WELCOME TO THE DALI HOUSE (PLEASE MIND YOUR HEAD)

Sun 27th Jan, 2008, Canadiana, Black (Frank)

For Frank Black,
some posthumous admiration

Frank Black’s “Back Street Bermuda”, circa 1932
Click the image to see it much larger.

It was a really pleasant surprise to get a couple of comments on my March 2007 post on Canadian artists who aren’t well known beyond the national borders. And the comments weren’t about the brighter of these dimmer lights but about the least known of them all, Frank Black.

Frank Charles Black was a British-born, Toronto-based artist who was an associate of some members of the Group of Seven and shared their initial profession — commercial art — and their disdain for it. He retired from the business as soon as he could and moved to Georgetown, Ontario, just west of Toronto, where he taught art basics to pay the bills but finally got down to painting what he wanted to paint. He died in 1988.

The readers’ requests for more information prodded me to try and get in touch with John Sommer, proprietor of Gallery House Sol in Georgetown, which is also the town where I grew up. John knew Black fairly well, whereas I had only met the artist once, around 1976. Unfortunately House Sol doesn’t have an online address, and the local library, who I know could put us in touch, didn’t respond to my email. Georgetown does seem to be in a timewarp that way.

However, both the National Gallery of Canada and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts responded quickly and helpfully. The latter has no Frank Black works in its collection, but at least offered a list of titles from its archives:

“Minnieog” in the first entry could be a typo, since I’ve found no references to such a place in Ontario’s Georgian Bay area. There is, however, a Minnie Rock there. Other than that, the list indicates when Black was painting in Bermuda, which was central to the queries I had from both readers.

One of them, a resident of Lansdowne, Ontario, owns the painting reproduced at the top of this post, “Back Street Bermuda”. Her grandmother, she reported, had lived in Georgetown and while there bought a handful of Frank Black paintings. A label on the back of “Bermuda” includes accreditation by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

The National Gallery sent me by regular mail a package of photocopied newspaper clippings about Black, among which I was astonished to find two articles that I’d written while I was with Georgetown’s now-defunct Halton Hills Herald. I had no idea I was in the national archives (apart from police records).

Alas, neither of the galleries was able to supply digital images of any of Black’s work or confirm that any of his paintings had been at some point part of their collections (and the Art Gallery of Ontario is in the midst of a revamp for the next few months). But from the clippings, I’ve at least been able to prepare a short biography and extract some photos. The photocopied newspaper pictures are in rough shape, which I’m afraid still shows through in my Photoshopped versions in this post.

Black was born on December 18, 1894, Southall, Middlesex, England, to a family that had been involved in boatbuilding for many generations. John Sommer, whose Gallery House Sol debuted in 1962 with an exhibition of Black’s work and hosted him many times thereafter, placed the family “in and around Woodbridge”.

Frank’s father was a naval engineer and in 1901 was posted to Bermuda, taking the family along. Frank, then seven, was enrolled in school in the British Caribbean colony and within a few years took to both painting seascapes and building model boats, mimicking the family avocation.

While the National Gallery indicates that Black migrated to Canada in 1907, Sommers has said it was in 1911 that Frank’s mother brought her children to Toronto. Frank was initially taken on as an apprentice at the Hough Litho Company and then a year later joined the art department at McLean’s Publishers. McLean’s was for decades Canada’s version of Time magazine.

In 1915 Black enlisted in the 48th Highlanders and saw action in France the following year. He was wounded in April 1917, returned to the fight, and was wounded again near Vimy Ridge in February 1918, this time almost mortally. He spent nearly two years recuperating, first at an army hospital in England and then at Toronto’s Christie Street Hospital.

He finally emerged from the ordeal just before Christmas 1920, with a bullet still in one lung, and went back to his job with McLean’s. There he remained for a decade, in the meantime enhancing his talents with courses at the Ontario College of Art (where Arthur Lismer of the Group of Seven was among his teachers) and the Art Students League in New York City. Frank himself did some teaching at Danforth Technical School in Toronto.

