Passionate Gesture
Passionate Gesture is not so much a portrait as a story, the story of a Canadian 
artist couple who spent a lifetime intensely devoted to art and each other. By 1936, Ken Phillips, and his wife, 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 travelled across Canada, and one of Ken's wood engravings had been acquired by the Art Gallery of Toronto. 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, glamourous 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 these artists to a painful choice. The thirties and forties were a challenging period for them, as they were for most Canadian artists, fraught with financial disappointment and rapid change in public taste. The war isolated them from mentors and associates; a disinclination and inability to engage politically increasingly distanced them from success. Poor health and 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 and the will to go on creating it. Over six decades their works evolved, and for the last five was largely unseen and forgotten by the public.
It is hard not to ask questions. What would have happened if they had had an independent income, as 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? Would Marie's health have improved? What if Ken could have afforded to retire early?
And yet, we are left, all of us, simply with what is. And, in this case, that is a great deal. My parents invented their lives against a backdrop of painful circumstances which might well have made them quit. How hard it must have been for Ken to sketch mattresses at Simpson's Art Department, while continuing to follow his own vision of his art with the remaining dregs of his time. But, unlike so many other aspiring artists, he never stopped. Many of Marie's women contemporaries gave up their art upon marriage. She came from a background where careers for women were frowned on. But, with Ken's wholehearted encouragement, Marie continued to paint and draw all of her life. There were few maps or models for women artists then, or for an artist from a working background such as Ken's. But they never gave up. Instead, they honed their skills, rigourously 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 work under the guidance and inspiration of the other.
But if this is a story, it is also an invitation to begin a dialogue about the meaning of these lives and these artists' work, and also about the position of art at present. With the encouragement of their favourite teacher, Arthur Lismer, Guard and Phillips 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, these artists chose to remain true to the philosophy of their Group of Seven teachers, while expanding it in individual 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 was a precious resource which belongs to all and which should be widely available. To be an artist, as Henry Moore once affirmed, 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.
* Now the Art Gallery of Ontario.
