Category Archives: Drawings

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.

 

 

 

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

Circus Art

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It was only after my father retired that my parents came to consider the artistic possibilities of circuses. One Spring day, in search of new subjects, they scouted the arrival of Circus Vargas in Brampton. As they sat in the parking lot on their stools that morning sketching the build-up, they became increasingly excited by the many subjects that presented themselves. Nothing else was available for them of that caliber and glamor. They decided to attend the afternoon performance and immediately were enchanted by the color, movement and character of the entertainment.

Circus by Night Marie Cecilia Guard

Circus by Night Marie Cecilia Guard

Later, reflecting on what they had seen, they recognized that the arrival of television would make it difficult for circuses to continue.  Here was yet another dying art for them to record while there still was time, and they decided to return as often as possible. It wasn’t long until the circus people noticed how they and their doings were being magically captured on paper. Intrigued in turn by the artists’ own performances, they began to open up to them. As my parents got to know the entertainers, they were invited inside the splendor, heartbreak and sometime tawdriness of their world. Because the performers were gypsies and also aliens (as my artist parents sometimes felt themselves to be), they were glad to welcome people they saw as fellow performers and to offer them friendship.

A family of jugglers with a bicycle act invited them into their trailer for tea, and this was the beginning of a number of circus friendships, which lead to letters back and forth, a commission for my father to do a painting for the owner, and even invitations for the pair to visit the troupe in their southern winter quarters.

Unfortunately, by this time, the artists felt too old for such an adventure, but over the next few years, my parents searched out circuses, and particularly Circus Vargas, whenever possible and created series of pictures based on their sketches.

Ken and Caricature

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At the same time that he was searching out interesting architecture to draw, my father began his caricature sketches of Toronto’s people, partly as notations for figures he could later add to his pictures, and partly as a warm-up for his more serious work, but mostly because he found gesture irresistible. At last he had found a way to come close to them without their even realizing he was there.

Image (87)Furtively sheltering his small, homemade notebook in the palm of his hand, in the forties he began a candid, rollicking Tristam Shandy-type of sketching everywhere he went. One minute he would be chaffing with the wreckers, or delving into their equipment, the next he would whip out the sketchpad. (He showed me how he rested it on the inside of his wrist and flattened the angle of his favorite pencil so that he could work unnoticed.)

During morning coffee breaks in Simpsons cafeteria, he caught secretaries gossiping. In Kensington Park he drew tramps arguing, or a portly, puff-cheeked tuba player marching in a small parade. In Grange Park (the hub of his territory) he captured clusters of the down-and-out gathered around a picnic table gesticulating over cards, or children gleefully splashing each other at a drinking fountain. On the train ride home he penciled in an exhausted stockbroker sprawled yawning across his seat. In this way, as his pencil groped for their truth as a blind man’s hands might read a face, he achieved an extraordinary intimacy.

An Artist’s Unique Christmas Cards

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One way in which my parents reached out to people was by designing their own Christmas cards. The first year that my mother had been back at art school after her marriage, she took a commercial art course, which included illustration. O.C.A. students then were encouraged
to integrate art into their daily lives. At Christmas all of them were assigned a project making a linocut Christmas card. My mother was pleased to find that the other students were impressed by her effort, and thus began a sequence of Christmas cards which
continued all my parents’ lives. At first, the cards were hers. But once she had babies to care for, she let my father take over the job. He bought a hand-turned printing press at one of the second-hand stores he liked to frequent near the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, and he
began to take production of the annual card seriously. More than just a greeting, it was intended as a message that both artists were continuingly faithful to their art.

Card 1Every year, my father followed a complex process. This began with copious sketches and consultation with my mother. When they were satisfied with the design, he carefully transferred the design (in reverse) onto a linoleum block, which he then cut with gouges. Because he had so little time to work, often it was perilously close to Christmas by the time my father made his way to the chilly cellar where he kept his press. He mixed the glossy thick ink to the right consistency and rolled it onto the carved lino block. With great care, he placed the heavy paper on the block and set them under the press. For each of the hundred cards, he had to hand-cranked the press to imprint the design and then release it, being careful not to shift the paper before the image was set. Inevitably, in this uncertain process, there were failures which demanded that my father work even longer into the night. Even then he wasn’t finished. Frequently he was tempted to touch up the cards individually with white or vermilion paint.

Toronto Subway

Toronto Subway

Gathered together, these special Christmas greeting cards tell the story of an artist’s shifting focus, and his joyful sense of place. There is a woodcut of my parents’ newly-built Mississauga home on a snowy night, and then a picture of me as a child, tilting upwards
on a swing, followed by one showing two small daughters admiring the stars through the ivy‑wreathed studio window. Next come the Toronto cards, spirited reproductions of the fascinating buildings he loved to sketch in his noon hours–the old Arcade, Loretto Abbey, a Christmassy scene of Kensington Market piled high with spruces, and even a depiction of an old post office, designed to appear like a cancelled postage stamp. Later, about the time that my parents started to travel abroad, commercial reproduction had become sufficiently accessible that my father was able to give up the time-consuming lino cuts and switch to professional reproductions of pen and ink sketches.