In 1928 Black had his first painting accepted for an Ontario Society of Artists juried show, and he remained one of its choices for the next nine years. During World War II he had works accepted by the Royal Canadian Academy for three consecutive years.

Frank married Lillian Spears in 1930 and they honeymooned in Bermuda, and on his return to Toronto, Black joined the engraving house Batten Ltd as a commercial artist. Batten had formerly been known as Rapid Grip, and before that Grip Ltd, which was where CW Jefferys, Tom Thomson and several of the Group of Seven had once toiled on ads and packaging and posters.

In 1976, while he was having an exhibition in Brampton, Ontario, a small city near Georgetown, Frank told that community’s Daily Times that it was the pressure under which commercial artists worked for such companies that drove the likes of AJ Casson and Franklin Carmichael into the wilderness.

He implied that the grind of the Grip — the exacting precision of the work in the commercial shops — meant that their bottled-up creativity exploded as soon as they got into the great outdoors. And it was on the bondage at Batten and his later labours in commercial art that Frank finally turned his back in 1959. Perhaps a vote of thanks of some sort is due the artisan factories, which in Toronto’s case continued to ferment enormous talents, including Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow and some of the guys from Painters Eleven, Jack Bush, Oscar Cahén and Harold Town.

Batten evolved into Bomac Batten and then was absorbed by Toronto’s Laird Group, but in the 1930s Black was finding any opportunity he could to return to the passion of his youth — marine painting. He learned from two of the best on the continent, the Americans Stanley Woodward and Emiel Gruppe, travelling with them along the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts.

Frank and Lily, who was a designer of millinery, spent most of 1934 in Bermuda. They went back to Canada once more — reluctantly, one senses — and for the next five years Frank mostly freelanced, doing some work for the Toronto Star. And then, in 1939, he landed a job as a newspaper designer in Bermuda. He must have been in his element once more.

Below is a detail from “Back Street Bermuda”.

At a February 1980 retrospective of his work at the Halton Hills Gallery, Frank remembered a Bermudan local taking great pride when she spotted him painting a seascape that included a view of her home. “That’s my house you’re painting!” she said, and then used to her broom to shoo away the youngsters who were hanging around him. One of the boys, he recalled, told him his uncle was an artist too, but he painted “real-like”. The lad then demanded 10 cents in payment because Black was painting his house too.

But the Blacks were back in Toronto from 1942 to 1952, Frank again freelancing, this time primarily with Bryant Press, which is still operating in the upper Toronto borough of North York. It must have been during this period, if not a long time earlier, that Black first visited Georgetown.

This is his “Spring Thaw”, a scene from Georgetown’s outskirts.

He used to sketch in the area with AJ Casson, and during one of the slumps he admitted to — when he was ready to pack up the paints and brushes for good and find something else to do — Lily reminded him that there were places not far from Toronto where he always found fresh inspiration.

Charles William Jefferys had discovered plenty of subject matter among the rolling hills of Halton County, she told him. Jefferys was another transplanted Briton, and he met fame illustrating Canadian history texts with woodsy, suitably stirring scenes. In 1952 the Blacks bought a roomy house next to the high school, and three years later Frank confided to the Toronto Star that Georgetown was “a great location for almost any type of scenery”.

A century earlier the house had been the home of George Kennedy, the local founding father after whom the town was named. Black’s painting of it is shown here; the building no longer exists.

Both Frank and Lillian were soon teaching night classes at the high school. For a while he must have maintained a studio in Toronto, though, because in mid-1955 Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine reported that he and RW Major were holding an exhibition at their studio at 18 Granville Street of their “pleasant, unpretentious pictures” and some of “Mr Black’s colourful batiks”.

I reckon the batiks were another Caribbean legacy. In his 1976 interview with the Brampton Daily Times Frank said he found some of the new abstract paintings “very clever” and he even owned a few, but his own works, he said, were devoid of abstraction — except for his batiks.

Through the 1970s Black painted scenes all across Canada, including on Vancouver Island and on the Atlantic shore of Newfoundland, where in fact he completed one of his all-time favourites in 1973, a work called “Deep Water”. The waters, his preferred element and his medium of choice, did indeed run deep.