 For the Sake of Her Children, by Lana Matskiv (Canada, b. Ukraine) 2022 Defiant Stories Anyone who has met Lana Matskiv in person is already aware of the storyteller spell. Lana the artist is first and foremost a storyteller. She is an archetype, an astute observer and a magnetic force that draws everyone in and holds them close. When talking with her at a soiree, Lana’s audience leans in instinctively to catch every word. She talks about the stories inside the paintings of others, sharing her passion for the visual world. She recounts fables and fairy tales and operas. She tells of her own harrowing scrapes. Most of all, she glows when sharing a fellow traveller’s triumphs and tragedies. She is right there with them every step of the way. This is what you must listen for when looking at Lana’s paintings. Despite immediate impressions of exquisite colourship, of impossible precision, flawless perspective, and mastery of composition- the artist as storyteller is how you must approach her art. There are a multitude of labyrinthine rivers coursing under the surface of these stunning paintings, deep and wide with promise and meaning, with hurtful and hopeful histories, blood and water as real as that running through your own veins. Because it is yours: in the layers of fairy tale and fancy, of history and hell, Lana paints for the truth that lies at the bottom of the well but always spills out, defiantly, and ready for battle and beauty. No matter what Lana’s paintings show on their surface, they are her story, told through the story of others. Whether a portrait, or an homage to a cultural treasure, or a scene from folklore or ballet, Lana paints about wandering, about movement, about migration. This road is best taken by choice, when we follow our hearts and curiosities to learn more about others and the world, or by chance, when wanderlust changes our course and becomes part of our fate. Of course, the road is too often the desperate path of refugees or immigrants sacrificing home for hope of a life of freedom from oppression. The dance is one of danger and bitter obstacles for too many. But even so, there is beauty in each story. Over thirty years ago, Ukrainian-Canadian artist Lana Matskiv fled the Soviet Union with nothing but six dollars, her teenage daughter, and a rolled-up painting in her possession. Anything else she had was left behind, or taken from her en route. She was a journalist by profession, interested in people’s stories, in their cultures and histories. This curiosity and compassion, along with her own experiences, informed her lifelong interest in themes of migration and immigration, wanderers, travellers, refugees, and settlers. She has been driven to understand what is behind people and what is in front of them when it comes to the dangers and promises of the road. Is home something you leave behind, or something you carry in your soul? Lana’s interest in the arts is lifelong. “In a country where religion was forbidden, the god in my family was art,” she says. Born in Poltava in Central Ukraine, art and literature surrounded her. Her family prized writers and philosophers connected to local history, Gogol, Kotlianarevsky, Kotsybuynsky, Lesia Ukrainka. Childhood in Ukraine meant total envelopment and saturation in folk arts such as embroidery, kilim weaving, and pysanka- elaborate decoration of Easter eggs with pre-Christian astrological patterns. Everywhere, there was Petrykivka painting, a decorative folk art tradition from Central Ukraine. Paintings of floral and avian motifs on freshly whitewashed abode walls, ceiling beams, boxes, hearths and more brought colourful cheer to the atmosphere and celebrated humanity’s place inside the natural environment. Each bird and flower held unique symbolism of eternity, masculine and feminine beauty, harmony, eternity, and the cyclical rebirth of nature. Lana attended art school in Kharkiv, and had private instruction in Odessa, where she also frequented regular literary gatherings or exhibitions of artists in secret studios. Many artists were jailed, exiled, or forbidden to paint or show their work. It didn’t make sense for a middle-class girl to become an artist in this political climate. Becoming a teacher was seen as a stable or respectable option. Lana also had a passion for literature and a gift for writing, but she was most drawn to what she calls “faction” rather than fiction- she was interested in the real stories. She had an aptitude for history and politics and an instinct for people, so she went into journalism. This very appreciation for stories past and present, for cultural diversity and expression, was the same reason for her continued interest in visual literacy. Art is the fingerprint of a culture, the way a culture reveals itself. It is also about her deep connection to people as individuals, because art is the way we express our unique perspectives and communicate with each other across time and across borders. Lana still yearned to create art herself, but as a newcomer in Canada, she found meaningful legal work. She was busy with pragmatic and urgent work helping other refugees. While she used her professional life to help newcomers land and build their lives, she was forging connections and friendships and imprinting the stories of their lives on her soul. She also became something that is perhaps even more important than the creation of art- a collector of art. Lana built an impressive collection of art through her years in Canada, starting with her artist friend’s rolled up portrait that she brought with her. The Matskiv Collection is something rare, a rich and eclectic range of works of Canadian and European painters, focused heavily on Ukraine. Some jewels include Viktor Gontarov and Mykola Mogylat. Collecting art is arguably the best education available. It involves commitment, conviction, and sacrifice. The Matskiv Collection has been exhibited at the Palette School of Art in Vaughan, and her door has always been open for private tours. Seven years ago, the many roads and branches of Lana’s life intersected by chance or destiny. Lana was returning home from some errands and saw that a woman was set up outside of her home, painting a watercolour streetscape. Of course Lana struck up a conversation with the artist, Manije Sabet, who happened to be a recent immigrant from Iran. Lana signed her daughter up for art classes at Manije’s studio, and before long acquired a piece for the Matskiv collection as well. At the second scheduled instructional, Lana’s daughter was late and the artist invited her to come in and draw rather than waiting idly. A sleeping giant came to life in that moment. “Since that time, I never stopped,” Lana says. There are many paths available to an artist today, and many modes of expression. But while Lana sees immense beauty in all kinds of forms, she is an intense, thorough