Tag Archives: Canadian Art 1930’s

Frames My Artist Father Designed

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

 

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]

 

Art and Theater

skgi_2944925_24810 K theatre 1Stage within, stage without. Not only did my father love the grand old theaters of Toronto, but he was forever searching for ways to include performance in his own life. When he built their studio in 1940, it seemed natural to him to include the beginnings of a small, curtained stage between the giant yellow-varnished bamboo pillars which upheld the balcony part of the staircase to the upstairs bedrooms. The long landing half-way up the stairs doubled as a balcony, and he had entrances planned to each side of the little stage area itself.

Art-making was performing. He knew that. Ever since the days when he had been a boy magician on the stages of church halls, impressing his audiences with the quick sketches which changed a cat to a boy to a tree all within a few strokes, he had understood that. It seemed as necessary for him to have a theater in the home as a meditation center might be for others. Although my father could fiercely guard his privacy, he was conscious of a responsibility to entertain and inform the crowds that inevitably gathered when he was sketching in Toronto.

skgi_2944857_22054 K Toronto 3At the time that he built his Harborn stage, he still anticipated that friends and associates from his Toronto experiences would be a part of his life there, likely improvising charades or acting scenes from his beloved Dickens. Sadly, he never found a way to create the entertainments he envisioned. Still, so intrinsic were dramatics to him that when he was in his late sixties, his plans for his later home in eastern Ontario quite unjustifiably included a massive stage in one of the outbuildings.

 

 

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.

 

Glory – The O.S.A. Exhibition

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

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.

More About Phillips and Guard

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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