At an East Side Vancouver Art Studio, Experts and Amateurs Share a Love of Life Drawing

Click on the headline above to read my full story
about life drawing at Basic Inquiry in
Montecristo magazine, an on line journal.

Sing Lim, Vancouver Artist and Printer

by Janet Nicol

Your name is Sing Lim and your wife is Chinese, too, and you run a printing shop in Chinatown in Vancouver and that is how you earn a living and you have chosen things to be that way.

—excerpt from In Search of Innocence, written, directed and narrated by Leonard Forest, National Film Board of Canada, 1963.

Sing Lim paints an image of a woman on a glass plate while a press rolls in the background of his print shop. He is clean shaven, wears glasses and a printer’s apron. A cigarette dangles from his mouth. The camera captures his quick movements as he creates this monotype from start to finish for a film about West Coast artists entitled In Search of Innocence. Ironically Lim’s artistic career takes a turn soon after the film is released in 1963.

So begins my portrait of Sing Lim (1915-1993), in Devil’s Artisan, (winter, 2022), http://devilsartisan.ca/latest_issue.html–soon available in print at bookstores (including Chapters). Note – An abridged version of this story has appeared in Montecristo magazine (on line only)

Sing Lim, photograph by Jack Long. Printed with the permission of Frances Long.