person and for herself, there was only one possibility, the hardest one. “I wanted to draw and paint,” she says. “And I had to learn how to draw and paint realistically.” “The world did not need another amateurish landscape or still life. The pursuit was only worth my while if I learned to do it on an acceptable professional level.” Lana was working full time and was a mother, too, and she was not sure how to resolve this issue. But she felt she had something important to say, and on another level, she understood that all her pursuits and experiences were now converging. There was no choice but to go forward with this calling. She had stories to tell. Lana began her work with Oleh Nedoshytko, a private instructor from Odessa that she invited to Canada. They worked together from a method known as “constructivism,” which is essentially dissecting subjects into their essential geometric forms. A second method was the French Atelier way, which involved exercises to develop motor skills, following the mantra to “draw what you see.” Lana’s nature, of course, was to decide she needed to learn both methods to get where she was going. She began working at the Toronto Academy of Realist Art, founded by internationally renowned teacher Fernando Freitas. She also undertook studies at the George Brown in Fine Art Foundations for a helpful overview of anatomy, art history, composition, design fundamentals, and illustration. In this short time, Lana has already given birth to a vast and difficult body of work, painting and drawing around the clock. Her art has already been exhibited, collected, awarded, and auctioned. Her work was part of a Waddington’s fundraiser for Ukraine, and it was displayed at the Ukrainian embassy. It is in the permanent collection of the Ukrainian Canadian Art Foundation. A careful observer will see Lana’s vulnerability leaking from the edges of her confident brushstrokes. She has rigorous expectations for herself, but isn’t interested in adulation for her gifts of draughtsmanship, or in the way she can focus and construct a likeness in time and space. She credits her teachers for these talents, and wants her work to be recognized for something else. “Even the chairs at Fernando’s Academy can learn to draw reasonably well in a short period of time,” she claims, as if a brilliant instructor can transform a lump of coal to gold with nothing in talent or labour from the artist herself. When I marvel with the helpless jealousy of another artist next to a master’s talents, Svetlana dismisses my praise. “It’s something that anyone can learn, with practice,” she tells me, as if the magic of light on ballet’s silk or ancient coral beads is a passing trifle. But these paintings could not be created on emotion alone - they required a gruelling commitment of time and patience, a remarkable talent, and a dedication to work and study that few painters possess. But we can understand where Lana is coming from if we understand what fuels her passion to create art. This is not merely the desire for self-expression or for a creative outlet. This is about all the experiences she has amassed along the way, absorbed from her culture in the occupied Ukraine, accumulated from the voices she has worked to free. These paintings are not about the meticulous tonal variegation or the painstaking accuracy of their objects. They are about struggle, survival, soul, and beauty. “What does it for me it to capture form, shape, and colour in the world around me, as they are divine. But they only live on a support surface if they have a spirit and get my message across,” Lana explains. The stories are dense and richly layered, in literary allusions and references to fairy tales and folklore. They are there in homages to other artists, to writers, to mythologies. They are woven in the brushstrokes that bring symbols and motifs across vast geographies, across time. They are written into the traditions Lana acknowledges in patterns. They are lurking in the faces of her models. They are written in the flowers and birds. “For this show, I prepared a story about wanderers…They defy the gravity of the comfort zone and embark on the road not only by choice, or by trade, but too often by circumstances larger than themselves. But there is much beauty along the way. The beauty they encounter, and the beauty of spirit they develop. I hope I captured some of it in these paintings. Much more to come.” Lorette C. Luzajic This essay was previously published in Lana Matskiv: Paintings and Graphic Works, 2022, the catalogue that accompanied the artist's exhibition at the Shevchenko Museum, Toronto. It formed the basis of the keynote speech Lorette gave at the opening of the exhibition.   Lana Matskiv at the show.  Lana and Lorette   The Queen's Gambit, by Lana Matskiv (Canada, b. Ukraine) 2025  Easter Journey, by Lana Matskiv (Canada, b. Ukraine) 2019-2022
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 The Magic of Mercurio: an Artist at an Exhibition for Giuseppe Mercurio “I don’t know what I’m doing,” the artist reveals candidly from the podium. It is Giuseppe Mercurio’s first retrospective exhibition, curated by Francesca Valente at the Joseph D. Carrier Art Gallery in Toronto. We are surrounded by giant, colourful canvases, playful, instinctive, semi-abstract, gestural works; immense palimpsests of splash and scrape and shape and sgraffito, of asemic writing and graffiti and colour fields. The paintings are raw and intuitive. They are both ancient and ultra-contemporary, each one a kind of archeological dig that excavates old cities and cultures, treasures of cuneiform and intaglio, from a surface of the modern city and all of its flash and griffonage and neon signs. But the pulse is personal, too; we are wandering through the artist’s emotional landscape and imagination, a person of passion and frenzy, mischievous, driven, and outrageously creative. Mercurio’s parallel incarnation is that of chef and restauranteur. Almost thirty years ago, he opened Bar Mercurio on Bloor Street near the Royal Ontario Museum. It’s an intimate, rustic space centered around the classic long bar and a bountiful, glittering apothecary of bottles, serving spectacular pizza on sourdough, succulent duck pappardelle, and the best carpaccio in the world: grass-fed, drizzled with the oil of Sicilian olives and bright lemons. My initiation into Bar Mercurio was by chance, walking past after a lecture on science at the University of Toronto. It was late on a late summer evening and there was a free space on the patio. My date and I agreed that a glass of Mount Etna wine and a pizza seemed like a perfect nightcap. Stepping inside to visit the facilities, it was a series of intriguing paintings that stopped me in my tracks. These were bold and marvelous creations, magical mazes of colourful shapes and word fragments. They summoned Hans