Category Archives: Canadian art

A Sketching Artist Observed

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Recently, I was given a gift when professional artist and teacher David Wick contacted me to share some memories of long ago days when he experienced my artist father’s daily train trips to and from his work in Simpsons art department in Toronto. His words brought back my father’s zeal and devotion to his art, so, with his permission, I’ll let David speak for himself about the times when he and his friend Reid also were commuting to study art in Toronto and when they experienced my father’s passionate commitment.

…your father always found his window where he’d begin his drawings,..incessant drawings of so many things,..people and subjects that grabbed his thought and mind en route.

Reid and I just watched his hands flowed over each drawing with his magic pen,…a fountain pen with black ink and chiseled nib drawing and drawing moving to some hidden inner rhythm your father knew instinctively and with such interest in every object that captured his eye and heart.

Your father Ken would draw and talk little if either Reid or myself asked questions while we rode the train,…and sometimes Ken would enter this “zone” and his hand did all the talking …a blaze of movement back and forth capturing the gestures of people on the outside of the train walking with their bikes,..parking them or others in conversation at the train stops on the platforms, even people next to some buildings talking or moving into some space,..he seemed to be perpetually drawing and sketching. That chisel nib must have had it’s well past it’s replacement date,..or at least it’s warranty deadline!

***

Your Fathers grey suit,..with his bike sprocket protector about his ankle and wrinkled pant legs showed Reid and Me that drawing was his absolute love, and devotional focus, not his pants. Every once in awhile,..he’d look up but only to turn the page on his clipped paper pad or pile of drawing papers he’d combined to make into a drawing pad and turn them over as the journey progressed. The drawings where never large,..but smallish,..about 8″x10″ or so, that he seemed to carry with him everywhere. … When he did look up at us,…it was as though he was questioning what we where looking at,..he was simply lost in his drawing and referencing the everyday gathering of travellers and bystanders en route to Toronto. He simply lived for drawing!

At this point I replied to David with some memories of my own:

He was an ardent teacher and could hardly help telling people about his passion, often more than they wanted to hear. If he didn’t talk with you, two appreciative young men, I’m thinking it was because by five pm he was exhausted, having been up since five am. Only by clinging to his art after a day of sketching things like mattresses, could he survive by turning to subjects like clouds. His little cobbled-together pads and yellow thick lead pencils were designed to fit in the palm of his upturned hand so he could do caricatures without being noticed.

David replied:

Yes,…I do remember your father sketching with pencil in hand, and indeed they where stubs he’d sharpened with his penknife as they looked revealed by that procedure. When I mentioned your father going silent from time to time when we talked with him,..it was because he appeared lost in his wonder at what he was drawing and was caught up away in his enjoyments.

However,…I was always more impressed at your fathers ink sketches as they couldn’t be erased, they where immediately fresh and gestural,…loose yet concise. Reid and I where amazed at his drawing skill level, his perceptions and observations so clear about the subject he was drawing.

 

 

 

An Artist’s Despair

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When my artist parents bought their land on Harborn Trail (then Harborn Road) in 1939, it was surrounded by several fine orchards with magnificent, tall, spreading apple trees. These orchards gave them joy in every season, and often appeared in their pictures. However, over the years they lived there, one by one these trees were torn up and the trees were replaced with subdivisions,

By the time my father retired only one small orchard remained, living on borrowed time. My  father felt his world was being assaulted from all sides. He was watching the surrounding woods and fields disappear with dismaying speed. Thanks to early retirement from his day job at Simpson’s advertising department he was free at last. But free to do what? With time to reflect he faced straight into the teeth of old age.

Panicky, despairing, he feared that the long-awaited opportunity to paint at will had come too late for him. Wrestling with complicated new glasses, fumbling to sketch with arthritis-twisted fingers, daily wracked by pain and in an agony of despair, my father had lost all hope for himself and his art. As he struggled to regain hope, he turned to the style of his favourite Group of Seven teacher, Arthur Lismer.

That autumn, when he heard that the last orchard, with its dying, uncared-for trees, was doomed he stumbled down there every day to paint his most elegaic tribute. As he did so, I believe he wrestled with his despair for the orchard and himself.

 

Canadian Artist Couple

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313KMarie pink brushes

Ken’s portrait of Marie

Canadian artist couple, Ken Phillips and Marie Cecilia Guard, my parents, were unusual in that they remained profoundly in love with each other for more than 50 years, and each was supportive of the other’s work. No one, my mother said to me, was ever as interesting and exciting as my father. For all the vexations caused by his full-blown artistic temperament, this remained true all of their married lives. In turn, my father adored my mother for her exceptional beauty and graceful ways, but also for her intelligence. Both studied and learned all of their lives.

