The invitation promised a champagne fountain, and there it is, sitting on the bar, overflowing with bubbly, very tabletop and not on the Versailles scale I was anticipating. “Domestic?” I ask the bartender, querying the vintage. “Exactly,” she says. Still, it’s the sparkle at the heart of the empire, the Thrush Holmes Empire on January 25, 2008, to be specific, where several hundred of us are partying to celebrate the first anniversary of its encroachment on 3,100 square feet of Queen Street West. The Empire is one of the largest studio-cum-galleries in Canada and its proprietor (whose first name will bring to mind either a songbird or a nasty fungal infection) the richest (and possibly most envied) 28-year-old artist on a strip long known for a culture of genteel poverty and bohemian disdain for the wrong kind of success.

It’s his party, but at first you won’t notice Thrush Keats Byron Holmes. You will notice singer Leslie Feist. You’ll also notice Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew (the two aren’t friends of his, says Holmes, but they admire one another’s work). Then you’ll notice the party boys and girls—all of them pretty, many of them pouty, flaunting much in the way of good complexion (meaning young), a few flawed (meaning very young), a very few rehabilitated (meaning…well, you know). You’ll finally spot Thrush Holmes in a white shirt, black vest and purple tie. You’ll note that he doesn’t really fit his own scene. He is not given to fashion-plate pouting. He is reserved, courteous and soft-spoken, with a poised, slim doodle of a body hosting a neatly parabolic tummy: a late medieval Adam as imagined by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Not exactly pretty, he has the face of a Hollywood Jesus, clear blue–eyed and open as daylight, with a scragglepuss beard and hair on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Tonight he looks exhausted, and his hands are stained with paint. The rooms smell of freshly applied oils and acrylics, and the paintings hanging on the walls, most of them huge and some of them enlivened (or demoralized, depending on your take) by illuminated neon tubing, do seem to have just parted from his brain and hands. Lately, he’s been experimenting with text-based work: “Every Million Golden Universe” (also the title of the show), written in multicoloured neon, works its way across a backdrop of coppery butterflies. Neon wolves leap through a darkling forest in the giddily titled Dim-Lit Gleaming Universe of Budding Leaves Blown by Overwhelming Night Breeze. Rainbows, or hints of rainbows, make frequent appearances. One of the largest works, depicting a ramshackle house in a forest, he confesses he did from start to finish just the day before. The titles and prices are scribbled in marker on the wall beside them (unlike most galleries, which will, when asked, hand you a discreet price list). The small works are priced at around $8,500. He is asking $100,000 for some of the larger ones (two of the big pieces and one of the smaller ones will sell that night, another put on hold). Those prices don’t fit this stretch of West Queen West. Neither does the fact that there’s a live skinny-young-boy band for entertainment, and better (and more varied) food than you’ll find at other openings. Most unlikely of all (and most easily recognized as out of place here, with their impudent ease, their ready business cards and their spectral smiles) are two American women, associated with the Bill Lowe Gallery, which represents Holmes in Atlanta and Los Angeles. Late in the evening, the rooms will be packed with too many blondes, too many profiles, too much boy band. Swimming through it all will be a sweetly out-of-it Holmes, carrying a cupcake and an envelope with his name on it. In my last image of him, before I leave, he is bending over to listen intently to a very short admirer while one of the American women picks cupcake icing off the back of his vest. It is only then that I realize this party is as remarkable for the people who aren’t here as the people who are. The beautiful people had swarmed the place. The villagers had stayed home.

West Queen West is a village. It stretches from Trinity-Bellwoods to Dufferin. Those 14 or so blocks feature some 30 galleries, most of them small to minuscule storefronts. Sometimes there is a second- floor space, and sometimes the gallery owner lives there (art is not a business to make most people rich). Art show opening nights are heavily ritualized. They tend to feature Sawmill Creek wine, Steam Whistle beer, sliced red pepper, broccoli and cauliflower florets, and dip. Extravagance might equal cheese cubes, olives and a fruit tray. Villagers are expected to show up at village events. If you are an artist and it is your opening, you can always hope for the presence of the local gentry—the likes of Stephen Andrews, Paul Petro, Katharine Mulherin, Christina Zeidler and a handful more—but even if they’re inexplicably missing, you know you can count on at least the artist friends whose openings you attended the previous season. It’s cozy and it works. No one buys anything (and little may sell over the following weeks), but camaraderie blossoms, war stories are exchanged and the village recreates itself as a self-consciously serious home of artistry and craft and experiment, worlds away from the likes of Yorkville, ground zero for the aging artistic establishment and the iteration of art as decor.