Hoffman, Gorky, Kline, Klee, De Kooning, Tapies, Twombly, and Basquiat, while wholly original to their maker. And yet, I recognized them as if looking into a mirror. Someone I did not know saw what I saw, was driven by similar aesthetics, a frantic, raw creativity amok with adventurous colour, messy beauty, fragmented dreams, scrawled words, numbers, and cryptic sigils. Our art was very different: this artist was much better and more advanced on his path; he worked on larger substrates; we both used acrylic media but mine used collage liberally and employed fewer drawings. But creatively, I knew that we were kindred spirits. I inquired as to the provenance of the paintings and was told it was the owner’s work. This was the only invitation I needed to centre Bar Mercurio as the restaurant to which I would return for every special occasion as the next eight years unfolded, feasting on calamari and spaghetti and salads with mixed greens and candied walnut morsels, and sampling my way through a gorgeously curated wine list. For many years before it stopped publishing, I wrote regularly on wine and art pairings and on food lore for Good Food Revolution, with wine, food, art and literature a holy tetrad of my personal and professional passions. Here at Bar Mercurio were all the things I loved most. To this day, we visit for enchanted dining at every anniversary or with guests from out of town. Back on that first night, my date returned to the patio after paying the cheque inside, and said, “Did you see the paintings? The art reminds me of you.” Perhaps it is gauche to put too much of the spotlight in a story of another artist’s work on one’s self. But the parallels in source, style, aesthetic and inspiration would be a glaring omission if not acknowledged. It was absolutely transformative to encounter the work of an artist who clearly experienced the world and the creative process with a mutual intensity, an artist who speaks in a similar language. I dreamed of seeing dozens of Joe’s paintings, and entering the Joseph D. Carrier gallery for his first retrospective, that dream came true. This exhibition is exquisitely curated by Francesca Valente. The spacious, palatial architecture and two-story showcase allows guests a journey with the paintings, with ample room to encounter each work. Grand, yet intimate. Up close and personal, each painting reveals a masterful medley of rich textures and movement, a buoyant dance of mark-making. You are submerged into joy and revelry, but there is a sardonic undertow, too, an alchemy where tension and anger are released into light. There is, too, poetry, and a spirit of play. It is often said that the key to unlock the ninety million dollar secrets of Mark Rothko’s works is to enter them physically and encounter them as a form of meditation. Rothko, the abstract expressionist, famously painted large-scale colour fields, simple rectangle blocks of contrasting colours. These consistently sell for tens of millions of dollars and are status symbols for collectors and museums. The secret is to stand in front of them and dissolve into the experience of the colour, to become one with them, if you will. Contemplating them in this way will deliver an emotional confrontation. Rothko himself stated, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” I enjoy the occasional Rothko immersion, but have never quite fallen under their spell. The high stakes commerce obliterates the spirit and simplicity of the contemplative experience that might make sense in its absence. Still, I am a champion of this technique: entering into art and surrendering to it, meditating on it, and allowing a profound connection, is the best way to experience art. It is a technique that proves a revelation with Mercurio’s canvases. It’s as if stepping outside of yourself is the ideal way to step inside of yourself. Communion here takes you into another realm, into the mystery of creativity. There is something essential that happens, that is, something of the essence, a spell where all that is enigmatic, where mystery itself, takes material form and becomes image. “By transcending any reference to contingent elements, Mercurio embraces a new realm in which the tangible and intangible become one, the outer and inner worlds appear as an unicum in a mental dimension which incorporates the past and the present simultaneously,” writes Valente in her curatorial statement. This magic cannot come from instruction. You might say that it can only be liberated. It is pure imagination and freedom. The artist must have a conviction of beauty, yet be in profound embrace with a wide and broad definition of such an elusive ideal. They must see beauty everywhere, so that they can show us, while being paradoxically unflinching in the face of terror and darkness, because here, too, is beauty, and some of the truth of the world. “Why do I paint and what do I paint?” For Mercurio, it is rhetorical question. “These inquiries have haunted me for a very long time and they have been a very tough code to crack. A copious mass of coats have been peeled away to glimpse at this existential matrix.” The Catalan painter Antoni Tapies has been profoundly influential in my own practice. Tapies saw creation as a ritual act, as a way of participating in and connecting with the consciousness of the universe and time. He loved to include humble materials, emulating the ordinary and overlooked aspects of the world, such as textures in sidewalk pavements or a discarded stick. Mark-making and graffiti to him were symbols and incantations. Repetition and all that is raw and elemental were aspects of, building blocks, of meditation and ways to plug in to the past and future. Attention and intention were spiritual or mystical matters, and being present for experience was the essential work of the artist, the spectator, indeed, anyone. He was interested most in a deep engagement with the materials he used. I have long used recurring symbols in my artwork, and perhaps the simplest of them is the X or the +, recurring motifs for Tapies as well. I see them elsewhere, of course, including in Mercurio’s paintings. The straightforward intersection of two lines has always resonated as deeply meaningful to me, suggestive of signature or being present (“X marks the spot”), of seeing inside something (“X-ray vision”), of lovers coming together (“xoxo”), of standing in for something else (“x+y”), of life (the ancient ankh of Egypt), of intersections and decisions (the crossroads), of declarative and decorative mark-making (graffiti), and of God and man uniting or Christ’s power over death (the Christian cross.) This is admittedly a lot to wrench from one humble mark, but there is just as much meaning in a circle, a stripe, a dot of orange, a spiral, a star. Every mark made by an artist participates in a complex, universal, multilayered symbolic code. It