EXCERPT: PASSIONATE GESTURE 

 

SKETCHING WRECKS 

For my father, the fifties was the time when he became wholly committed to his lifelong quest for the Japanese "line that moves everything." The old motto of the Toronto Art Students' League (where each member was supposed to make at least one sketch each day), Nulla dies sine linea (No day without a line), might have been his.

 

The fresh, unretouched quality of drawing was particularly suited to his impetuous style. In a vivid shorthand, he was able to interpret character, light, atmosphere, and tone. And it is here that his sensibilities can be studied at their best.

At this time, development in Toronto was burgeoning. After the stagnation of the Depression and the War, a new prosperity meant that everywhere familiar, historically and architecturally significant buildings were being torn down to make way for the new. Within a decade there were a new city hall, provincial court house, conservatory of music, and a host of parking lots to serve the expanding population.

 

My father's love of early Toronto architecture ran deep in his blood. Although never formally trained as an artist, his Grandfather Phillips, as Chief Draftsman for the Toronto Transportation Commission, had supervised the drafting of plans for public buildings. And later his son, my grandfather, became a carpenter, but a carpenter, who, Robert Thomas Allen wrote "wrought from wood wide and gracious curving stairways, graceful bell towers, generous mantels ...the architectural details that suggest the feeling, the pace and the scope of the time in which they were wrought."  It is likely that these men taught my father to appreciate what he saw as he roamed about the city even from his earliest childhood. My father's fascination with actually drawing Toronto may have originated in the thirties when Simpson's commissioned him to do the series of pictures of the city's early days.

 

Now he recognized that the beloved city of his youth was dying, and he became vigilant, rushing out almost every noon hour to capture the last moments of the splendid buildings that had enriched his life. At this time, demolition was a lingering proces, which had to be performed one section at a time, so that it was possible for an artist to sketch the progress of destruction over a number of days.

 

He began with the old fruit market which was replaced by the O'Keefe Centre (now the Hummingbird Centre). Later, alarmed by the pace of the destruction, he began to record anything that had a special feeling for him and was (of necessity) within easy range of his downtown Simpson=s office. A street scene featuring a corner grocery near Grange Park, the decorative fretwork on a Victorian house on Huron Street, the Great Western Railway Station at the Yonge Street esplanade, with the Locomotive No. 90, the Scotia, which had been made in 1860. The fascinating breathing, snorting locomotives at the bottom of Somerset Avenue had been a part of his earliest years, and now, each day, he rode a clanging, rushing train to and from work.. The more he drew, the more he saw that needed drawing.

 

How could he seize more time for this urgent work? He must. He stopped having tea breaks and took to bringing a lunch from home, which he ate at his desk while he did his commercial work. In this way he managed to escape for an hour and a half. Fighting the weather, the crowds and the exhaustion caused by his early morning starts, he worked on the spot. He never used photos, being convinced that the immediacy would be lost. In his notes for an unpublished article, writer Robert Thomas Allen captured his friend at work:
...in front of the lovely Georgian house on Huron? street ... as he sketched in the warm early spring sunshine the people tumbled out to watch and enjoy ... and the youngest boy in his exuberance danced a Charleston that is caught and held in the lovely sketch. In this work he achieved the kind of architectural drawing which not only records the form of a building but which also evokes a living quality.

 

Although he had a great feeling for the structure and solidity of buildings, it was the complex layering of life and surroundings as well as the architecture, which compelled him. Needing to balance Toronto's concentration on growth and change, he was drawn ever deeper in search of what he saw as an eternal reality, a city with a tangible soul. He plunged into his lines as if he were taking on in single-handed combat the ruin of the beauty.

In the thirties he had used pencil (which often smudged) in his drawings and small notepads. But now, driven by his need for haste, he began working directly on the large 18" x 24" sheets of cardboard which backed the tracing paper he used at Simpson's. This way he devised support and surface all in one. At first he used one of the new felt pens, or a fountain pen with black or sepia ink on water colour paper. For a child, watching his felt pen whistling over these boards had the fascination of watching messages spelled out through a ouija board. Often, at home, he later decorated these with wash and/or white ink. But it wasn't until, poking about in the ruins of Loretto Abbey, the school where my grandmother had been so happy, that he made a discovery which was to lead to some of his best drawings. Pen plant, as he called it, actually was Japanese knotweed, the "Canadian bamboo" , which Arthur Lismer had advocated to his art students back at O.C.A.. When he salvaged some of the plant to grow at Harborn, one of the workmen asked him why he would bother with such an insignificant plant. "Don't tell anyone," he grinned, "but it makes good wine." The pen plant flourished in dark glades at Harborn, and later moved with my parents to their eastern Ontario home. Charmed by the rough, expressive line he could achieve with pens made from its stems, he began extensively using them on water colour paper. These reed pens, fragile and short-lived, were not easy to work with, but they enabled him to soften his lines and make them more pliant, and hence added a more expressive quality to his work. Later, and particularly when he travelled, he experimented with different fountain pens, but he never came upon a truly satisfactory one.

 

Most of all, my father found himself at home with the act of drawing. Tiny detail had become restrictive. He now was working in broad, vigourous sweeps, so he could feel himself to be inside his subjects. The new work was emphatic, but also rough and free, with dramatic tonal contrasts and complex variation of texture. He found a line to dance the eye across the page, expressing rhythmic movement and mass. It often seemed that to see him drawing was to see his breath blended with the spirit of the subject and brought to the page.

 

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