These later cards told of their travels, adventures which earlier would have been beyond
their wildest dreams. –A page of airily sketched caricatures of band players from Petticoat Lane, the sweeping rooftops and sky of Bellinzona, the graceful interior of Ste Chapelle du Palais, each card was a small gift of art for the recipients. And finally there were designs which told of their move to a handsome limestone house in eastern Ontario where they could be near their daughters and their families.Bellinzona

PAINTING WITH FIRE

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20131013_154028_edited-1
Everything my father, Ken Phillips, did he did with a passionate involvement which I think is rare these days. If, on a Saturday morning, he was stirring vile-smelling rabbit glue on the stove, which he used for preparing his canvases, he made it a thoughtful, relishing process. But, he gave the same zeal to raking leaves from the lawn with exactly the right rake for his purposes, or to working soap into his fine oil painting brushes to clean them. When he danced around the
house, testing out a new tambourine he’d rescued from the Crippled Civilians’ store in Toronto, he was quivering with pleasure at this new addition to the
many instruments which graced our home.

But when he turned to painting, it seemed to me that he painted with fire. There was a quick, sizing glance, followed by a flurry as he blended colors on his palette, then a second look, to check, followed by a sure stroke on his canvas. As the work progressed, he advanced and receded from his ground as if doing battle. Yet his painting was also a tender love-making or a dance which inspirited his pictures. Covertly, I, his daughter, watched as with brave ardor he forced the meaning into his swift strokes.

Color and light giving joy

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Ontario Farmhouse - Marie Cecilia Guard

Ontario Farmhouse – Marie Cecilia Guard

Reflecting about her art near the end of a long life, my mother, Marie Cecilia Guard, wrote a journal entry which might have provided her epitaph: “My subject is color and light giving joy.” She truly lived a lifetime devoted to art. With every spare moment she could steal from a life of poverty, ill health and family obligations, she was painting, drawing, and studying. But the cost was very high.

Quite simply, being a woman artist in her generation meant walking away from the crowd. Upon graduation in the thirties, many of her woman friends from the College of Art married and largely abandoned their artistic dreams. Her two best friends, Annora Brown and Euphemia (Betty) McNaught returned to Alberta, where they painted and taught art all their long lives. But, unlike my mother, they did not take on the distractions of marriage and children.

For much of her adult life, in spite of her great love affair with my father, Ken Phillips, Marie suffered from profound loneliness. Moving to Mississauga from Toronto just before World War II and its ensuing gas rationing, inevitably meant that she and Ken largely severed their art connections. Her middle class neighbors in Mississauga found nothing in common with the beautiful artist, and she, in turn, recoiled from stultifying coffee parties, where conversation centered on washing machines and new recipes. When neighborhood children were invited to my birthday party, and it was
discovered that the art on the walls of our home included large pictures of unclothed women, our family became permanently branded as suspect.

In the fifties and early sixties, when my mother taught would-be artists in Port Credit, she faced another, but equally unfortunate, kind of distancing. In awe of her ability and knowledge, her students were friendly, but, as students often do, they mainly kept their teacher at arm’s length.

In terms of promoting her art, my mother was hampered by old-fashioned notions. The dreadful accusation of “not nice” often rose to thwart her. “It was not nice to promote your own work.” What was “nice” was cherishing the improbable dream that at long last someone would discover how gifted you were and would take up your cause for you. Isolated as she was, she lacked the confidence to “put herself forward” in the competitive post-war art world.

And yet, my mother never, ever gave up on what mattered most to her. The hand-sized homemade sketch pads my father crafted sat ready wherever in the house she might be. I remember her pausing from stirring soup to capture a chickadee in the pines outside the window. Still lifes were arranged in the Studio, where giant easels loomed, were waiting to be captured in oil. There are sheets of sketches of her daughters as babies. Marie had merely to glimpse a gleam of sun striking from clouds, and she whipped out her pencil crayons to capture the evanescent light, making notations for a later
picture. In late life, coming out of an anesthetic after hip surgery, her first request was for paper and pen. Doctors and nurses gathered in amazement as she captured a likeness of the hundred year old woman in the bed beside hers. In spite of macular degeneration and cataracts, a large table in her retirement home room was spread with masses of color studies which she continued nearly until her final, devastating stroke.

20131013_153726_edited-1“My subject is color and light giving joy.” To this I would add that her gift was to see and convey Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”