is not always a jigsaw puzzle to be meticulously pieced together, or to be deciphered, but rather, experienced on all levels, consciously or unconsciously. As Mercurio stated in his speech at the opening, “Only you, the viewer can complete the story on these canvases.” Images transcend the maker’s intention. They communicate from both the concrete and the liminal. Standing in the presence of Mercurio’s art is to be fully here, and fully “there” at once. It is the same sacred experience of entering into a cave of handprints and horse outlines in ochre and animal fat marked there by people who lived thousands of years in the past. An image is one way that we participate in eternity. By nature, I am sign-seeking and introspective, always linking the individual to the archetypal. I approach art with whole-hearted openness, expecting to be changed and transported. My appreciation is wildly diverse: I adore the meticulous draftsmanship prowess and rich symbolic language of still-life painting; I am swept away by the beauty and mythology blushing under the pre-Raphaelite’s brush; I love the opulent maximalism of the rococo and the high drama of Latin American colonial religious art. Perhaps I am most critical of the art that bears some resemblance to the aesthetics of my own work: I love street art, and yet feel most of it uninspired or driven by a hackneyed desire to shock. I feel that Picasso’s grandiose confidence gave way to spectacular innovation that paved the road for me and my collages, yet his inflated ego deterred him in some ways from growth. He never did master composition and most of his works evoke no emotions at all. (Acknowledging that I’m on thin ice here! Joe expressed to me, “Picasso said that it took him old age to finally pain like a child. I vibrate profoundly with this thought!”) Franz Kline’s sweeping gestures zing with the energy and movement of dance, but Jackson Pollock’s are muddy and too easy to replicate. Jean Michel Basquiat was a genius and the rhythms of his graffiti and pictorial improvisations reflect the fragmented ways that our minds manifest information, identity, and memory. But Julian Schnabel’s efforts at the same are discordant and empty. Mercurio’s art shares something with the best of these, all the while resisting labels. “I do not have any favourite artists,” he told me. “I am drawn obviously to the great American abstract artists, but I struggle with anyone in their entirety. I love individual paintings for the momentary idea shared.” In his artist statement, Mercurio says, “I detest the limits of being defined.” His art is pure instinct and conjure. Joe is a self-taught painter. In his speech, he states, “I am not a classically trained painter, I have had no formal training…However, I am committed to tirelessly paint.” His mentor was Uno Hoffman, a Swiss-born artist who lived here in Toronto. (I was shamefully not familiar with Hoffman’s artwork until I started cyberstalking Joe’s.) There is a compelling immediacy in self-taught work that I find irresistible: at its best, it embodies that which cannot be taught- freedom, instinct, imagination, ambiguity, rhythm, innovation, experimentation, exploration, expressiveness, nuance, paradox. Indeed, as Joe said to me, “My artistic process must be immediate.” He begins “with a canvas pinned to the wall.” Using acrylic paints and oil sticks, Mercurio starts with an undercoat and builds with brush and paint stick. “Painting is the medium I use to release something that resides inside of me which must be expressed. A cathartic release… painting depicts the inner nuances, emotions, feelings, etc. As such, they complete their journey and do not remain stuck within!” The self-taught artist must draw not from the particular school of thought inherent in his training, but from his own devices and the constellation of personal influences and interests. This is the richest environment for art to flourish. Mercurio’s work is vivid and emotional, thrumming and alive. He is a confident colourist, unafraid of unpredictable juxtapositions. His work pulses with flavours, with conversations, with cultures and cities and a roller-coaster spectrum of emotions. He draws from his Calabrese heritage and Toronto home, from the studio, from his family and the kitchen and his love of bicycling. His educational background in statistics and Italian language make an appearance, too, with layers of ambiguous script and mathematical calculations forming part of the texture of his art. Perhaps those who dine at the divine Bar Mercurio have front row centre insight into Joe’s art. At the helm of this restaurant, Joe is both exacting and freewheeling. Quality is first: only the best ingredients will do. He is an expert curator, bringing together flavours and ambiance that are experiential for his guests. There is a sense of tradition and the hospitality of the old world and family, with Mom on deck for quality control, and the warm and gorgeous Jackie to attend to our every creature comfort. Everything is expansive and generous, and every staff member is unique, contributing in their own way to the culture of the place. It is busy and noisy, yet the atmosphere is relaxed. The food is upscale and immaculate, yet you can come as you are and be comfortable. Perhaps Joe’s name holds some clues, too; the fleet-footed Mercury was the messenger of the gods, the Roman god of business, travelers, communication, and mischief. The word “mercurial” draws from this archetypal history and denotes passion, quick-thinking, intelligence, impulsivity, eloquence, and ingenuity. Joe strikes me as creative, clever, witty, intense, hard-working, ambitious, and over the top. He has a rich background of academic, artistic, and entrepreneurial endeavours, but even so, you can tell he is a live wire, operating almost entirely on instinct. On top of all that, there is a certain je ne sais quoi here: from my first visit to Bar Mercurio, I felt it was an oasis, an enchanted, inspired place. Everything here can equally apply to the experience of his art. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he says. Only, clearly, he does. One foot in the old world, the other in the new and the now, and the rest in a different place entirely. Pure magic. Lorette C. Luzajic Visit Mercurio’s exhibition On New Ground until September 29, 2025 Joseph D. Carrier Gallery 901 Lawrence Avenue West, Toronto Artist website: https://www.studio1mercurio.com/about Visit Bar Mercurio: 270 Bloor Street West, Toronto https://www.barmercurio.com  A Pantomime with a Bugle (Giuseppe Mercurio, 2020)  Joe and Lorette.  The Algorithm in Delirium (Giuseppe Mercurio, 2019)   Pizza of the gods.  