I grew up in a blaze of paintings. I have only to close my eyes to remember. Wherever I went within my artist parents' house, there was colour and texture and line.  As a child I peered at their paintings through forests of brushes, all the while breathing the pungent scents of linseed oil, and turpentine, fixative and varnish. My fingers dabbled in the chalky, vivid dust of pastels. I lingered near palettes decorated with vocabularies of lucent watercolours and opaque oil paints.  My playhouses were the scaffolds of six foot easels. Within the house, all was a fluid, brilliant chaos of everchanging pictures--on the walls, on the floors and in the closets. There was even an undersea mural in the bathroom.

There was a sense of theatre to my parents' house. We did not so much have furnishings as props--elegant chairs for models to pose in, costumes and draperies for backdrops, and an endless variety of the curious and beautiful objects required for still lifes. Sometimes even food was enlisted. A lobster was not to be eaten, but to be portrayed languishing beside an indigo and white Chinese jar. Onions might well disappear from the kitchen to be found in the studio\living room, nestled in the folds of a hand-woven Mexican cloth. In fact, so closely were theatre and art allied in my father's mind that he even built a tiny stage into one end of the studio.

My childhood reflections rested not so much in mirrors as in the parade of my mother's portraits of me--a small girl dressed in red and seated under a spreading beech tree, clutching a book; an older girl in her gree ballet dress and slippers, poised tremulously on a stool; an almost grown, enigmatic young woman in a white satin ball gown, seated in a Victorian chair, arms billowing with crimson peonies.

As I watched, the paintings came into bloom, multiplied and were set aside in favor of new visions. Some of the house's light went out when my father, Ken Phillips, died suddenly in 1983. Besieged by failing eyes and dwindling strength, my mother, Marie Cecilia Guad, clung to the house and to her painting. Although pictures, some of them fine ones, continued to be created there, the house became a sort of living gallery, a place where small grandchildren could prowl and teenaged ones could continue to breathe in images that had been familiar to them from earliest childhood. Indeed, it remained a place where all my mother's visitors, from Red Cross home-makers to professors, could experience the pictures in spite of the disorder. However, as her health and eyesight diminished, my mother became increasingly concerned that the paintings should be divided between my sister and me and safely preserved outside of her house until it should be possible to achieve a wider audience for them. 

Several potential agents and art consultants had told us that the works couldn't be exhibited or sold until they had been catalogued thoroughly by an expert, but after that they just shook their heads. A collection so large and in such disarray was hopelessly daunting, and no, they could suggest no one who would be willing to take it on.

We had our first real help when I contacted Michael Bell, [then] associate curator of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen's University. Although more practical and helpful than the agents had bee, he too appeared overwhelmed by the amount of work involved. When he proposed cataloguing as a necessary first step, I had the impression that he hoped this would act as a deterrent, saving art curators from the necessity of future decisions about a hopelessly unwieldy project. Determined to persevere, I asked again.  Whom could we hire for such a job? At last we received an answer: Deborah Brown (now Deborah Child), a recent graduate of Queen's University's master's program in art history, with some expertise in conservation.

Although the physical and logistical problems of cataloguing would be intense, Deborah brought to the project boundless enthusiasm and a sensitivity beyond what we could have hoped for. From the beginning she saw that the catalogue should include not simply a chronological record of the pictures, but also as much story and detail as possible, since my mother still was available to contribute helpful background information.

As it turned out, the cataloguing of my parents' art would be both a celebration and a mourning. On the one hand, this was a first-time gathering and appreciation of seven decades of work by two Canadian professional artists. As a chance to observe practically the entirety of the pair's work, the cataloguing offered the most glorious retrospective the artists could have desired.

On the other hand, our work was underlaid by an autumnal sadness as we faced the reality that the collection was making a transition.  In the future very few pictures would be added to it. Moreover, throughout the long and challenging process, my mother, my sister and I were continually confronted by the imminent dispersal of this untied body of work. 

