A Life Time of Exploring Art
This year marks 20 years since I received my degree in art, donned my Basque beret and declared my self an artist. How strange it seems now to think about those first few years after graduating. The confusion of what it meant to be an artist. The constant worry over the work now seems somewhat endearing in its naïve way.
To have that degree in art, a piece of paper with little artistic merit, what did it mean? A license to practice insider art was certainly a new way to define my plane of composition. But my real education in art started way before that. I was born an artist.
Part 1 show and tell
At the tender age of six I arrived at my grade one class well prepared for show and tell and very excited. Under my arm was my older brother’s Roy Roger’s red suitcase, which was now my art portfolio case. And I was all revved up to share my work. This show and tell I though was going to be different from the dad bought stuff, which was the usual fare.
Finally it was my turn and the teacher called me to the front of the class. I stood there looking at my class. I could tell they were all eager to see what I had in my red suitcase. And with a child’s sense of intrigue I began to slowly introduce the contents of the suitcase carefully opening it and raising the first painting to view.
I had no idea that these classmates, the kids that I played with frequently on the playground and in the neighborhood were from Canadian families with mostly worker dads and stay at home moms.
As I pulled out the first painting the class began to titter and by the second image they were in a full roar. They were laughing as if my intentions were to disrupt the natural order of Central Park Elementary school. I have long forgotten my grade one teacher’s name but I still remember her reaction, “All right that’s enough of that, go back to your seat and sit down.” I really didn’t care that the other children could not understand the seriousness of my work. I remember feeling sorry for them. It was sad they didn’t know things. However I was hurt and very surprised that the teacher didn’t respect or defend my work. After all she was a grown up and a teacher. She should have knowledge of art that her six year old student had. But she didn’t know who Jackson Pollock was so she didn’t know why I painted like I did. I have no idea of the source of my art experiments but it was 1962 and abstract expressionism was mainstream art in the media, so mainstream that Disney was spoofing abstract expressionism in comics. Of course my teacher didn’t read comics, but did she not watch the boob tube?
Unfortunately for her she didn’t have a mother schooled in a private school in London England. She didn’t have an aunt that was a jewelry designer and most of all, this ignoramus educator didn’t have a great tome of all of Europe’s deemed masterpieces.
On rainy days from as young as I can remember I would lie on the carpet and go through the great book of paintings. This giant blue book with over a 1000 pages containing colour, tipped on prints from the renaissance up to the end of the nineteenth century. A book to fill me up with the knowledge of European art, and also a book to leave me unsatisfied and searching for art of my time and place. Having a perceived foreign mother and an indigenous dead father left me always craving for something mine, something North American. And I am guessing that’s why abstract expressionism and particularly Jackson Pollock had such a huge influence on my earliest work. After all the abstract expressionist movement had been a huge campaign to create an art that was uniquely American.
Part 2 garbage art
But the thirst to see the world of matter as text was greater in me than my desire to transcend. Sculpture was in my blood and the found object became my medium. By age seven I had begun to go out early in the morning on garbage days. I would pick the neighbors garbage for objects I could use in my “inventions” as I called them. I’m sure Jean Tinguely would have loved these inventions, I sure did. But my Mother was aghast, if it wasn’t bad enough being a single mom in the late fifties and early sixties and living in a new survey of nuclear families, she had a son that picked garbage.
Our neighbors were average people living in a new fifties survey, folks with little worldly education and decent jobs. We were the only single parent family in our survey and as a result we were also the only poor family. Keep in mind that this was also a time in Canada when the government could put a neighbor in an asylum if people complained they were not normal. Later on when I was an adult my Mother who worked at the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital, admitted to me that she would order my older brother to get these things out of the house while I slept. And I was told to cease and desist from doing this for all kinds of reasons that didn’t make sense to a wee artist. Why wouldn’t my mother want a broken hair dryer or an old birdcage?