Toller Cranston and his dogs in Cabbagetown. Toronto Star Archives. Beyond the Beyond: Toller Cranston In my wildest days, I lived in a basement apartment on George Street in Toronto, just across from Allan Gardens, a botanical greenhouse and sketchy park where dog walkers, street walkers, and an assortment of addicts would convene to partake in the various mysteries of intoxication. The nearby pub, Pimblett’s, where I held the after-party for my wedding, and Walk on the Wild Side, a longstanding establishment for wigs and large sized ladies’ shoes, were classic haunts for transgender women and crossdressers. It was a neighbourhood frequented by a rare breed, old queens, the fey and the fabulous, if you will, those wonderfully flamboyant characters with a penchant for antiques and excess, for opera and old movie stars. One such personality was my neighbour Paul, known for his lawn chair perch surrounded by scraggly rhododendrons, decked to the hilt in festive fuchsia feather boas atop an old “wife beater” style tank shirt. Anyone and everyone was welcome to join him for a tumbler of Maria Christina, even before noon, or a sampling from assorted pills and powders served on a vintage Tiffany platter. You would be regaled with racy stories and scathing witticisms about passersby if you stayed. It was the same district where the enigmatic Toller Cranston was often seen in his big floppy hats and his fur capes, walking his spotted English setters. On one occasion when his beloved dog Minkus got lost and the locals helped find and return him home, Toller had thrown a party for them. “To show my appreciation…I had a cocktail party for all the people who had helped me: the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the pimps, and the mental patients from the streets…They were imperial. They were perfection. They were so helpful.”  Toller Cranston skates in front of Toronto's city hall in February, 1973. Fred Ross / Canadian Press Photo Toller Cranston was the charismatic Canadian icon best known for revolutionizing the world of figure skating. He was a virtuoso, internationally renowned athlete who took national champion of Canada six years running from 1971 to 1976. Though he “only” took the bronze medal in the Olympics and never made gold, his epic flights of fancy on ice changed history forever, turning the sport into art. If it smarted to evade the gold medal that many believe was rightfully his, Toller said it was a useful reminder that he always had something more to strive for. “I really wasn’t a competitor…The only person I was competitive with was myself.” And if the names of gold medalists often fade into forgetting, no one could forget Toller’s radical contributions. Certainly, he was keenly aware of what he had wrought. In his books, he refers to himself repeatedly as the Patineur du Siècle, the skater of the century, and he is right. Toller brought interpretive, full-bodied expression, dance, creativity, and musicality into the game. With his seemingly impossible choreography, exquisite high kicks, and spinning fluidity, he was known as Nijinksy on Ice. Indeed, the man who made theatre on the rink had started with ballet at the age of six. The hockey skates he was given as a child were meant to make a man of the boy who wanted to be a ballerina, but the young Cranston began inventing dances with them. His spectacular leaps and bounds were all the more astonishing when we consider that at age thirteen, he was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter, a condition of inflammation of the ligaments. He was told he would never skate again. But one thing the world came to know about Toller Cranston was that he never took no for an answer. In his autobiography, When Hell Freezes Over, Toller wrote: "The great moments in figure skating occur when a performer is true to his own nature, and puts his heart and soul on the line with no holds barred." This is what he gave to the ice, and to all of us, the entirety of his body and soul. In doing so, he changed the sport forever into art. With those impossible, arabesque arcs and arches, in skin-tight sequinned orange and aqua deep plunge V neck disco jumpsuits, he was dazzling and over-the-top. No one had ever seen anything like it. And we couldn’t keep our eyes off of him.  Toller Cranston's House in San Miguel, Mexico. Andrew Osta, CC BY-SA 4.0 Toller Cranston was a maximalist in every way, on and off the rink. Everything was dialled up to eleven. He was theatrical, smart, exaggerated, and snazzy. He glittered. He was the same eccentric character whether at work and at play. He was electric. By my day, he had retired from skating and sold the house he lived in two streets over, and all the treasures of his infamous clutter, enchanted old gewgaws and curiosities. Toller described his home as “rococo gone loco” and as part museum, part “bordello.” “I had a green Murano glass fountain that lit up, played music, spewed perfumed water, and changed colour,” he wrote in his memoirs, Zero Tollerance. “I had nine-foot-long Mexican Christ figures from the 18th century flying in the air. I had jewelled boxes; anything that would illuminate itself, marble columns that lit up; secret, strange things; magical things; wonderful things; terrible things; practically hideous things; exquisite things.” Waddingtons, where he loved shopping til dropping, recalled that he would scoop up every carved wooden cherub they had. “Toller was always on the hunt for the wild, the colourful, the outrageous, the beautiful and anything over the top,” wrote Duncan McLean in his eulogy at the auction house. “His favourite expression when he saw something he had to have was: ‘It’s beyond the beyond!’” Later, Waddingtons sold all those things for him. Toller took the money and ran, off to San Miguel in Mexico. There, he spent the next twentysomething years collecting a new assortment of baubles and handicrafts, and also, doing something else: painting. In fact, Toller Cranston considered himself an artist first. Skating was but one kind of art, collecting, another. All of it stemmed from his imagination as an artist, and painting was his primary expression. Toller described himself as a “painter who skates.” The San Miguel de Allende blog quotes him as saying, "We're all born with an inclination in the genes. Who we are, what we're supposed to do, it's in the DNA. I had full knowledge as to what my destiny was—my inclination—from a very early age. I was a painter." By the age of sixteen, Toller was a self-supporting artist. He did attend post-secondary studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Montreal, but he didn’t graduate. When his teachers told him there was nothing more he could learn there, he left. He was already using his professional painting to fund his costly ice-skating adventures. Still a teenager, he held exhibitions in his skating coach’s house. Barely 21, he had a major exhibition in Toronto. He considered himself a self-taught artist, and on his world skating tours, he visited the great museums everywhere. “That was