Passionate Gesture is the biography of that rare entity, a Canadian artist couple, Ken Phillips (1909-1983) and Marie Cecilia Guard (1908-2000), told by their daughter, Peri Phillips McQuay. Phillips and Guard attended the Ontario College of Art during the dynamic years of 1928 to 1935 (when Marie completed a post-graduate year), as well as the Grand Central School of Design in New York in 1930.  Their teachers included Arthur Lismer, J.W. Beatty, J.E.H. Macdonald, and Emanuel Hahn.  They both painted continuously from their childhood until Phillips' deaths. In the 1930's they exhibited regularly in the Ontario Society of Artists and Royal Academy shows. 

Ken Phillips, at 19, was one of the youngest painters to exhibit at an O.S.A. exhibition in the Art Gallery of Toronto, and had one of his woodcuts purchased by that gallery when he was in his early twenties.  Marie Cecilia Guard had work that travelled across Canada. By the mid-1930's the artists had every reason to look forward to exciting careers.  In spite of the difficult economic climate of the Depression era, both husband and wife regularly exhibited major pictures (figure and landscape) in the prestigious Royal Canadian Academy and Ontario Society of Artists shows, and their paintings travelled across Canada and to the United States.

However, because of the Depression and the advent of the Second World War, followed by the post-war emphasis in Canada on abstract art, they eventually largely gave up trying to market and exhibit their paintings, preferring to focus all available time and energy on creating art.* But nothing could prevent them from a lifetime devoted to painting and drawing.