This selection from our collection—a selection that excludes photographs (the pieces by Dyan Marie and Thrush Holmes, while photo-based, are really poems), most of our graphic works, ethnographic pieces (masks and objects from Africa and New Guinea) and works of sculpture—represents, in miniature, the range of our interests and enthusiasms, a range which, encountered so immediately and in such high focus, must, of necessity, seem rather hectic and perhaps over-eclectic.
And indeed we have collected—though that seems too deliberate a term (acquired would be closer to the mark)—eclectically, spontaneously, intuitively. There is no visionary master narrative at the helm of this unashamedly bad hoc collection. While we have purchased works, always for astonishingly little money, and traded for them, most of the things in our collection were simply given to us by our artist-friends (a kind and generous lot!).
This gifting never had anything to do, I hasten to add, with the fact that I was writing widely and regularly, in magazines and newspapers, about contemporary art. The only work in the collection directly generated by my writing is Nicole Collins’s “735 Marks for G.M.D” which was a playfully mordant response to a Globe & Mail piece I had written about her which happened to be 735 words long.
Some of the pieces were wedding gifts (the John Heward Self-Portrait, among them); Harold Klunder gave us his self-portrait painting (in an act of baroque munificence) only because we once put him up for a night so he wouldn’t have to travel back to Montreal in a storm. Toronto art dealer Olga Korper traded me the delectable Susanna Heller “Venice” plaque for a limited edition copy of a book of my poems (I’m pretty sure I was the winner in that little exchange!). Some of the works (a John Scott drawing and a Natalka Husar painting) were personal offerings to Malgorzata (Natalka’s painting—an uncanny likeness—came in the mail a few days after my introducing her to Malgorzata on the street, a meeting that lasted only a couple of minutes); the Tony Urquhart drawing from 1958 is a drawing I saw as a student and which, as the first abstract work I ever loved, changed my life (when, after thirty years or so, I described the drawing to him, he disappeared into his studio and came back holding it in his hand. “Is this the one?” he asked me. It was. And so he gave it to me).
Too many of the works in the exhibition are by dear friends, no longer with us—and whom we miss every day: Guido Molinari, Harold Town, William Ronald (Bill used to give me a painting every time I visited his studio; I used to take it home wet, balancing it on my knees in the taxi as if it were a hot pizza), Peter Aspell, Rick Gorman, David Bolduc, Gerald Ferguson and my dear Barker Fairley—who was like a father to me.
(Gary Michael Dault)