my education,” he said. He learned how to paint from his skating artistry, too. “Something that I learned as a skater, and brought it into my painting, was the idea of rhythm and the never-ending line.” Our northern Nijinsky had more than enough accomplishments and contributions in figure skating, but they were a sideshow next to his life as a painter. He had been studying and creating visual art from the beginning, and until the day he died, in 2015, of a heart attack at the age of 65, he painted obsessively in his self-imposed exile to Mexico. Twelve hours a day, he said, seven days a week. He had several hundred solo exhibitions around the globe. The sheer volume of his output attests to such a schedule: in 2025, he told the Globe and Mail he had created over 30 thousand paintings, not including drawings and prints. The estimated number occasionally changed, being cited as 70 thousand in another interview. Most experts put the number at a minimum of over 20 thousand. And he sold them all. As a point of comparison, Pablo Picasso’s prolific output is estimated at 13 500, not counting prints and sketches, and Paul Klee meticulously logged his oeuvre to show close to 10 thousand works. Marc Chagall probably has around the same as Klee. Quantity meant something to Toller, who bedazzled every square inch of his homes, performances, and canvases with eclectic oddments and razzmatazz and curiosities. But quality mattered, too. He was driven by beauty and magic. And his paintings are spellbinding and masterful. For a man born into the drab gray industrial landscape of Hamilton, Ontario, Cranston’s art is inexplicably enchanted, with fantastical scenes and creatures, evoking Russian Orthodox ostentation, Croatian naïve art traditions, an aesthetic of opera, ballet, and fairy tales, Canadian woodland native art, colonial Spanish opulence, and Mexican shrines and folk art. His life and work personified the aesthetic of horror vacui, or “fear of an empty space.”  Photo of Toller Cranston with his art, taken a few days before his death in 2015. Andrew Osta, CC BY-SA 4.0 Sarah Hampson’s Globe article made much of Cranston’s colourful persona, patronizingly dismissing his theatricality as performative vanity. This fashionable reaction to Cranston is almost part of his legend. “Cranston is not so much an artist as a performance artist,” Hampson harrumphed. She emphasized the man’s audacity to compare himself to Van Gogh. "’My work is windows into another world that no one else sees,’ he proclaims… He sighs. His voice has a drawl to it, a suggestion of ennui, as if he has long come to terms with his sense of superiority and the explanations it requires…Artistic arrogance is the costume Cranston dons to strut through the world... He once wore a peacock outfit in a skating performance and still, at least in spirit if not in dress, he likes to fan out his plumage.” It makes for good reading, to be sure. But the implication that Cranston, the “peacock with the paintbrush” didn’t merit his streak of eccentricity doesn’t fly. His passionate drive as an artist was borne out by his lifelong, obsessive work ethic as an artist, whether on skates or with brush in hand. Perhaps the writer did not understand the concept of camp. A classic archetype of gay personae, camp is an artful and dramatic way of life. Camp is difficult to define: it is performative, yet second nature to those who possess it. It is about art and artifice, yet impossible to fake. It’s a show, but more than that, a way of being. It is both ostentatious and subdued. Intelligence, wit, and irony are hallmarks of camp, yet it inverts and disrupts dominant ideals of beauty and taste. Camp is a form of masquerade, yet it must come naturally in order for one to possess it. In camp, everything is exaggerated, and yet it is sharp and incisive and confident. Camp is about excess emotionalism, and yet it is detached. To be camp, one must possess a cocky superiority complex, but it is also self-deprecating. The word might come from the French, se camper, meaning to pose in an exaggerated way. Camp is Oscar Wilde, Freddie Mercury, Jean Cocteau. Toller Cranston’s grand gestures and maximalist sensibilities on ice and in art, are absolute camp.  The Bride Who Flew Away, by Toller Cranston (Canada) 2007 As an artist, he was also a magician. His paintings are other worldly fairy tales from his fertile imagination, a veritable circus of fantastical costumed queens and creatures, summoned from mythology, dance, folklore, and literature. He was profoundly influenced by both folkloric and Imperial Russia, and the history of Russian ballet, and visited often from his youth. Pravda, the Russian paper, described him as “more Russian than the Russians.” His work was also heavily informed by theatre and dance. His paintings are narratives and performances for operas and ballets that have not yet been written. They are resplendent, too, with ornament and motifs and patterns inspired by palaces, by tiles and embroidery and painting in Uzbekistan, Persia, China, India, Mexico and beyond. They are ostentatious, and decorative, evoking sumptuous fabrics. They are floral, ornamental, all silk and velvet. They are whimsical, mythic, phantasmagorial. Toller sometimes felt like a fish out of water, misunderstood, as he put it, by a country that was too young to “get” his old soul. "Our country is too new,” he told Hampson in 2003. “The DNA is too new. The brains are too new." He was probably right. If his slight seemed snide, it was a response to a real phenomenon. Canadians by and large ignored his art completely, and some dismissed it outright. Harold Town, an abstract painter of fading renown, called Toller a “Sunday painter,” a snub that couldn’t have been more tone-deaf given Toller’s relentless productivity and self-support of an expensive athletic career. Barbara Sears for McLean’s Magazine quotes AGO curator Maria-Mari Sutnik, explaining why the museum does not own any of his paintings. “His work doesn’t fit into any of our collections. His work is decorative art. And then he left the country. He wasn’t part of the community.” This embarrassing exclusion borders on outright bigotry, attesting to the sorry state of academic and popular arts-historical, history, and cultural education in this country. Cranston lived and painted in the modern and postmodern era, and modernism pervaded art, with a critical and popular preference for massive canvases marked by abstract splashes and austere geometrics, and for conceptual work that draws on ugly politics over sumptuous beauty traditions. There is, by design and rebellion, nothing of the old worlds in the new. Beauty and old culture were stripped away from art defiantly as artists sought to separate themselves from everything ancient. Thematically, conceptually, new art has been about austerity, resistance, and oppression, rejecting