Atlantic Books

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Beaverbrook Art Gallery

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The Frame-Up
Wendy McLeod MacKnight
HarperCollins/Greenwillow Books
(Ages 8-12)

Sargent Singer has mixed feelings as he boards a plane bound for New Brunswick to spend the entire summer with his father, the curator of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. While he can’t imagine spending all those weeks with his father, maybe they will forge a connection through their shared love of art. But his father is under a lot of pressure and is frequently preoccupied and distracted.

Things take an unexpected turn when Sargent makes an amazing discovery: the people in the paintings in the gallery are alive! He befriends Mona Dunn, a 13-year-old girl from one of the paintings. As their friendship grows, these two lonely young people try to help one another find solace in their respective life situations. But there are strange things afoot at the gallery and soon the two youngsters find themselves in the midst of a major art heist that could yield tragic results for the people in the paintings, as well as for Sargent’s father and the Beaverbrook.

This New Brunswick author brings middle-grade readers an action-packed tale with an intriguing premise. The narrative is told alternately from the points of view of Sargent and Mona, enabling readers to get a thorough glimpse into Mona’s world within the paintings: the social and political structure of their world, the relationships they have with each other and what it means to be a figure in a painting who sees what goes on in the outside world but can never actively participate in it.

McLeod MacKnight sensitively depicts Sargent’s troubled relationship with his father and his apprehension about making new friends at the art camp he attends. The mystery element of the story is also well-developed and well-paced in this compelling and meticulously-crafted tale of friendship, family and secrets.

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Any artist’s career, considered over enough time, can resemble a journey with an internal, retrospective logic that makes it seem as if their destination had been predetermined. “Here I am,” we think we hear, “and this is how I got here.” The retrospective exhibition, with its traditional chronological path from the earliest to the latest work usually reinforces that impression. The reality is that few artists know where they’re heading when they start out on their journeys. They follow the work, often stumbling in the dark, with the prospect of failure their constant companion. Their paths meander, double back, run into dead ends. They discover unexpected vistas. But in the retrospective exhibition (or the book that accompanies it), we rarely see the failures, concentrating, as I suppose they must, on the vistas opened up by the artist’s successes.

This is certainly the case in the new book on the work of Newfoundland artist Marlene Creates. Self-described as an “environmental artist and poet,” Creates works across disciplines, comprising elements of sculpture, performance, written word and video, though the majority of her work is photo-based. Since the late 1970s, Creates has been working in the environment, making ephemeral gestures in the landscape documented with her beautiful photographs in places across Canada and the United Kingdom. Always, it seems, circling around and towards Newfoundland, where she has family roots, and which she has made her home since 1985.

The five contributors to Marlene Creates: Places, Paths and Pauses each deal with varying aspects of her career, building a picture of the broad scope of her work. The editors and co-curators of the accompanying exhibition, Susan Gibson Garvey and Andrea Kunard, bookend the publication with thoughtful essays that look at the overall practice of Creates, each from their own perspectives. In between are contributions from British writer Robert MacFarlane, Governor General’s Award-winning poet Don McKay and art historian Joan M Schwartz.

The artist herself is a constant voice in the publication, providing short introductory statements to each of the many selections of images documenting various bodies of her work. Divided into five sections, there are 20 bodies of work covered in the book. This is not exhaustive, by any means, but it represents the majority of her projects, and, one must assume, the way she wants her career to be described. Such publications, with their mission to present as much as possible about their subject, can run the risk of exhausting the reader. Marlene Creates evades that pitfall through a combination of skillful design, a well-balanced selection of texts and the sheer visual richness offered by the numerous illustrations. The balance between installation shots, details, full-bleed images and double-page spreads keeps one’s eyes active and engaged. The spare, conversational, texts contributed by the artist function like the pauses of the book’s title, providing short breathing spaces before we fully engage, again, in our journey along the artist’s path.

Newfoundland, specifically her six acres of boreal forest on Blast Hole Road in Portugal Cove, has been, since 2002, the primary subject matter of Creates’ work. Of the seven projects documented here, three are listed as “ongoing.” One, the Boreal Poetry Garden, actually has multiple projects, comprising poetry and performance, walks in the acreage and an online component. Clearly, this volume documents a journey that has by no means ended, although it has tightened its focus to a small patch of land on the Avalon peninsula of Newfoundland.

