Festival is part of a series of Optical or Op art paintings by Canadian artist Harold Town (1924–1990). Characteristically, he steals features from a current style and twists them for a new purpose—here he takes the repeated discs and lines that appeared around 1960 in the works of Paris-based painters Victor Vasarely (1906–1997) and Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005). He mixes these Op art elements into a rich and dramatic fabric. The theme of the festival was one he had treated in earlier paintings. Behind a foreground layer of frantic activity that evokes jugglers, strings of lights, ticker tape, and confetti, we glimpse an intergalactic darkness in which writhe twisting, faintly painted nebulae made up of dashes, waves, and what Town jokingly called “doughnuts.”