Tag Archives: Canadian women artists

Canadian Artist Couple

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313KMarie pink brushes

Ken’s portrait of Marie

Canadian artist couple, Ken Phillips and Marie Cecilia Guard, my parents, were unusual in that they remained profoundly in love with each other for more than 50 years, and each was supportive of the other’s work. No one, my mother said to me, was ever as interesting and exciting as my father. For all the vexations caused by his full-blown artistic temperament, this remained true all of their married lives. In turn, my father adored my mother for her exceptional beauty and graceful ways, but also for her intelligence. Both studied and learned all of their lives.

My parents shared a passionate understanding that art meant everything to them. There never was a line between living their art, whether by pouring over Turner paintings in a library book or studying Rembrandt’s treatment of lace in the AGO. Each artist valued the other’s opinion over anyone else’s. A picture was never complete without a thorough critiquing by the other. Each understood the other’s way of working and was supportive of them. There was no question of one advancing without the other.

Marie’s portrait of her Young Husband

What happens when such a complex, profound partnership disintegrates? During his last years, my father became ever more difficult to live with, so in some ways his sudden death from a massive heart attack must have been a relief to my mother. And yet, without her husband to critique her work, she seemed at a loss about how to go on. There was never any question that she would continue to paint, but without his expert assessment and suggestions, after such a long partnership, I don’t believe she ever clearly saw a direction for her work. Yes, she went among the canvases, so lovingly prepared by Ken, choosing one to work on. And yes, she hunted through the frames he also had worked up so they would be ready. As always, until her last year she rarely went a day without picture making. Occasionally, she would surprise me by asking my opinion, and it was then that I saw most clearly how much had been lost.

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

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.

The Little House in the Mississauga Woods

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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

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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.

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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