Peter Sager was the youngest artist to hold a one-man show at the Vancouver Art Gallery when he exhibited there in 1937. But that was three years ago.
     "I'm getting old now. I'm 20," explained young Mr. Sager to me. His present exhibition of prints done in an advanced form of abstract design opened at the gallery today.
     Abstract art, according to Webster is "characterized by little or no reference to the appearance of objects in nature."
     Mr. Sagar (sic) explains that it's more a matter of painting from one's imagination and feeling than from a model. But he insists he is no modernist.
     "I never set out to be modern. I guess my work is just a reaction against the times."
BEGIN TO SEE SOUL
     Of course he doesn't expect people to understand it or like it ... at first. Abstract art is the sort of thing that grows on one.
     Actually this is the first exhibition of purely abstract art ever held in the gallery.
     There's a few of Mr. Sager's earlier prints on the walls. Much of his more recent work has to do with "Northern Islands" and "Northern Ice Floes." He was among the islands last summer "but I didn't even know then that I was going to make use of them," he says. To the average onlooker these will look merely like studies in black-and-white design.
     "But there's more than design," the artist protests. "After studying them, you begin to see the soul."
     One print, called "The Monument" has a companion "Disarmament." Mr. Sager explains:
FOR THE HOME
     "I did the 'Monument' a few days before war was declared. 'Disarmament' I did after the war began. It is the breaking up of the monument and is a distortion of forms."
     Even though you mayn't appreciate abstract art as portrayed by the young Vancouver artist, he holds that it has its place ... and that place should be in the home.
     "During the day you see people and nature and so forth. In your home you want something imaginative on the wall," he says.