Lucky for me on the other side of the hogs back that our house backed on to was an old foundry. Tucked in under the far side of the hill was a plethora of found objects all cast in steel. Giant drills, old and vandalized cranes, rusty shapes and things from old factories. Not knowing or caring about the objects original intent it was a fantasy land for me and my friends. I could spend hours there collecting up the strange objects and rearranging them to create meanings different than they were intended for. Or more accurately to my child age desire I was making great machines and new inventions. Giving these rusty old objects a new life and new chance to communicate. Art for me was still a word used for drawing, painting, and dripping. I continue to collect garbage to this day only now I call them found objects.
Part 3 from garbage to garbage can.
By the time I was a young teen I had discovered Henry Moore. His surfaced round shapes mirrored my own desires. I was a young man in the throws of discovering, surfaces/skin, round and protruding forms. Forms that fold into themselves, interlock and reveal, were certainly the forms to inspire my adolescent becoming, as an artist and as a man. And to complement these powerful new discoveries I finally had an art teacher. I had a real art teacher, born in South Africa, a survivor of polio, with a husband that owned a gallery. Mrs. Lebow had entred my life not a moment to soon. She saw who I was and feed into it. As much as I could take and I could take a lot. I had already been working on my art for over ten years.
Such fun free thoughts the young mind has. Under the tutelage of Mrs. Lebow I decided at the age of 15 that I was going to marry the work of Henry Moore with that of Brancusi.
I wanted to create the roundest and most pierced “Kiss” you ever saw. I wanted to free the “kiss” from Brancusi’s blocked in Kiss, that modernist but some what less sensuous reaction to Rodin’s Kiss. And I was going to use Henry Moore’s freeing of the sculptural form to do this.
I commandeered a large steel garbage can and without any hesitation, I mixed up bag after bag of plaster of Paris to fill the garbage can to the brim. After a few hours I had completed my task, the full size galvanized school property garbage can was full and hardening. I waited a few days to slip the can off my gigantic lump of unborn sculpture.
And when I did I was a little miffed upon discovering the can did not want to release its valuable contents into my care. And it wasn’t until after a trip to the school shop class to borrow some tin snips that I was able to solve my problem. Of course this created several other problems I hadn’t thought of. Like how to let the school know they were short one of their precious pieces of property. Not because of some normal thing like the football team on a vandalizing rampage but for some weird art thing. As I had learned in grade one being a Canadian artist wasn’t something anyone understood or therefore liked.
I was quite relieved when nothing much came of my actions, protected as I was by my art teacher. And I was allowed to chip away for the next two months free of the mundane and infantile required art projects for Canadian art students lacking in having a parent to introduce them to a greater heritage than their home town and country flag.
Part 4 Museum sanctioned art
Mrs. Lebow was a gift from god. Like Mary Poppins she showed up magically at a time when most needed. The year after the Henry More incident and with the research I was doing on perspective I came to her one day with a sketch for a painting I had worked out. I was just handing in my home work and was surprised when she felt I should go all the way and make it into a full scale painting. I was coming from a well informed sculpture back ground and thought the real thing should have a chance at being monumental. I suggested that the finished size should be almost four feet square. She said this would be no problem. We had acrylic paint at the school but no canvas. So she cut down one of the blinds from the cafeteria. In those days they were old canvas roll down blinds but Westdale Secondary School was huge and so were the blinds. Next she obtained the help of the shop teacher to make the stretchers I needed.
It took a few months to finish that painting and I even framed it with cedar strapping from the wood shop. There was a city wide competition at the time for student art, which has been a regular show at the Hamilton Art Gallery until just recently. I was so surprised when I found out my painting was accepted. My first exhibited work and in the third largest gallery in the province (seventh in the country). I remember not being as excited for getting the honor of being in the show, as I was enthralled about being in a major gallery recognized as a peer of all the great artists I had looked up to.
Part 5 anti-art
My work and understanding of art had drifted away from my early “inventions” explorations in found objects and machines. I had been taught, whether self taught or through schooling what the academic western idea of art was. Concepts like aesthetics, form, space, composition, and feeling dominated my understanding. The definitions of the post Napoleonic museum were taking hold of my plane of composition. Until some thing happened to reaffirm my experiments in visual language beyond and above what I was being taught. The school took us on a bus trip to the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo N.Y.
