the Westminster Quarters.The clock produces a puff of steam from its top on the hour.The clock is featured on the cover for the 2011 Nickelback album Here and Now. Works such as Light Up reconcile masterful yet psychologically unfurled drawing with astute color applications veering toward the neon and radiant, an aesthetic squaring-off in which Saunders’s promulgation of mark-making in crayon and pencil vociferously challenges the minor status of drawing in art world hierarchies.Raymond Saunders' first steam clock was built in 1977 at the corner of Cambie and Water streets in Vancouver's Gastown neighbourhood, to deter people from sleeping on top of steam grate of distributed steam heating system in cold weather.Although the clock is now owned by the City of Vancouver, funding for the project, estimated to be about $C58,000, was provided by contributions from local merchants, property owners, and private donors. The result is an almost guileless art whose subjects-anecdotal, popular, and autobiographical-fuel Saunders’s distinctive, wholly original approach to post-Pop art-making. What distinguishes this Bay area artist’s methodology and production from those of other expressionist painters is a purposeful yet almost cursory approach to design and color in tandem with an instinctive, improvisatory tendency and a playful attitude toward the drafted, sketched, and portrayed.
Often combining delicate pencil traceries, handcrafted patterns, calculated scribbles, insets of prismatic colors adjacent to intermittent blank areas, cut-and-pasted papers, and stenciled and stamped symbols and numerals, these drawings revel in a free-form impulsiveness unencumbered by modern art conventions or expectations. Raymond Saunders’s drawings, especially those from the 1970s, are highly accomplished, tour de force graphic expressions in the tradition of Cy Twombly, Jim Dine, and other linearly oriented artists of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Reis and the National Endowment for the Arts, 105.1971. Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired with matching funds from Mr. Crayon, pencil, and cut-and-pasted paper on paper, 8 3/4 x 6 1/4″ (22.4 x 15.9 cm).
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