Category Archives: Group of Seven

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.

 

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.”

More About Phillips and Guard

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It is hard not to ask questions. What would have happened if my parents had had an independent income as so many art students of their times did? What would have happened if they could have afforded to study in France or England? What if they could have moved to the American southwest as they once dreamed of doing? Would my mother’s health have improved? What if my father could have afforded to retire early?

And yet, we are left, all of us, simply with what is. And in the case of these Canadian artists, is a great deal. Ken Phillips and Marie Cecilia Guard invented their lives against a backdrop of painful circumstances which might well have made them quit. How hard it must have been for my father to sketch mattresses at Simpson’s Art Department, while continuing to follow his own vision for his art with the remaining dregs of his time at home. But he did.

Many of my mother’s women contemporaries gave up their art upon marriage. But, with my father’s wholehearted encouragement, my mother continued to paint
and draw all of her life. Nasturtiums - Marie Cecilia GuardThere were few maps or models for women artists then, or for a would-be artist from a working background such as my father’s. But my parents never gave up. Instead, they honed their skills, rigorously criticizing and advancing their own work, and always studying art of all kinds for its lessons. The art they created was suffused with the inner vitality of their subjects.

Throughout their lives, these artists maintained an exceptional love and respect for each other and each sustained his/her work under the guidance and inspiration of the other.

But if their lives include the seeds of a story, this story is also an invitation to begin a dialog about both these artists’ work, and also about what it means to be an artist in Canada. With the encouragement of their favorite teacher, Arthur Lismer, my parents chose to swim lifelong against the current, to search for their vision and to hold to it.

As critic John Berger has insisted, the notion of freedom from tradition is illusory. It is the artist’s job to articulate an authentic response within the framework of continuity. At great personal and professional cost, my parents chose to remain true to the philosophy of their Group of Seven
teachers, while evolving in their own ways.

Their convictions are particularly timely: They supported the right of differing conceptions to share the public eye. But they also most emphatically
believed that art is a precious resource which belongs to all and which should be widely available.

As Henry Moore once affirmed, to be an artist is to believe in life. Through suffering and alienation, as the climate changed against classical artists, Phillips and Guard sought and found a unique vehicle for their intense response to the spirit in things. Through their personal crucible, they learned, as we all must learn, that it is the sense of reverence which shores us against the paralysis of despair.

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Who Were Ken Phillips and Marie Cecilia Guard?

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It has been easy to be a classical artist. Today it is immensely difficult. And immensely necessary. John Berger, Permanent Red

By 1936, my parents, Ken Phillips and Marie Cecilia Guard, had every reason to look forward to a brilliant future. Although they were only twenty-eight, they were exhibiting regularly in the prestigious O.S.A. (Ontario Society of Artists) and R.C.A. (Royal Canadian Academy) shows. Indeed, Marie’s powerful, full-length female nudes had been given pride-of-place in these shows. One of her paintings had traveled across Canada, and one of Ken’s wood engravings had been acquired by the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario)]. Very much in love with each other and with art, they were at the beginning of a lifelong adventure together, a quest to convey in pictures the spirit which lay deep within all things.

Guard and Phillips were fortunate to have studied with distinguished teachers Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, Emanuel Hahn and J.W. Beatty and to have lived their youth in the atmosphere of a flourishing, glamorous Toronto. The young artists’ pictures reflect the radiant sense of possibility and promise which was typical of the best of those times.

Unfortunately, many factors forced my parents to a painful choice. As they were for most Canadian artists, the thirties and forties were a challenging period, fraught with financial disappointment and rapid change in public taste. The war isolated them from mentors and associates; a disinclination and inability to play political games increasingly distanced them from success. Poor health and the lack of money eroded the time they could devote to their lifework. By the fifties, Guard and Phillips felt forced to choose to give up marketing their art in order to have the time to go on creating it. Over six decades their works evolved, but in later years, with a few significant exceptions, their art was largely unseen.

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