The curator at the time was a Canadian by the name of Douglas MacAgy. He was an instrumental player in the history of abstract expressionism in America and a firm believer in artistic evolution beyond academic parameters.
The exhibit we were going to see was the memorial retrospective of Eva Hesse. An artist that was new to me and one that had just passed from this world at an early age. This became know to me later. At the show I was taken, amazed, ripped apart, devastated, tickled and excited. I was a teen, it was the early seventies, and I had never found anyone that came even close to ripping apart and recreating understandings of art like this, other than me in grade one with my abstract expressionist paintings. Her work was unlike anything I had seen so far or anything I had done and yet familiar to what I had felt.
It was close; it felt like home, it was like the thick vines that hung down through the broken widows of mammoth machines behind an old foundry of my youth. It felt like rusted steel and grease and plastic tubing. I remember one piece in particular , Accession 2, that was a box roughly three feet square with an open top. The box was steel mesh woven with plastic tubing so that the interior felt like a womb, not mother’s but a machines. I remember like it was yesterday. It was a womb I felt I belonged in, it was art and yet anti art. My mind was spinning on the bus ride home the other students laughing and jostling around me. Something I had come quite use to in my younger years as an artist. I loved what I had seen and the new experiences it afforded me. But there was a rift. This work related more to my early experiments as an inventor. And seemed to contradict the understanding I had come to take as western art.
In hindsight
It wasn’t until I was in my twenties when I entred the Ontario College of Art and was able to resolve the rift in my work. The two paths of art, one defined by the western tradition, the other defined by my own explorations with materials finally crossed. It was the last incubation before returning to an art that was purely self driven, an art that I had know from an earlier time, something raw and basic, now informed by a gala of artists and theorists through out history and the world. No wonder twenty years ago when I graduated I found myself in such an unsure state. It was now my time to take on the world and supply a new definition of art. Or so I truly believed.
This year marks 20 years since I received my degree in art, donned my Basque beret and declared my self an artist. How strange it seems now to think about those first few years after graduating. The confusion of what it meant to be an artist. The constant worry over the work now seems somewhat endearing in its naïve way.
To have that degree in art, a piece of paper with little artistic merit, what did it mean? A license to practice insider art was certainly a new way to define my plane of composition. But my real education in art started way before that. I was born an artist.
Part 1 show and tell
At the tender age of six I arrived at my grade one class well prepared for show and tell and very excited. Under my arm was my older brother’s Roy Roger’s red suitcase, which was now my art portfolio case. And I was all revved up to share my work. This show and tell I though was going to be different from the dad bought stuff, which was the usual fare.
Finally it was my turn and the teacher called me to the front of the class. I stood there looking at my class. I could tell they were all eager to see what I had in my red suitcase. And with a child’s sense of intrigue I began to slowly introduce the contents of the suitcase carefully opening it and raising the first painting to view.
I had no idea that these classmates, the kids that I played with frequently on the playground and in the neighborhood were from Canadian families with mostly worker dads and stay at home moms.
As I pulled out the first painting the class began to titter and by the second image they were in a full roar. They were laughing as if my intentions were to disrupt the natural order of Central Park Elementary school. I have long forgotten my grade one teacher’s name but I still remember her reaction, “All right that’s enough of that, go back to your seat and sit down.” I really didn’t care that the other children could not understand the seriousness of my work. I remember feeling sorry for them. It was sad they didn’t know things. However I was hurt and very surprised that the teacher didn’t respect or defend my work. After all she was a grown up and a teacher. She should have knowledge of art that her six year old student had. But she didn’t know who Jackson Pollock was so she didn’t know why I painted like I did. I have no idea of the source of my art experiments but it was 1962 and abstract expressionism was mainstream art in the media, so mainstream that Disney was spoofing abstract expressionism in comics. Of course my teacher didn’t read comics, but did she not watch the boob tube?
