Tag Archives: Canadian artists

An Artist’s Unique Christmas Cards

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

The Little House in the Mississauga Woods

Harborn Road

Harborn Road

One spring afternoon, my mother was driving along a dirt road north of the Credit River, brooding over their need for a better place to live and her love of country scenery. She stopped to sketch two big, leaning poplars, and looked into a lovely, woodsy glen. It was such a beautiful wild place, she remembered later, with immense trees and many wild flowers. On that day the woods were dappled with white trilliums, and the swamp in back of the woods was a vast spread of yellow marsh marigolds. By good fortune, just down the road from the poplars, she discovered a two-and-a-half acre property they could afford by using five hundred dollars they had saved from my father’s overtime work.

Often, later, as her isolation pressed in on her, my mother was to wonder whether the two artists should have stayed in Toronto. But really, she knew they had no choice. She had always loved the country, so for her the decision was easy, but my father, who had
never lived there, and who so loved his city, was doubtful at first. As it turned out though, the Harborn Road [later changed to Harborn Trail] home would become one of the joys of his life.

They started to build a summer cabin the next spring, in 1937 on Coronation Day, as my mother’s journal of the time notes. Because the cabin was destined to become a garage for a future house, my father insisted on a cement floor and garage doors, and actually drove their car in with them. With a bedroom scarcely bigger than a closet, they could scarcely squeeze in bunk beds. It was a particularly damp summer and my mother recalled that, in the closeness under the surrounding trees the mosquitoes were savage.

Both my parents thought they would be relieved in the autumn when cold weather forced them to return to Charles Street. But, once they were back in the city my mother missed her woods profoundly. As a result, they secured a mortgage from Ken’s carpenter father and hired him and my Uncle Joe to work making the cabin into a home over the winter. A basement was dug out with the help of work horses. It turned out to be a very snowy winter but the house grew under a spirit of good cheer, with much help from family. On weekends, both grandfathers, and any other available family members threw themselves into the
building.

The home was to be a simple house in the heart of the woods, clothed in brown-stained shingles, so that it would blend into the forest background. Initially it consisted of a kitchen where the summer cabin had been, a bathroom and a living-room cum studio. It would have large windows (which my parents later discovered let out the heat in winter and left them with nowhere to hang pictures) but then, my parents always considered windows to be the most essential feature of a house.

On Sunday, January 30, 1938, my excited mother wrote in her journal: We went out to see our house. It is so thrilling! It is hard to believe in its reality. To see our plans and little model grow up in a couple of weeks. The windows are placed in the new part and it was such fun seeing the different views from them. It is just four weeks since they started to get the foundation dug. They now have the walls boarded in and nearly half the roof shingled.

By March 9, she blurted “…too busy to write, moving Sat..” However it was not long before the poor planning and lack of money caught up with them. They discovered that, between art
paraphernalia, costumes, props and books, they had accumulated so much that the new house turned out to be more cramped for storage space than their Charles Street apartment. Worst of all, there was no room to set up easels and paint.

How they managed, and even prospered, in spite of the upcoming war, poverty, and a difficult house is a compelling story.

 

PAINTING WITH FIRE

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

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.”

Who Were Ken Phillips and Marie Cecilia Guard?

 

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.

More About Phillips and Guard