history, tradition, and any hint of opulence or theatre. Toller said, “My work has always been atypical…of what one might think of Canadian art…” He was a fountain tapped into those ancient worlds, the rivers of old cultures and their ideas of beauty, their patterns, pageantry and puppetry, their lavish courts and harems and storybooks. On his passions and performance in daily life, writing, ice, and paint, Toller stated astutely, “It all derives from the same creative reservoir.” He was also deeply rooted in the 20th century world of theatre and dance, where countless gay artists and actors and costumiers and couturiers thrived. This world of new and ancient spectacle was where he belonged. Everything was camp and flourish and beauty. No wonder he fled to Mexico. Mexico’s pomp and passion and fearless colour were synonymous with his soul. Fashion journalist Jeanne Beker described him thus: "He was style personified in his dramatic hats and capes, with a wardrobe of the finest cashmere sweaters, in exotic shades of persimmon and banana.” Olympic silver medalist Debbi Wilkes trained with Toller in his early years and travelled the globe with him. After his passing in 2015, she spoke to the Canadian Press of his unforgettable personality. “He was crazy, he was absolutely the weirdest and most wonderful person ever. Incredibly generous, but never spoke about that, and loved the drama, loved the spotlight, wanted to be the centre of attention.” “Cranston’s over-the-top self-aggrandizement, combined with the incessant name-dropping, threaten to turn the book into either annoying drivel or hilarious parody. But it never does, and the book remains an oddly compelling read.” The literary review, The Quill and Quire, weighed in on one of his autobiographies, Zero Tollerance. “Although he admits to suffering from a cocaine addiction in the early 1990s, for example, he glosses over the gory details. And, with the exception of one brief, but apparently passionate, affair with a married man in Paris, Cranston refuses to open the kimono on his sex life.” Perhaps. Leaving aside the question of how much of one’s personal life is the rightful business of the public, it was no secret that Toller was gay or that he struggled with cocaine addiction. Like many focused athletes, Toller strived for monastic celibacy when training, unwilling to let desire distract. As for his dalliances, this was also a time when social and cultural homophobia allowed what was obvious so long as it was undeclared. In terms of his addiction, Toller’s chapters on the subject are quite candid. He wrote honestly and insightfully about the personal and social stresses that lead to substance abuse, about crashing under the pressure of his own drive. “Alcohol, drugs, or religion can freeze the pain for a moment. Under their influence, particularly cocaine’s, you reach a point where you don’t give a good goddamn about anything. Then you do it to punish yourself.” He advises the reader not to place the blame for his choices on anyone else, including another skater and colleague of Toller’s who had tragically died of a cocaine overdose at the age of 40. “I crumbled. I went past my limit, and I had neither close friends nor family. I had no one to turn to…Perhaps, at the time, I had created a persona that was too far out, and I had to crash. I had to get real. I had to start playing the game of life like other people in the world, not just live in a fantasy.” He also spoke about falling for the deadly fantasy of turbulence. "The myth was that to be a great artist, you had to lead a tortured life.” Perhaps the takeaway for those of us who have gone down this terrible road and lived to tell the tale is the realization that it is not the road of artists alone. Artists are necessarily sensitive creatures who experience life and feel deeply. But pain and confusion and the search for coping mechanisms with which to handle it gracefully are universally human. It is not only the colourful personality that falls into the undertow of addiction, but rather that their position is one of unique public scrutiny and pressure. He was also engagingly forthright about his infamous inability to manage his money, and the messy impulsivity that drove his spending habits. He lived lavishly but was more often than not totally broke. In true form, he died without a will, leaving his next-of-kin with a shambles of paperwork to sort through his assets. One could get catty instead about Toller’s trademark self-aggrandizement, but perhaps it is better to ignore that eternally boyish bravado and turn that attention to the fact of his work. Toller put everything into his work, with a rigorous, obsessive discipline that was only matched by his voracious creative vision. The athletic endurance and training it reflected, the tireless efforts, the sacrifices he made. His friend and agent Christopher Talbot said on video for the Canadian Press, “His greatest joy was in the studio. But he certainly suffered. Nothing was ever good enough. He was a perfectionist to the point of absolute dysfunction.” At the end of the day, if he compared himself often to Van Gogh and to Da Vinci, what of it? I would go so far as to say that such comparisons are his rightful place, if work, passion, skill, talent, innovation, production, experiment, and study have anything to do with it. Toller’s paintings bring us into a magical kingdom infused with lively storybook spirits and the enchanted realms of ancient cultures. Decorative? Oh, yes. The whole history of multicultural ornamental aesthetics is brought to life on his canvases, teeming with flowers, jewels, and patterns from palaces and folk culture alike, from old Europe to the near and far east, to the pre-Columbian Americas. And watching him skate is an otherworldly experience, too. The videos are all scratchy and dated, but even so, the artist is enigmatic, transporting you into another space. He soars on those slivered silvery blades, spinning until we are dizzy, with exquisite grace and panache. Watching him, we sail away, beyond the beyond. Lorette C. Luzajic   Photos by Lorette C. Luzajic. The Second Coming House Last summer I travelled from the town I was born, Niagara Falls, Ontario, an hour from my home in Toronto, across the river into Niagara Falls, New York. I went to visit an old friend, but the trip was also a pilgrimage to a spectacular visionary shrine on Ontario Street. It was a perfect summer day, with clear blue skies, and I stood dazzled before the creation of Prophet Isaiah Robertson. "When God had me to dig up all the ground, people thought I was crazy," the Prophet told the Buffalo News back in 2006. "When Noah started to build the ark, praise God, on dry land and told them it's going to rain, they thought he was crazy also." But dig up the yard he did, and in the six foot deep hole in front of the