It’s not new, but Working Women, a collection of colourful, quirky portraits of women by artist/musician/letter-writer/feminist Mendelson Joe is a dandy book, and would make a great gift for any occasion you want to mark in 2006.

Each portrait is accompanied by the author’s comments on the role the subject plays in Joe’s community, or in the wider society. In this book, women’s work runs from parole officer to ecologist to oracle to judge. Not only does the unbridled emotion of Joe’s work shine through in this collection, but his respect and affection for the women he paints is unmistakable.

Joe's has just launched a second book of portraits, which includes famous Torontonians (Robert Fulford, Robert Priest, Margaret Atwood,) as well as anonymous citizens that people the streets of the Toronto that he loves.

“My purpose in my work, any of it from song to essay to picture, is to tell the truth and it seems that most truth ain’t couth. Inequality bugs me. Prejudice bugs me. And, I’ve long believed that women are the only hope for this ever-degrading organism that mothered us all. So, in 1982, I began to paint portraits of women. The purpose was to document women in the context of their job descriptions, so the pictures showed them as working folks as opposed to sexual objects.” — Mendelson Joe

Vicky Sanderson is a Toronto-based writer whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and a variety of other publications.

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