Although Robert Young is best known as a painter, his early art training was in printmaking, and it is a discipline he revisits periodically. In 1962, after completing a bachelor's degree in art history at the University of British Columbia, Young left his native Vancouver, taking himself off to England, to the City and Guilds of London School of Art, where he studied etching, engraving and drypoint. He returned to Vancouver in 1964, studied graphic arts at the Vancouver School of Art, then set off again for London in 1966. It was during this second sojourn there, lasting a full decade (he returned permanently to Vancouver in 1976), that he began to paint, finding inspiration in a number of sources, including art history, photography, and the mass media.

Young's early paintings and prints combined an exquisite fluidity of line with flattened and Renaissance perspective and dream-like passages of negative space. Although decidedly individual, these works accorded with some of the Pop-inflected and photo-derived figuration of the time, and garnered the young artist considerable acclaim. He showed his work in prestigious commercial galleries in London, Montreal and Toronto; was collected by major public and private institutions; and had significant exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1974, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 1981, and the Charles H. Scott Gallery in 1984. In recent years, however, Young's determined opposition to what he sees as the orthodoxies and programmatic thinking of the postmodern "Academy" has set him outside the curatorial mainstream. Still, collectors, connoisseurs and critics continue to champion his work, lauding the evocative and meditative qualities of his imagery and his exceptional technical accomplishments. We also value his art's handmadeness.

In the early 1980s, Young shifted away from the photograph as source and began to situate his philosophical and art historical investigations in images gleaned from his own home, a 1910 cottage which has been in an ongoing state of renovation and repair. Images and image-series derived from it have included peeling layers of wallpaper, broken chairs, interiors with walls stripped to the laths, still-life arrangements of humble objects and, most recently, window-framed views of an ancient crab apple tree that stands in his front yard. Young has invested his unpretentious subjects with references that range from early Renaissance art through Cubism and Constructivism, and from jazz music through Zen Buddhism and Christianity. At the same time, he has established that his home is a place of reflection and reverie, a significant site for the creative process.

Throughout his career, Young has maintained an interest in textiles and stitchery as a means to both formal relationship and philosophical enquiry. His new print, Sampler, is probably his most direct homage yet to this most domestic of art forms -- and to the work of the hand. Combining etching with linocut and woodblock printing techniques, Sampler revisits imagery that Young has employed in the past, including a striding figure which cites a William Blake engraving of 1793, The Traveller Hasteth in the Evening; stitch-like drawings of a patch of British Columbia forest and shoreline, which Young first developed as an art student in London; and line drawings of dandelions, a humble plant Young sketched during hitchhiking journeys through Cornwall in the 1960s.

Blake's traveller is used here in conjunction with two other striding figures, borrowed from Edward Lear and Marc Chagall and juxtaposed with the Dutch word for "forward". It's difficult to read these images as anything other than a critique of our unexamined, headlong commitment to technological progress. Young values the dandelion for its "potency", its "medieval feeling", its harking back to a time when we looked to the plant world for healing and renewal. In conjunction with the references to embroidery samplers, the fragment of an E.E. Cummings poem (about an Old-World tailor deploring machine-made suits), and the decorative border based on an ancient Greek design, the dandelion causes us to consider what we lose when we divorce ourselves from nature (and our own bodies) and wed ourselves to technology. Yet Sampler manages to be reflective rather than didactic, evocative rather than doctrinaire. It expands our understanding rather than constraining it and, not incidentally, it is also a thing of beauty.

Ms. Laurence is a freelance art critic who writes for the Georgia Strait, The Globe and Mail and is a contributing editor to Canadian Art and Border Crossings magazines.