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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 26, 2006
Old master
My grandfather’s religion was the Old Masters. He had some books with late Victorian reproductions of the big paintings -- by Raphael and Michelangelo, Rubens and Rembrandt. They were the holiest of holies, the greatest of the great. One spoke of them with reverence, or not at all. Usually, not at all.In his dayjob he was a cartographer and draftsman with Imperial Oil, who once did gratuitously ambitious prospecting maps of South America, superbly cross-hatched in the mountains. By night he was a calligrapher and illuminator. In the boxes of his papers that have recently come down to me, I find the most glorious examples of his “scrollcraft”, done to commemorate the retirements of Imperial Oil executives, or to mark the passage of some “kingfisher” at his freemasonic lodge. There are little fits of speculative heraldry, and the occasional grand flourish -- on a Bible passage, or on the mariner’s compass, or a gallant thank-you note to his longsuffering wife. I have the tools of his trade, too -- his pens and even some of his colours, plus elegant binders on “Engrossing and Practical Scroll Design”, on “How to Use Manuscripts Pens”, and so on. There are exchanges with his most admired contemporaries in the craft, as far away as Poland. Or with the pedagogues of the Ministry of Education, who were seeking ways to improve the handwriting of the children of Ontario. He was a practical man, with a strong Protestant sense of his own worth, and even lapses into vanity, but immediate humility in the presence of anything he thought greater than himself; and an exact appreciation of his own strengths and limits as a craftsman. Our country was once peopled with characters like that: who knew their place, and weren’t shy about keeping it. Believing people; though who can plumb belief? For grandpa, I think religion was mostly a question of respect, for what is higher. It gave a time and place to be at one’s Sunday best. (They had Sundays in those days.) He did not suffer from religious doubts, but neither from any religious obsessions. For the rest, he was governed by the cast-iron moral standards in which he had been raised. And he entertained a deep suspicion that modern art was all a fraud. This came to a head at the installation of a Henry Moore sculpture (Three-Way Piece No. 2, “The Archer”), at Toronto’s new City Hall in 1966. He declared, “I know what I like and I don’t like that!” -- though not without a self-deprecating wink. He compared it to a soup bone. Pressed on this issue by his son (my father), who was a Moore enthusiast, grandpa allowed it was a pretty soup bone. Papa found him a soup bone in a butcher’s shop, and had it polished and mounted on a small pedestal. Grandpa replied by gilding it, and hanging it on a string. He thought the Impressionists were possibly making art -- that certainly they could understand colour -- but any child could do a Picasso. The proof came in a magazine article, showing exact reproductions of major Picasso paintings in coloured chalk, done by schoolchildren on walls in Malaga, Spain, as a lure to the tourist trade. Well, although he is dead a quarter century now, I can testify to grandpa’s admission that Picasso could at least draw -- which was more than he thought “the others” could do to save their souls. I can recall being scandalized by grandpa’s reactionary views on subjects like this -- I, a child of the ’sixties. Only later in life did I discover that all capable craftsmen have reactionary views, on most subjects. And finally, that I, myself, hold reactionary views. Dear grandpa: the world is going to hell. There is a portrait drawing of him among his papers, done in sanguine Conté crayon, when he was a young man on the battlefields of France. Whoever did it, captured something of his spirit through later life, and the inner physiognomy, passed down through my uncles and aunts. (No photograph could do this.) Those who master the art of drawing, capture time as well as shape and shade. I’ve been myself following grandpa’s composition notes, while doodling in inks on a sheet of cold-pressed watercolour paper: a crucifix in Burgundy red, envined with the old Jesuit motto, “Ad maiorem Dei gloriam”, for the Feast of Christ the King. How often in the moment everything seems lost, one finds everything returning. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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