Category Archives: Oil Paintings

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.

 

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

 

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.

Glory – The O.S.A. Exhibition

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Early one morning in March, before going to his advertising job at Simpson’s, my father, Ken, trudged the many blocks from my parents’ Charles Street apartment to the Art Gallery of Toronto [sic]. He was badly hampered in his downhill journey by the two large paintings he and my mother, Marie, were entering to be juried for the year’s prestigious O.S.A. [Ontario Society of Artists] exhibition. He made the trip on foot, partly because he could not afford the carfare and partly because the large pictures were too awkward to wrestle onto the streetcars.

In Toronto in the Thirties, a lack of gallery space, which could have enabled artists to exhibit individually, meant that the exhibition system was dominated by artist societies such as the O.S.A. and the R.C.A. During this period, and into the war years, in spite of their youth, (Ken was just 26, and Marie 27) my parents exhibited significant works almost every yearat the O.S.A. show, and also had paintings accepted at the R.C.A. Toronto shows in 1930, 1934 and 1935. Few of their classmates from the College of Art exhibited in the professional shows. As my mother recalled, since most of them did little work beyond their class assignments they had little to exhibit.

You could tell from the outside of the envelope whether or not it contained an acceptance, she recalled. And if the letter was a ‘yes’, it meant that there was the further excitement of attending an exhibition opening. As Art students, my parents generally attended the art gallery during the daytime, when they could study the exhibitions for free.

That year, my mother’s impressive, life-sized nude, the largest painting in the O.S.A. exhibition, was given pride of place on a wall of its own, while my father was represented by Miss Margot Guard, an elegant, somewhat smaller portrait of Marie’s beautiful younger sister in a white silk dress, with a black chiffon cape.

At an opening, they were confronted by a crush of dignitaries in formal dress. Some of the more experienced artist stationed themselves close to their pictures. Unfortunately my young parents were too reticent and unsophisticated to try promoting their work this way. The most they felt able to do was to station Ken’s excited brother Joe and Marie’s sister Margaret on either side of their pictures, to eavesdrop on the viewers’ conversations.

What mattered most to the couple was their painting. Surely if they continued to work and improve, in time they would meet with public success. Meanwhile, inspired by each other’s untiring efforts, they continued to study and paint.

The following year, Marie’s Upward was followed by Ken’s highly effective 1936 exhibition piece Votaress, a full-length painting of a nude kneeling, and holding grey drapery above her head. This time it would be his turn to have the distinction of being the largest picture of that year’s O.S.A. exhibition.

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.”