As Creates wrote about some of her earliest work, “nature is never finished.” This is the sort of book that will repay repeat reading and most especially repeat viewing of the unique images that comprise its bulk.

Retrospectives may be guilty of suggesting more order to a particular journey than may have really been there. But with its retrospective depth of vision, this work allows the reader to retrace the artist’s steps, or, at least, a version of them.

The exhibition opened at Fredericton’s Beaverbrook Art Gallery this September and will tour across Canada through 2020.

Marlene Creates: Places, Paths and Pauses
Edited by Susan Gibson Garvey and Andrea Kunard
Goose Lane Editions / The Beaverbrook Art Gallery

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Lucy Jarvis. Fishing Boats, Port Maitland, n.d. Oil on board, 30.3 x 38 Collection of Mark Connell

Her life and work exemplify a region of artists who succeed despite what we lack

Atlantic Canada is a very tough place to be an artist. Its market is small, its many galleries and museums woefully underfunded. The centres of art-world energy and activity are far away from our shores.

Despite those realties, this region continues to produce artists of national and international calibre. In the arts, as in so many other areas of activity, Atlantic Canadians prove to be stubborn and resilient. We keep at it despite lack of attention, lack of respect, lack of funding – in fact, a lack of just about everything that is taken for granted in places with more established and valued art scenes. Artists keep going, keep making, and keep persevering in the face of all the “despites.”

Where we may be getting better is in acknowledging the careers of some of these artists, in looking at how they fit into the regional cultural ecosystem, not as art stars manqué, but as vital and vibrant parts of local cultures, as builders of communities as much as makers of objects. Every community in our region has such people, who with varying degrees of public recognition have made careers and furthered the arts in places that may have had little or no exposure to creative endeavours without their labour. One such builder was Lucy Jarvis, whose life and career is celebrated in Fredericton author and curator Roslyn Rosenfeld’s fine new book, Lucy Jarvis: Even Stones Have Life.

It’s been 30 years since Lucy Jarvis died in Yarmouth at the age of 85, and a look at her life and career is long overdue. It’s not that Lucy Jarvis was an artist who was head and shoulders above everyone else, a Maritime Emily Carr who was ignored by the art establishment until the intrinsic merits of her work were recognized (though, interestingly, Jarvis and Carr do share much of the same history, of being ignored by the establishment, of being considered eccentric, of seeking, not always successfully, artistic peers – it is, sadly, a history endemic to many women in the arts in Canada between the war years). No, as Rosenfeld’s meticulously detailed book makes clear, Jarvis was a good artist, and an important one, but she made decisions throughout her life that sent her career in certain directions, and usually away from any chance of traditional success. Perhaps her most important such decision, and certainly the most influential on both her own life as a painter and the artistic community of Atlantic Canada, was to start, with Pegi Nicol McLeod, an art centre at the University of New Brunswick in 1941.

Rosenfeld relates the history of what is now the UNB Art Centre with thoroughness and objectivity, bringing to light many aspects of the way that this centre, which was the first art gallery in Fredericton (predating the Beaverbrook Art Gallery by almost two decades), became a central hub for artists across New Brunswick and the region. Jarvis’s boundless energy, generosity of spirit and persistence in the face of adversity (then, as now, the arts are never first in line for institutional funding or support), comes off the pages in Rosenfeld’s book, augmented by many interviews with former students and colleagues, as well as Jarvis’s own letters. The letters – to other artists, to her nephews, to friends, and, most of all, to her life-long friend and companion, fellow artist Helen Weld – positively sing with enthusiasm and grace, and their judicious use by Rosenfeld is one of the highpoints of the book.

Lucy Jarvis ran the Observatory Art Centre, soon to be renamed the UNB Art Centre, for 20 years, retiring at 64 to return to a full-time pursuit of painting. It is these last twenty years of her life that come across the strongest in the book, no doubt a result of the vast amount of research Rosenfeld did on the exhibitions that accompanied this publication, in particular a show of Jarvis’s late paintings and drawings, also called Even Stones Have Life.

