Dali House

“Portrait of Barker Fairley”, done in 1920 by Frederick Varley of the Group of Seven, now hanging at the National Gallery of Canada.

Barker Fairley’s picture of the Group of Seven’s AY Jackson from 1939, now at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

I remember seeing an exhibition of paintings by Barker Fairley some 30 years ago and being positively unimpressed. They were a bleak, washed-out lot. Renewing contact recently with John and Gisela Sommer, at whose Gallery House Sol in smalltown Canada the show was held, prompted me to have another look.

And now I think I see the point.

“Francis Sparshott”, 1957: Fairley depicts his colleague at the University of Toronto, the author of “The Structure of Aesthetics”.

There’s something quite moving in the gaunt portraits and sparse landscapes, particularly the latter. Rather than washed-out, the scenes now seem blindingly bright to me. I wonder, too, if he was consciously stripping away the utensils of the scenery so that we could see the countryside fundamentally naked.

“Dale Fields”, 1975

“People keep asking me if painting is hard work,” he once said. “Painting isn’t work. Painting is making decisions. I make decisions, nothing more.”

There’s an interesting political sidebar to Fairley’s career as well: he and his first wife Margaret Adele were once ridden out of the USA on a rail, their reputations tarred and the Canadian government in no mood to help them remove the feathers.

Fairley, who was born a headmaster’s son in Britain in 1887 — in Barnsley, Yorkshire, in fact, just down the road from my hatchling nest in Lancashire — but who spent most of his life in Canada, was far better known in his time as one of the world’s foremost authorities on German literary beacons like Goethe. He was an academic through and through, a literary and art critic, author of many books, and only then, it seems, a painter.

It was well after he brought his scholarship to the German department at the University of Toronto that Fairley was prodded to take up a brush by one of his former students, Robert Finch, himself a painter as well as a poet.

He couldn’t have needed too much encouragement. By then he’d encountered all of the Group of Seven, though he’d missed out on Tom Thomson, their spiritual heart.

“I knew them all,” he told an interviewer. “I met Jimmie [JEH] MacDonald in the fall of 1917. I never met Tom Thomson, he had died a few months before.”

Fairley began by rendering landscapes in watercolour but, lamenting that “Canada has no tradition of portraits, no tradition of freely painted faces”, soon switched to the human physiognomy in oil (without ever abandoning landscapes).

“Cathy Edmonton”, undated

“Ought not the painting of humanity … draw ahead of the landscape [and] take priority over it?” he wrote in 1939. “Ought it not do so in any age, and especially in this age of intense human conflict and suffering and innovation? There is everything in the world about us, the world of today, to suggest that the luxury of dwelling on empty landscapes is likely to recede in men’s minds and the urgent human issues to assert themselves with growing force.” See the rest.

“New Zealand” — Maoris at a shrine

The bracing “explorer’s specials” in this post are being sold off by Sotheby’s London later this month, apparently on behalf of the local tailor Austin Reed, which evidently displayed them in the “Red Lacquer Room” of its Regent Street flagship store.

Information in the catalogue is sparse, but I’m guessing they’re a commissioned series on the far-flung reaches of what used to be the British Empire. The asking prices range from £4,000 to £8,000.

One wonders whether the sun is setting on Austin Reed as well. It’s a retailer that specialises in men’s and boys’ clothing, so you can well imagine its erstwhile interest in a collection of adventurous mini-murals to thrill its customers. Plus, the artist’s name had a familiar ring to it.

They’re all watercolours by a Canadian, Frederick Bourchier Taylor (1906-87), who’s not well known even in his homeland, even though his big brother was probably Canada’s richest man in his day: Edward Plunket Taylor, the formidable “EP”, beer-retail-media-and-mining tycoon and the man who gave horseracing the greatest sire of the 20th century, Northern Dancer.

“Burma” — The Procession of Umbrellas

The Taylor boys were born wealthy in Ottawa. Grandad handed his Brading Brewery over to EP, who promptly stitched it together with 20-odd others to make Canadian Breweries Ltd, the biggest suds-maker in the world.

Then he founded the massive investment firm Argus Corp, and grabbed Canadian Food Products, Massey-Harris, Orange Crush, Standard Chemical, Dominion Stores, Domtar Paper, Standard Broadcasting and Hollinger Mines.

“British Honduras”

EP set up one of the planet’s first gated communities, Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. His Windfields Farm in Oshawa, Ontario, where he bred his horses (now home to the Canadian Film Centre), was where the British royal family stayed when they came to the colonies.

Somehow in the late ’50s he found time to serve as president of what was then called the Art Gallery of Toronto.

Where was Fred all this time? Becoming a communist, which really must have pissed off his filthy-rich sibling!

At least that’s what it says in John Virtue’s biography “Fred Taylor: Brother in the Shadows”. Apparently they feuded about it for two decades.

Virtue also revealed that Fred tended to boil over. He once pulled a Dick Cheney, shooting and wounding a rival artist while hunting, and people were never quite sure if it was an accident. See the rest.

Frank Black’s “Spring Thaw” also appears in this post.

Frank Black, I’m pleased to say, has become a hometown mainstay for Dali House. His name’s in the menu palette on the left, and this my fourth post involving him.

This time it’s a glimpse of the February 1980 exhibition at Gallery House Sol in Georgetown, the small burg in southern Ontario, Canada, where Black (1894-1988) spent his last two decades or so, and where I grew up.

Frank and his wife at the opening of his retrospective at the Halton Hills Arts and Cultural Centre in June 1982.

“By the Magnetawan”, from 1948

A wish came true when a couple in that area came across one of the posts and brought it to the attention of House Sol’s proprietors, the remarkable John and Gisele Sommer. The print shown here, “Sol Duo — John and Gisela Sommer” by Edward Schleimer, comes from the website of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre at the University of Guelph, Ontario, where there’s a profile of the couple.

The Sommerses weren’t themselves online, I soon found out, and for good reason, related directly to their emigration to Canada from East Germany in the 1950s.

John has since written to me by regular mail:

“With the experience of the years 1933-1945 behind us, with the loss of our parents’ possessions, and our flight to the West, eventually finding in Canada a new home, we have tried to live according to our convictions, which means no TV, no car, nothing that could prevent us from constantly educating ourselves by reading and travelling, and studying mankind’s history and finding the crossroads where we took the wrong turns.”

John and Gisela forwarded the photos on this page, taken at Frank Black’s 1980 exhibition. You see Frank seated in a chair while John McDonald, an arts-minded council member of the local municipality, Halton Hills, formally opens the show. And in another shot, hey, that’s me on the far right! Meanwhile Frank’s paintings, big and small, fill the walls.

The Sommers opened House Sol in 1962, and for four decades it drew a steady stream of patrons from Toronto, 40 miles away (a lovely weekend drive), and around the area. Among the many artists whose works they exhibited were Harold Town of Painters 11 (see the Dali House post), Tony Urquhart of the Heart of London group, Ken Danby, Charlotte Brainerd, Yosef and Andreas Drenters, with whom the Sommerses were very close, and Barker Fairley, the British-born painter who championed the Group of Seven.
See the rest.

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. See the rest.

Another great painting by the late Frank Black, “The Angry Atlantic”. Click the image to see a larger version.

The owner of this work and “Back Street Bermuda” tells me she and her husband bought them directly from Black on a visit to his Georgetown home around 1973 or ‘74. Her grandmother had previously bought some of his work.