Dali House

As a smalltown boy I had few chances to meet working artists, but being a smalltown newspaper reporter brought some encounters. Frank Black I’ve invited into Dali House several times, and Robert Bateman has been for a visit. Another artist of my acquaintance was Josef Drenters, a sculptor whose biggest project, it might be said, was giving new life to a near-dead century-old building.

This was the Rockwood Academy in Rockwood, Ontario, a village not far from my hometown. I’m pleased to see that the academy has its own page at Wikipedia, one of the modern age’s rewards for being rich in history.

That history began in 1850 when William Wetherald bequeathed rigid, Quaker-style private tutoring upon young lads who roomed in the vast building, three storeys and all massive, locally cut stone. Among the alumni were JJ Hill, who went on to make a fortune building railways, Sir Adam Beck, who pioneered the use of hydroelectric power, and Arthur Sturgis Hardy, who served as Ontario’s premier. Below is a very old photo of the rear of the academy.

By 1883 the provincial government’s own colleges were good enough to put the Rockwood Academy out of business. The school building pretty much haunted the village for the next eight decades, until Josef Drenters bought it in 1960 and got to work restoring it, as well as a log barn and chapel on the property.

In his remaining 23 years, Drenters drew on his own education in a seminary and the skills he learned in all sorts of tough manual jobs to make the academy a living place once again. The lofty-sounding website RockwoodHeaven.com wondered if the local gossip might be true — that Drenters was Headmaster Wetherald reincarnated to save the building from damnation.

Early on in the salvation process, in 1961, a young filmmaker named Allan King came by to shoot documentary footage of Drenters chopping wood, toting barges, lifting bales, etc. Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, has a strange little clip from the resulting movie, “Josef Drenters”, on its media department’s website. Allan King went on to create acclaimed full-length documentaries while earning a living directing 1980s television series like “Kung Fu: The Legend Continues” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”.

Not long before Drenters died, he donated the academy to the Ontario Heritage Foundation, though he was allowed to continue living there. Josef did so until 1983, and then his brother Andreas, also a sculptor, moved in with his wife Heather.

Andreas and the Heritage Foundation soon had important visitors: Norman Jewison shot a significant portion of his 1985 film “Agnes of God” in and around the academy. Where I’d once sat around talking about sculpture with Josef, now Jane Fonda and Ann Bancroft were put through the paces to come up with a fine psychodrama. They put bars on the windows and built a tower with a steeple on the grounds.

On the Internet Movie Database, the credits for “Agnes of God” include “thanks” to Andreas and Heather, the film crew’s hosts and enablers.

I met them both around that time and found them very hospitable indeed, but with respect, I’ll always remember the academy as really being Josef’s bag.

No doubt I’m prejudiced. Josef wrote to me in 1977 elaborately praising an article I’d done about the academy for the Guelph Daily Mercury.

Here I am writing about the place again, and over at my Dorseyland blog, there are a few more words about the making of “Agnes of God”.

I really ought to know whether Josef and Andreas had originally come from Belgium or the Netherlands. Online sources differ over their homeland, but actually my own sister was in elementary school with a member of the family, likely a niece of the brothers, and they were indeed Dutch.

The Macdonald Stewart Art Centre in Guelph goes along with this, and has Josef born in Holland in 1930, a blacksmith’s son, and educated in preparation for the priesthood, yet taking drawing lessons beginning at age 14 from local artist Willem van Ejendhoven.

Josef, who was evidently properly named Yosef Gertrudis Drenters, emigrated with his parents and brother to Canada in 1951, initially settling in British Columbia. He worked as a lumberjack, a rancher, a miner and a farmer. The family relocated to Ontario three years later, farming north of Guelph. Josef was by then painting, but in 1958 started sculpting.

Following a successful exhibition at Toronto’s Here and Now gallery he received a Canada Council grant and was accepted as a member of the Ontario Society of Artists. The Canadian government commissioned a piece for the 1965 Tokyo Trade Fair, and two years later the work shown below, “Pioneer Family”, won a competition to be placed at the Ontario Pavilion fpr Expo 67. In 1974 Drenters was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy.

“Pioneer Family” is jointly accredited to both Josef and Andreas, an eight-month, 26-ton effort that turned heads at the 1967 World’s Fair and was later moved to the civic headquarters of the borough of Pickering, outside Toronto.

The Macdonald Stewart Art Centre published “Josef Drenters: A Lifetime of Drawing” in 1990, and his work remains very much in the public eye today, in Kingston and the art galleries of Windsor, Winnipeg and Edmonton, at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo and, in the United States, at the Princeton Art Museum in New Jersey and even the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, which has “Madonna and Child”.

Unfortunately Josef doesn’t have much of a presence online. The pair of not-very-thrilling drawings featured in this post come from the website of the Rose Royce gallery, “After Raphael” and then “Foot Frontal”.