How had it come to pass that there were so many pictures and that the majority had remained with the artists? Born in 1909 and 1908 respectively, Ken and Marie had both been engrossed by art since their earliest years. In the 1920's, while in their teens, both had experienced the excitement of the then intimate, magical College of Art (now the Ontario College of Art), led by Arthur Lismer, C.W. Jefferys, J.W. Beatty and J.E.H. MacDonald.  In 1930 they had headed for New York to continue their studies. That spring they married and returned to Toronto, confidently looking forward to the future.

In 1928, when he was only 19, Ken had two pictures in the Group of Seven style accepted for the Ontario Society of Artists' (OSA) spring exhibition.  At that time he had also sold a picture to the Art Gallery of Ontario, becoming the youngest artist to have done so. After they returned from New York, Marie's paintings were also exhibited by the OSA and she had cover illustrations accepted for Chatelaine

The thirties were a difficult decade for all Canadian artists: there was almost no money to be made. Nevertheless, Ken and Marie could count on exhibiting regularly in the prestigious OSA and Royal Canadian Academy (RCA) shows. In 1934, when she was just 26, Marie's picture Once Upon a Time, a dreamy, half-length portrait of a blonde wearing a white dress against a green and white background with fleur-de-lis, was included in an RCA show that travelled across Canada. At this time, in his Toronto newspaper column Art and Artists, Kenneth Wells remarked of Marie, “This lady is making rapid strides towards the front rank of figure painting.”  By 1938, when they moved from Toronto to Mississauga, where they built a house and studio in a small woods, Ken and Marie were on their way to established, if not lucrative, careers as artists.

But by the decade's end the string of successes broke. Public taste was changing.  Prudish Ontario viewers persuaded the OSA to ban nudes from their exhibitions. So many bland represenetations of lesser dignitaries were circulating that the general category of portraits was disallowed as well. Ken and Marie's striking full-length nudes and character portraits had been well received criticall, but now the artists found their subject focus shifting by necessity away from people and towards places and things.

The outbreak of the Second World War brought increasing isolation to Ken and Marie. Wartime restrictions on gas made it physically challenging to travel to Toronto for contact with friends and galleries, let alone to transport pictures there for exhibitions.  Moreover their lack of money, which continued beyond the '30's, meant that there was little time for work on their art. The house, which they had to build themselves, demanded far too much of their time. For Ken the construction continued for years, while Marie was hampered by her necessarily primitive housekeeping arrangements as well as her uncertain health.

After the war, abstract art rode the crest of a wave of popularity that was to destroy my parents' hopes for recognition. Separated from their artist colleagues and from influential people who might have helped their careers, their sense of rejection increased.  They withdrew almost completely into their art.

To Ken and Marie, art was an intensely meditated act of reverence. Although they had a profound and unflagging concern for perfecting technique, they lived to portray the spirit, the essence of all they found beautiful or significant.

Marie's earliest inspiration came from Raphael and the dream-like illustrations of books of fairy tales. Her elegant, graceful, poised classicism and lyrical perception of colour reflect a deep veneration of beauty. Her art reflects a profound control of media and technique.

At one time Ken proposed as his memorial Japanese artist Hokusai's inscription “Old Man Mad About Drawing.” Remaining closer in style to his OCA teachers than Marie, and like his admired teacher, Lismer, he became a compulsive draughtsman and caricaturist.  He was forever searching for and relishing the spirit in people, places and things. In reflecting this spirit's gesture, his eyes and hands were rarely still. He was a master of eloquent line. Although his best painting is less flatly decorative than that of his teachers, it can convey more intensity of conviction.

The Group of Seven began with a brilliant vision, but as critic Joan Murray has written, they “never lost control over what they saw; they did not, or could not recognize the strength that comes from using the unconscious.”  Unlike the Group of Seven, Ken and Marie continued to evolve their vision, not just in subject matter but in style. Particularly in their later art, their quest to convey rather than to control spirit put them increasingly in touch with the realm of the unconscious.