My parents shared a passionate understanding that art meant everything to them. There never was a line between living their art, whether by pouring over Turner paintings in a library book or studying Rembrandt’s treatment of lace in the AGO. Each artist valued the other’s opinion over anyone else’s. A picture was never complete without a thorough critiquing by the other. Each understood the other’s way of working and was supportive of them. There was no question of one advancing without the other.

Marie’s portrait of her Young Husband

What happens when such a complex, profound partnership disintegrates? During his last years, my father became ever more difficult to live with, so in some ways his sudden death from a massive heart attack must have been a relief to my mother. And yet, without her husband to critique her work, she seemed at a loss about how to go on. There was never any question that she would continue to paint, but without his expert assessment and suggestions, after such a long partnership, I don’t believe she ever clearly saw a direction for her work. Yes, she went among the canvases, so lovingly prepared by Ken, choosing one to work on. And yes, she hunted through the frames he also had worked up so they would be ready. As always, until her last year she rarely went a day without picture making. Occasionally, she would surprise me by asking my opinion, and it was then that I saw most clearly how much had been lost.

Frames My Artist Father Designed

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One of Ken's frames, note combing texture in upper corner

One of Ken’s frames, for a painting by his wife. Note the decorative combing texture in the upper corners

The frames my father designed and made to enhance my parents’ pictures were a passion in themselves. As a teenager, occasionally I was enlisted with my sister to help in this complex, exciting process. These frames came about mainly because my parents couldn’t afford ready-made frames of a quality my father deemed necessary. Rather than seeing this as a chore, though, in his characteristic way, he poured thought and skill into them. I already saw my artist father as an alchemist, with his occasional cooking of vile-smelling rabbit’s foot glue on a hot plate, or the mysterious mixing of linseed oil and oil paint which brought my world to life. But it was with his frames, where he transformed the most ordinary wood that I could see his art in action.

Sometimes he bought simple frames, as in the example above, treating them until he thought they did justice to the pictures they were designed for. Later, he snapped up discarded old ornately sculpted and gilded frames or ones of handsome fruitwood from Toronto second hand stores. He hunted through books of antique techniques, and  fabricated strange tools, taking over pieces of comb with which he made dragging, wavy lines in half-set gesso. Sometimes he had my sister and me distress plain wood with nail holes, in which he trickled India ink to imitate worm holes.

Most magical was the process of burnishing gold leaf, though even my father seemed scandalized by the expense of this technique. In the many steps of this process, first he covered the frame with a base, which he coated with an terra cotta color. This, in turn he wiped with a rag, to create an irregular effect. Next he flipped through his little books, selecting delicate sheets of copper, silver or even precious gold, almost light as air itself. I watched as he took his agate burnisher, a tool made of a real, semi-precious stone, and polished until the leaves mysteriously melded onto the frame. After this, after turning his creation thoughtfully between his fingers, he might have second thoughts about the rawness of the new color, in which case  he might take up a rag to soften the effect with an uneven rubbing of thin white paint.

“People don’t appreciate them,” my mother sometimes protested, exasperated by the good painting time he devoted to his creations. Eventually, age and the suspicion that he was indeed casting pearls to swine, would force him to abandon such elaborate procedures.  It was about this time that he turned to buying mouldings from which he constructed much simpler, if less charming, frames.

Marie Cecilia Guard’s Nude Portraits

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Marie Cecilia Guard’s nude portraits were remarkable. Wryly, in later years, my mother was to recall hearing my father remark approvingly at the Graphic Arts Club: “She paints more like a man.” All her life, she was to see herself as an artist rather than a woman artist. What was important to her was that she “just wanted to paint as well as the best.” Now, at the same time that she was trying to make a place for herself in illustration work, she began a daring crusade to gain recognition through the O.S.A. and R.C.A. shows. Her mural work had encouraged her to work boldly and to fill a large canvas. She recognized that the large walls of the impressive new Toronto Art Gallery [Now the AGO] demanded big pictures which drew the eye. Although landscapes dominated the exhibitions in the thirties, figures were still her subject of choice.

DSC00705_edited-1She tested the climate with Margot, a life-sized portrait of her sister, in a softly ruffled dress baring her shoulder, and with her eyes provocatively downcast, which was exhibited in the spring 1934 O.S.A. show. The following autumn, the R.C.A. show included two life-sized works by Marie. Once my mother had been a frail little girl who dreamed and poured over her books of tales and legends. Now, in 1934, she painted her blonde classmate, Isabelle Dawson (later to become a successful New York illustrator), in a similarly dreamy pose looking at the book Tales of Long Ago and waiting for her lover to come and call. [illust – Once Upon a Time] Harking back to the magical 1929 O.C.A. masquerade ball on the theme “King Arthur’s Court”, where both my parents had been praised by the press for the originality of their costumes, Marie made up a background tapestry effect for this portrait. Subsequent to the R.C.A. show, this painting was exhibited across Canada. Although she was just twenty-six, author and critic Kenneth Wells, reviewing Once Upon a Time, remarked: “This lady is making rapid strides towards the front rank of figure painting.”
The second picture shown that autumn was Idyl, the first of a series of stunning, life-sized or larger nudes. Idyl, later known as Nude With Chrysanthemums, is a supple, graceful back view of a drooping Margaret, ornamented with white chrysanthemums. This, and the nudes which followed, were pictures which reflected a defiant elation in the face of hardship.