Unfortunately for her she didn’t have a mother schooled in a private school in London England. She didn’t have an aunt that was a jewelry designer and most of all, this ignoramus educator didn’t have a great tome of all of Europe’s deemed masterpieces.
On rainy days from as young as I can remember I would lie on the carpet and go through the great book of paintings. This giant blue book with over a 1000 pages containing colour, tipped on prints from the renaissance up to the end of the nineteenth century. A book to fill me up with the knowledge of European art, and also a book to leave me unsatisfied and searching for art of my time and place. Having a perceived foreign mother and an indigenous dead father left me always craving for something mine, something North American. And I am guessing that’s why abstract expressionism and particularly Jackson Pollock had such a huge influence on my earliest work. After all the abstract expressionist movement had been a huge campaign to create an art that was uniquely American.
Part 2 garbage art
But the thirst to see the world of matter as text was greater in me than my desire to transcend. Sculpture was in my blood and the found object became my medium. By age seven I had begun to go out early in the morning on garbage days. I would pick the neighbors garbage for objects I could use in my “inventions” as I called them. I’m sure Jean Tinguely would have loved these inventions, I sure did. But my Mother was aghast, if it wasn’t bad enough being a single mom in the late fifties and early sixties and living in a new survey of nuclear families, she had a son that picked garbage.
Our neighbors were average people living in a new fifties survey, folks with little worldly education and decent jobs. We were the only single parent family in our survey and as a result we were also the only poor family. Keep in mind that this was also a time in Canada when the government could put a neighbor in an asylum if people complained they were not normal. Later on when I was an adult my Mother who worked at the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital, admitted to me that she would order my older brother to get these things out of the house while I slept. And I was told to cease and desist from doing this for all kinds of reasons that didn’t make sense to a wee artist. Why wouldn’t my mother want a broken hair dryer or an old birdcage?
Lucky for me on the other side of the hogs back that our house backed on to was an old foundry. Tucked in under the far side of the hill was a plethora of found objects all cast in steel. Giant drills, old and vandalized cranes, rusty shapes and things from old factories. Not knowing or caring about the objects original intent it was a fantasy land for me and my friends. I could spend hours there collecting up the strange objects and rearranging them to create meanings different than they were intended for. Or more accurately to my child age desire I was making great machines and new inventions. Giving these rusty old objects a new life and new chance to communicate. Art for me was still a word used for drawing, painting, and dripping. I continue to collect garbage to this day only now I call them found objects.
Part 3 from garbage to garbage can.
By the time I was a young teen I had discovered Henry Moore. His surfaced round shapes mirrored my own desires. I was a young man in the throws of discovering, surfaces/skin, round and protruding forms. Forms that fold into themselves, interlock and reveal, were certainly the forms to inspire my adolescent becoming, as an artist and as a man. And to complement these powerful new discoveries I finally had an art teacher. I had a real art teacher, born in South Africa, a survivor of polio, with a husband that owned a gallery. Mrs. Lebow had entred my life not a moment to soon. She saw who I was and feed into it. As much as I could take and I could take a lot. I had already been working on my art for over ten years.
Such fun free thoughts the young mind has. Under the tutelage of Mrs. Lebow I decided at the age of 15 that I was going to marry the work of Henry Moore with that of Brancusi.
I wanted to create the roundest and most pierced “Kiss” you ever saw. I wanted to free the “kiss” from Brancusi’s blocked in Kiss, that modernist but some what less sensuous reaction to Rodin’s Kiss. And I was going to use Henry Moore’s freeing of the sculptural form to do this.
I commandeered a large steel garbage can and without any hesitation, I mixed up bag after bag of plaster of Paris to fill the garbage can to the brim. After a few hours I had completed my task, the full size galvanized school property garbage can was full and hardening. I waited a few days to slip the can off my gigantic lump of unborn sculpture.