And so, over the years, the works of art accumulated: engravings, drawings in pen and ink and pencil, and water-colours and oils of nudes, costume studies, character sketches, still life groups, portraits, Canadian and European landscapes, scenes of a swiftly vanishing Toronto, flowers and animals domestic and wild, illustrations for murals--so many items that when my parents moved house to eastern Ontario in the late '70's, a full-sized moving van was required to transport their collection. The works were saved not because the artists couldn't beat to abandon the unsuccessful. Upon occasion both could be ruthless in eliminating chaff.  But mainly they were saved because Ken and Marie cast their nets very widely. There was no telling when an earlier picture, from whatever period would provide the impetus for new work to move ahead.  Former errors could be as telling as successes. The problem was that the artists were never granted sufficient space to be able to gain fluid access to the works. A second reason for the collection's bulk was Ken's uncommon percteption of time. Seemingly convinced that he would live forever, foraying ever onward into new and alluring projects, he nevertheless had a highly unusual list of priorities, devised to ensure him the maximum time for his art and for the quixotic exploration of peripherals such as carving, photography and the frame-making that was a necessary to move the pictures out into the workld.

At last, in the autumn of 1990, the first step began. Some of the most difficult work took place before the actual cataloguing began. My sister Lisa spent many long days searching out long lost paintings and roughly organizing the collection. In a sense, the first stages of the project were like a treasure hung--a kind of archaeology-within-a-house, as the layers of the artists' history were uncovered. Our search led us through nine rooms of the house and two small barns. Here, as if ready for immediate use, were stored the paraphernalia of the artists' lifetimes--plaster statues rescued from the demolished Toronto theatres Ken had loved to draw, luxuriant draperies to be hung behind still lifes, costumes for models, the laces and top hats we would later see pictured in the paintings we uncovered. In several rooms were racks of Ken's frames. Recognizing that a picture was unfinished until framed, yet unable to afford professional ones, he spent endless nights restoring second-hand frames and creating new ones, distressing them, staining them, labouriously burninshing them with gold leaf, often achhieving something original and more complementary to his paintings than the conventional ones he couldn't afford to buy.

And from these fascinating, improbable surroundings were mined countless previously forgotten pictures to add to the catalogue. Weary but triumphant, Lisa would climb the stairs to our workrooms, her arms full of paintings that had been removed from their stretchers and lost for decades among piles of the old magazines Ken saved for reference. Without her diligence they might well have been thrown out.

As the number of works mounted to the hundreds, and then thousands, the three of us, in consultation with my mother, had to decide on a method of cataloguing. Each day it became more evident that it would not be practical to record every work, although part of our task would be to divide each of the pictures between my sister and me.  Although the works would ultimately be moved from Marie's home into safer storage, in the meantime, we had to find a place for Deborah to work. With the number of pictures growing daily, and as more were discoved in the most unlikely places, space to sort them was urgently needed. We also had to reconsider how much of Deborah's time she and we could afford.

Calculating an effective system for cataloguing over 3,000 items was difficult. My mother, although physically impaired, was still a working artist, needing to be surrounded by a lively group of her pictures and to be able to refer easily to as many as possible. However, we recognized the necessity of establishing a static collection where the pictures could be protected properly and where they would be readily available to the curators we hoped would be choosing for exhibitions.

There was, as well, the difficulty of a family working together. Often my sister, as an artist-potter, and I, as a writer, had differing ideas about the eventual disposition of the collection. My mother and sister would have liked to have the works catalogued completely by subject, but, given limited time and work space for sorting, determining effective categories and making pictures conform completely to those categories proved impossible. All too often one of us confronted the others: “Would you call this a barn picture or a landscape?”  “Is the subject here skunk cabbages or wildflowers?”  Deborah pointed out that a catalogue composed chronologically would be more helpful to art historians and curators, but she also agreed to try to organize the pictures in subject categories as much as possible.

In the end, our choice of chronological order provided a wonderful overview of my parents' working life. It was exhilarating to see in such abundant detail the evolution of our parents' work from the '20s to the '80s, the creations of a couple who had studied with the same teachers and who often used the same subjects, but always differently.