Jarvis spent the majority of her summers from the 1930s on in Yarmouth County, eventually settling full-time in a small studio in Pembroke Bar, south of the town of Yarmouth. Her friend Helen Weld eventually joined her there and the two artists became well-regarded pillars of the small Yarmouth-area arts community. Rosenfeld ably details the community life of “the Bar,” and the vibrant arts scene that grew up with and around Jarvis.

One area that remains somewhat opaque, however, is the relationship between Jarvis and Weld, who lived together at the studio in Pembroke Dyke from 1970, after decades of spending summers and trips together. There has often been speculation about the nature of the relationship between the two artists, who are still often referred to in Yarmouth as “the girls,” but as Rosenfeld is careful to point out, no evidence suggests anything other than a friendship, though one of deep mutual love and respect. In the end, whatever their relationship, it remains their own.

Rosenfeld’s analysis of Jarvis’s paintings is neatly balanced with the biographical details of the artist’s life. The particular context of the art world in the Maritimes, such as it was in each decade from the 1940s and 1950s, is fascinating and provides a useful picture of the challenges, drawbacks and rewards of pursuing an art career in a remote region. The portrayal of Jarvis’s life in “retirement” is rich and layered, ably depicting the struggles of any artist to remain true to their vision, to grow and push their skills, their ideas and their comfort-level with their art.

Jarvis’s willingness to push her art, to seek out new experiences and challenges even well into her 80s, is inspirational. Her full-hearted embrace of life, and of its often stony paths, is perhaps the thing one takes away most clearly. Getting to know Lucy Jarvis is getting to know Atlantic Canada, and is well worth the journey.

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Terry Graff headshot

From the Beaverbrook Art Gallery to an overflowing personal library, gifted artist, writer, teacher and curator Terry Graff is surrounded by art at work and at home

Terry Graff’s studio is without boundaries. It encompasses the galleries, archives, vaults and his office in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery as well as a personal library of art books which fill his study and have extended into the dining room in the home he shares with his wife, Kim Leaver-Graff.

Five years ago when Graff was director of the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon he was recruited by Bernard Riordon, then Beaverbrook’s director, to accept the position of curator in a planned succession that would see him take on the roles of director/CEO and chief curator upon Riordon’s retirement. “My wife and I had been away from the Maritimes for a long time,” he says, speaking fondly of the 14 years they and their family spent here. They lived in Sackville, New Brunswick when he taught at Riverview High School and Mount Allison University and directed Struts Gallery. Then in Charlottetown when he served as director of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum before moving to St. Catherine’s as director of the Rodman Hall Arts Centre.

The Beavebrook Art Gallery, 703 Queen Street, Fredericton, was a gift to the province of New Brunswick in 1959 from Sir Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook himself.
The Beavebrook Art Gallery, 703 Queen Street, Fredericton, was a gift to the province of New Brunswick in 1959 from Sir Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. All photos by M.P. Eaton

“The invitation to come to the Beaverbrook was one I just couldn’t pass up,” he says, “because the permanent collection here is by far the most outstanding collection of masterworks of any gallery where I’d worked and the opportunity to work with a collection of this caliber was really important to me. This gallery was a major gift to New Brunswick by Lord Beaverbrook [Sir Max Aiken] and it needs to be cared for, interpreted and promoted.”

Upon arrival Graff began work on Masterworks from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, a magnificent 238-page, large format volume, featuring full-colour plates of 75 works from the gallery, published by Goose Lane Editions and launched in February. The artists’ list reads like a who’s who with works by Salvador Dalí, J. M. W. Turner, Lucien Freud, Tom Thomson, Emily Carr, Henri Matisse and David Milne selected from over 3,500 works in the gallery. Each painting is accompanied by a lively and insightful analysis of the life and times of the artist as it applies to the particular work. There are also six longer essays by leading art historians, for example Dalí scholar Elliott H. King has written about the gallery’s signature painting, ‘Santiago El Grande’, while Katherine Eustace who trained at the Victoria and Albert Museum has explored Walter Sickert’s portraits of power.