And when I did I was a little miffed upon discovering the can did not want to release its valuable contents into my care. And it wasn’t until after a trip to the school shop class to borrow some tin snips that I was able to solve my problem. Of course this created several other problems I hadn’t thought of. Like how to let the school know they were short one of their precious pieces of property. Not because of some normal thing like the football team on a vandalizing rampage but for some weird art thing. As I had learned in grade one being a Canadian artist wasn’t something anyone understood or therefore liked.
I was quite relieved when nothing much came of my actions, protected as I was by my art teacher. And I was allowed to chip away for the next two months free of the mundane and infantile required art projects for Canadian art students lacking in having a parent to introduce them to a greater heritage than their home town and country flag.
Part 4 Museum sanctioned art
Mrs. Lebow was a gift from god. Like Mary Poppins she showed up magically at a time when most needed. The year after the Henry More incident and with the research I was doing on perspective I came to her one day with a sketch for a painting I had worked out. I was just handing in my home work and was surprised when she felt I should go all the way and make it into a full scale painting. I was coming from a well informed sculpture back ground and thought the real thing should have a chance at being monumental. I suggested that the finished size should be almost four feet square. She said this would be no problem. We had acrylic paint at the school but no canvas. So she cut down one of the blinds from the cafeteria. In those days they were old canvas roll down blinds but Westdale Secondary School was huge and so were the blinds. Next she obtained the help of the shop teacher to make the stretchers I needed.
It took a few months to finish that painting and I even framed it with cedar strapping from the wood shop. There was a city wide competition at the time for student art, which has been a regular show at the Hamilton Art Gallery until just recently. I was so surprised when I found out my painting was accepted. My first exhibited work and in the third largest gallery in the province (seventh in the country). I remember not being as excited for getting the honor of being in the show, as I was enthralled about being in a major gallery recognized as a peer of all the great artists I had looked up to.
Part 5 anti-art
My work and understanding of art had drifted away from my early “inventions” explorations in found objects and machines. I had been taught, whether self taught or through schooling what the academic western idea of art was. Concepts like aesthetics, form, space, composition, and feeling dominated my understanding. The definitions of the post Napoleonic museum were taking hold of my plane of composition. Until some thing happened to reaffirm my experiments in visual language beyond and above what I was being taught. The school took us on a bus trip to the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo N.Y.
The curator at the time was a Canadian by the name of Douglas MacAgy. He was an instrumental player in the history of abstract expressionism in America and a firm believer in artistic evolution beyond academic parameters.
The exhibit we were going to see was the memorial retrospective of Eva Hesse. An artist that was new to me and one that had just passed from this world at an early age. This became know to me later. At the show I was taken, amazed, ripped apart, devastated, tickled and excited. I was a teen, it was the early seventies, and I had never found anyone that came even close to ripping apart and recreating understandings of art like this, other than me in grade one with my abstract expressionist paintings. Her work was unlike anything I had seen so far or anything I had done and yet familiar to what I had felt.
It was close; it felt like home, it was like the thick vines that hung down through the broken widows of mammoth machines behind an old foundry of my youth. It felt like rusted steel and grease and plastic tubing. I remember one piece in particular , Accession 2, that was a box roughly three feet square with an open top. The box was steel mesh woven with plastic tubing so that the interior felt like a womb, not mother’s but a machines. I remember like it was yesterday. It was a womb I felt I belonged in, it was art and yet anti art. My mind was spinning on the bus ride home the other students laughing and jostling around me. Something I had come quite use to in my younger years as an artist. I loved what I had seen and the new experiences it afforded me. But there was a rift. This work related more to my early experiments as an inventor. And seemed to contradict the understanding I had come to take as western art.
In hindsight
It wasn’t until I was in my twenties when I entred the Ontario College of Art and was able to resolve the rift in my work. The two paths of art, one defined by the western tradition, the other defined by my own explorations with materials finally crossed. It was the last incubation before returning to an art that was purely self driven, an art that I had know from an earlier time, something raw and basic, now informed by a gala of artists and theorists through out history and the world. No wonder twenty years ago when I graduated I found myself in such an unsure state. It was now my time to take on the world and supply a new definition of art. Or so I truly believed.
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