The atmosphere that autumn crackled with diverse emotions. There was continual elation at the discoveries. Many times a day each of us would burst in on the others. “Look, I've found the preliminary sketches for Marie's self-portrait where she wore the plumed hat and velvet jacket. These tell us so much about what she was able to do.” Deborah would be jubilant over her detective work, having discovered drawings not seen since the 30's. Or, as the late afternoon sun slanted into her makeshift workroom: “I've identified the synagogue in Ken’s picture.”  Or, last thing before she left at night: “Here is Ken's study of the same black male nude Marie did. They're both so different, and both are absolutely gorgeous.!” A feeling of inspiration came from living and working with the paintings. As Picasso observed, “A picture lives its life like a living creature, undergoing the changes that daily life imposes upon us.”  Those days we were living intimately with a shifting array of thousands of living paintings and drawings. But there also was a poignant and pervasive sadness in reliving the acute lifelong disappointment that Ken and Marie's vision and ability had remained largely unshared.  And there was sorrow as well that the collection would be dispersed, first to storage and eventually to my sister and me, who now would own the paintings.

All too often I was tempted away from my work of arranging the pictures so Deborah could catalogue them, or assessing the contents of notebooks and sktechbooks.  In the next room Deborah would be asking Marie for details: “Well you see,” Marie would explain, this study would have been done in the thirties at the Graphic Arts Club.  The models at the studio there assumed less formal poses than the ones at the college.” And I would slip across the hall to see what the informal pose looked like. On the way back I lingered in front of one of Marie's luminous, full-length nudes, a rapturous figure posed with upswept arms, before a midnight background of whirling galaxies. I had wondered if the several months' intense contact would make me like the collection less. Instead, I often found myself overcome by the fineness of so many of the works, and spent much time musing over the beauty I was discovering.

Marie's portraits were vivid and perfectly poised. They were lovely to look at, but also compelling to study, as the expressions of her models had that extraordinary complexity which, coming from long sessions with the subject, is beyond the scope of the camera. From her earliest works in the thirties, she had an amazing sureness of touch.  She once remarked, with very little pride, that by her third year at the college her teachers had said she needed little guidance. After ensuring that she was favourably placed near the models, they praised her work, but left her alone.

As with so many artists, after the school years there had been few opportunities to use models, and so they inevitably had turned to painting themselves. Indeed, I found the progression of self-portraits by both of my parents, from youth to old age, particularly arresting, especially in combination with the portraits the husband and wife had done of each other at different periods.

There were also the landscapes. After the thirties, when they moved to the country and away from the Toronto influence, they abandoned the handsome but limited planes and poster-like confinement of the Group of Seven for a livelier vision and a more supple style where line sang and colour was less sombre. It was as if they had moved out of the woods and into sunlit fields. In her new surroundings, Marie began her deft, lyrical watercolours of wild flowers that spoke eloquently of the essence of the individual flower or leaf. Ken saw his world differently. In his latter years, as he moved inevitably towards death, the earth's poetry took on a decaying, jungle-like nature in his work. This vision resolved itself in his final year, when he penned wild geese wheeling over wind-swept pines and a distant huddling cemetery.

Muskoka, Georgian Bay, Mississauga, Britain and Europe, and finally eastern Ontario were all reflected in my parents' art, but some of Ken's most successful work captured Toronto.  Trapped into a living as a commercial artist, Ken's life was made bearable during his lunch hours. Every day he arrived at work early and skipped his tea breaks so he could spend an hour and a half at noon steeping himself in the bricks, the trees, the steeples and the characters of his beloved city. Truly a man mad about drawing, his fingers searched his subjects as a blind man's fingers would search a face to know it.  At first he captured cathedrals, jumbles of stands at the old Kensington market, or tramps lolling in the park outside the Grange. Then in the fifties, as the city flourished, he sought demolitions, catching the sweep of a proscenium chained to the wreckers' grapples, a crew roasting eggs around a wood fire in the former orchestra pit of a theatre, as the snow drifted past the balcony from a rent in the ceiling. Elegiac, these pictures contrasted with the burgeoning life of his other Toronto scenes. Nevertheless, as his friend, the writer Robert Thomas Allen wrote of Ken: “His drawings do not re-create Victorian times...rather they show what the wealth and richness of the Victorian times have left in the house, churches, theatres, tree-lined streets...There's both a feel of the past and a feel of the driving surging life that belongs to the future in these drawings of buildings up to 100 years old...that bring back the flavour but tell of the vital forces that keep life moving on.”