[to be continued]

 

Marie Cecilia Guard’s Nude Portraits Continued

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Marie chalk headjpg (1)

Marie’s interest in nudes had started when she had seen Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Now she was struck by new possibilities. Her favorite quotation was Keats’ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, –that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”, from his Ode on a Grecian Urn. She had been taught to search for a truth and beauty which lies behind appearance, a deeper truth which is to be found through a knowledge of structure. From classical times, art teachers have often dictated that “The shape of the human body is the most complicated and subtle thing in the whole world…..The student who has learned to draw the nude can draw anything.” (Even into her nineties, my mother used to astonish medical professionals with her understanding of anatomy.)

In figure study she had been taught to construct her subjects by first studying their structure, that is, by reading the body of bone and sinew under its skin. A quest for the fundamentals both of design and deepest essence of her subject meant for her a return to studying the nude. At this early, important stage in her career, my mother would have agreed with Matisse: “[What ]I am after above all is expression. What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is that which best permits me to express my almost religious awe towards life.”

The first life model my mother had ever drawn was at a small outdoor class she attended with my father across Toronto harbour on the Toronto Islands in 1929. From when she was a small child, she had loved classical figures, including sculpture. Now she found the quest to convey this most challenging of subjects very exciting, particularly when her subject was enhanced with outdoor light. Although there are some studies of male nudes in Marie’s collection, she generally painted females, both because they were most available to her, and possibly because, as Kenneth Clark observed, it is arguable that the female body is plastically more rewarding.

For the 1934 exam of her O.C.A. model class, teachers had rigged up an ugly model as Salomé, accompanied by a ludicrous papier mâché head of John the Baptist. Being in her post-graduate year, my mother was entitled to refuse to paint this and she did. Instead she substituted the 72″ x 36″ Upwards, or Aspiration, as she first called it. This painting began with Marie’s fascination with warm and cold light. She had picked up a large piece of black transparent drapery at a sale, and wanted to study the effect of the shadowy veil with the warm flesh. Ken, with his sensitivity to Marie’s work, designed an attractive custom frame with a continuous band of carved leaves. In 1935, Upwards had the distinction of being exhibited in the then highly prestigious Canadian National Exhibition fine art pavilion. And the newspaper reviews? “The outstanding [nude] is entitled Upward and depicts a six foot woman, innocent of apparel, standing on tiptoe, with upward glance as if looking to far hills”.

At this time, no one was exhibiting anything comparable to my mother’s ambitious nudes. As she recalls it, six nudes were included in the O.S.A. show of 1936. As well as one each by her and my father, there were two by men, in the style of the Old Masters, and with very little color, and two by women, but of a smaller scale than my mother’s.
During the thirties, the young woman’s pictures became astonishing. Frequently as large as (or larger than) life, these portraits and figure studies in oil were suffused with light; they reflected a radiant sense of possibility and promise. Throughout this period, Marie’s nudes revealed eros, harmony, energy and ecstasy. She examined woman in many aspects: closed and remote (as in Idyl,  her back view of the nude draped in chrysanthemums), or open and daring, (a figure with a background of flamelike poppies, painted with an almost glaring boldness, and with her arms folded defiantly behind her head, challenging the viewer with a direct stare.).  In keeping with her classical upbringing, these are women larger than life, women as goddesses. This was work that obeyed Renoir’s challenge: “Paint with joy, with the same joy with which you make love.”

Back to Part One

Skunk Cabbage Painting Sequence

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Skunk Cabbages-Ken Phillips

Skunk Cabbages-Ken Phillips

Every year, in earliest spring, when the skunk cabbage thrusts out of its swampy muck, I remember how my artist father, Ken Phillips, prized this wild, unusual plant. He used to take me down to the splendid swamp beyond our Mississauga home to admire these harbingers, which rose so mysteriously out of the ooze. So  fascinated was he by this strange wild plant, heralded by its mysterious mahogany spathes, and followed by huge, vividly green leaves, that eventually he made a series of six small oil paintings of them which I believe are some of his finest works. Unlike any other paintings, to me they evoke energy that blends the erotic and the spiritual in a stunning whole.

Skunk Cabbages-Ken Phillips

Skunk Cabbages-Ken Phillips