Liss Gallery

The first thing you need to know about Brian Liss is that he, too, is a tortured artist. “I am a poet,” says the animated owner/curator of Yorkville’s super trendy Liss Gallery. Brian’s poetry is first rate and while he describes himself as provocative and a person who fears not what others think, he has yet to take his words to the stage. “I never really perform,” he says, dismissing poetry slams and such as something he’s much too conservative for.

Instead, Brian spends most of his time bringing light to the works of other artists, a career he says he visualized as a child. By the time he was in high school, Brian was buying movie posters from a distributor and selling them to students. Later, he went on to work in a gallery that, although it never paid him, did introduce him to contemporary art and a social scene he knew he wanted to be part of, and perhaps become a leader in. That was back in 1981. A couple of years later, Brian flew to New York and spent $50,000 on original art and brought them back to Toronto.