Graff’s essay, “A Portrait of Lord Beaverbrook and His Incomparable Gift” explores the works from yet another perspective, that of the collector. “I have an even greater appreciation for the collection now and feel even more strongly that certain works can’t be pulled out of the collection without damaging the integrity of its meaning, because collections have a personality or story and you can read them holistically,” he says. “There’s communication between the works of art when you look at how Beaverbrook acquired them and what he was thinking, so there are a lot of sociological and historical significances to the collection, as well as to the individual works.”

Bernard Riordan, director emeritus (left) and Terry Graff, director and editor-author of Masterworks from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery sign copies at its book launch.
Bernard Riordan, director emeritus (left) and Terry Graff, director and editor-author of Masterworks from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery sign copies at its book launch.

“The project actually extends back 10 years with Bernard Riordon who’d wanted to do this but it just never got off the ground, because of the dispute [between Beaverbrook’s heirs and the gallery over ownership of 135 paintings]. So as soon as I started in 2008, I began researching the collection, really delving into it. Then in 2009, the gallery turned 50, so I used that year to create a template for the Masterworks exhibition, but I certainly hadn’t done all the research by that time and it wasn’t something I could be totally absorbed in every day, all day long. That would have been a luxury,” Graff says, explaining how he works around the clock on multiple projects and has written “a slew of other publications related to group and solo shows at the gallery. So over four years, a little bit at a time, I looked through archival records, researched and checked out the paintings.”

“I spent a lot of time studying and contemplating each painting and I’d let the work speak to me and I’d jot things down that I wondered about. Did the artist really intend this? Is this the hand of another artist? Sometimes you discover all kinds of crazy things—in fact our Constable painting has another painting underneath it, which we discovered through x-ray and then discovered Constable had painted over the sitter when he complained about being portrayed in a turbulent storm. So I find there’s a real difference between looking at an actual work of art as opposed to looking at it on a computer screen, as the two experiences are radically different. For me looking at art is a bodily experience—you need to be present with your senses.”

Graff actually wrote most of the book at his home, however, as he says the gallery is not conducive to the more introverted aspects of the job. “Working in a gallery is a bit like Christmas as there’s always excitement when a new work comes in. And it’s definitely not a tomb,” he adds, referring to the contemporary exhibitions he’s curated, including 2012’s Hot Pop Soup’s opening where guests were invited to dress for an Andy Warhol-style party. “I don’t make a big distinction between historical and contemporary, because to me it’s all inter-related, but to truly appreciate contemporary art I think you have to be grounded in historical art.”

Master Works from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery is the newsest addition to a growing list of titles by Terry Graff. All of the books on the top shelf were written over the the four years he was writing Masterworks.
Masterworks from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery is the newest addition to a growing list of titles by Terry Graff. All of the books on the top shelf were written over the the four years he was writing Masterworks.

This leads the conversation back to Graff’s personal library where he did most of the research for Masterworks using the hundreds of books he’s been collecting all his life. “They’re irreplaceable because there’s so much you can’t access electronically—rare books and catalogues, that will probably never be digitalized and besides, I’m always cautious about what I find online, so I prefer reliable books by international scholars.”

Graff now has even more reason to be cautious about computers, as last summer when the Masterpieces manuscript was almost completed, his computer crashed. “I hadn’t backed it up and I lost a big chunk of text and that was devastating. There was a sunken feeling in my stomach—all that work! So I phoned Susanne Alexander [publisher] at Goose Lane and asked her to extend the deadline, but of course she’s looking at it from the other end, with editing, proofing, printing, binding. But she did allow me a little more time. It meant a lot of late nights, until two or three or even four a.m., drinking coffee and plowing through, but what I found was that because I’d already done it, the second version came out better in the end—at least that’s my perception.”

And indeed he’s right. His engaging and informative presentation of the interconnections among the Beaverbrook’s art treasures has made it a book you can come back to and enjoy, again and again.

This story was originally published in the spring 2013 issue of Atlantic Books Today.