humble house at 1308 Ontario Street in Niagara Falls, USA, Robertson erected a 25 foot cross. It was a cross like no one had ever seen before, despite two millennia of artist-inspired crosses. This cross was downright psychedelic, a kaleidoscopic array of brightly painted oak wood cutouts, concentric circles and a constellation of pointed stars. It was the first and central artwork of The Second Coming House, which over time, bloomed with the same dizzying array of exploding shapes, meticulously arranged in stunning geometric patterns. The whole yard was covered, and every inch of the home’s façade, front, sides, and back, as well as the inside of the dwelling. Thousands of wood cutouts form intricate mosaic arrangements, each piece painstakingly painted in red, white, purple, blue, yellow, turquoise, and green. The colours represent the rainbow covenant God made with Noah, that He would never again destroy the world with a flood. It was a covenant Robertson saw affirmed every day, in the perpetual rainbows hovering over the Niagara Falls, the trilogy of water falls separating Canada from the United States. Additionally, every single motif has rich symbolic meaning for Robertson: a six-pointed star, for example, represents the Jewish people; a twelve-pointed star represents the twelve tribes of Israel; an eight-pointed star represents Jesus; three circles represent the Trinity, and so on. There is nothing else that compares, for frame of reference. With some imagination, the bright, opaque colours hint at Caribbean arts. The shape-work bears some resemblance to the detailed folk art patterns of the Pennsylvania Dutch, German immigrants to the neighbouring state. The stylized geometric ornaments are commonly seen as “hex signs” on barns and on quilts. The esoteric symbolism behind the decorative folk traditions of the Pennsylvania Dutch (which is really “Pennsylvania Deutsch,” and “Deutsch” means “German”) is convoluted through time, with a blend of ancient agricultural and cosmological interpretations, and Biblical meanings that parallel Robertson’s symbology. The work of contemporary Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes also shares an aesthetic kinship to Robertson’s. Her vivid palette and kaleidoscopic optics of overlapping circles and shapes come to mind, but it is not likely that either artist were aware of each other’s work. Robertson used no blueprints or plans. Instead, he said, he followed directions straight from the voice of God, the master artist and master carpenter, maker of all things. He placed every piece where God told him to put it. “This is not the work of man,” the Prophet told his friend, photographer Fred Scruton. “No man could be capable of this.” Robertson was born in Jamaica. Just before his mother’s untimely death when he was twelve years old, she received a vision that God had special plans for her son. He decided to become a carpenter because that was the profession of his Saviour, Jesus Christ. He took some work making coffins, and then built a house with no training in carpentry. In his early twenties, he moved to Canada and worked in construction. When he learned of the lower prices for homes “across the ditch” in Niagara Falls, New York, he moved there with the intention of renovating and reselling homes. It was while doing some repairs with sheet rock for the Mount Erie Baptist Church that he first received instructions from on high, telling him to use oak instead. He used his own money to supply the oak, and inside the patterns of the wood grain, he found Biblical messages from God on how to proceed. Following this calling, Robertson received another prophecy, and began work on his own house, transforming it into a riot of sacred symbolism and joyful rainbows. He worked for ten years on the house, and believed the second coming of Christ would take place in 2014. Every soul, living or past, would see his tribute to God’s will on Judgement Day. The year of Isaiah’s prediction came and went. In 2020, he had a stroke and passed on into glory. The Kohler foundation began the work of preservation to keep the cultural treasure standing in perpetuity, like the promise rainbow it represents. Lorette C. Luzajic     A vintage poster for Pennsylvania Dutch barn signs.  The Death of Chatterton, by Henry Wallis (England) 1856 The Marvelous Boy: the Death of Chatterton, by Henry Wallis Death, in purple and auburn. Lying supine in satin and fading sunlight, his hand is poised nonchalantly, teasing his puffy shirt ever so slightly away from his hairless chest. His body is a perfect, graceful arc, and his face is a pale sad moon between the sartorial lavender and the natural halo of fiery red hair. What are we looking at? Here lies Thomas Chatterton, in his pauper’s attic garret, anonymous for now, his genius unrecognized. Around him are shards of words, torn up scraps of poetry, lost forever. The painting is The Death of Chatterton, by Henry Wallis, depicting the frail puer as a martyr. Cause of death, confirmed by inquest: suicide by arsenic at the tender age of seventeen. Thomas Chatterton is a myth. Perhaps he was the first, the very prototype of the brilliant, tortured, impoverished, isolated ingenue. The starving artist. There were others before him, yes, but seen this way- romanticized- only in retrospect. The young poet in the painting was the catalyst who ushered Romanticism into being. Romanticism, of course, was the late 18th century movement with a focus on emotion over reason, awe over the power of nature, individualism, and a fascination with the mystery and darkness of the Gothic. Lord George Gordon Byron saw in Chatterton his soul mate, another misunderstood maestro of poetry. William Wordsworth referenced him in his 1802 poem, “Resolution and Independence,” as “the marvellous Boy/ The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride.” Percy Byshe Shelley’s 1821 pastoral elegy, “Adonai,” mourning John Keats, likened Keats to Chatterton, who died young before him. And John Keats’ 1818 “Endymion” was dedicated to Chatterton, and famously begins, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." Coleridge started things off in 1790 with a monody for the fallen poet. “When Want and cold Neglect had chill'd thy soul…” The pre-Raphaelite painters were, in turn, heavily influenced by Romanticism, especially their emphasis on beauty, tragedy, and imagination. Henry Wallis was respected for his travels researching antiquities like medieval tiles and ancient pottery, and he published numerous illustrated volumes on the subject. But it is this iconic painting that gave him immortality. Depicting the vulnerable young poet on his deathbed in the room he rented cheaply from Mrs. Angel of Gray’s Inn, a brothel, he used purple velvet to anoint the tragic orphan to royal status. The open window behind him contrasts the squalor and symbolic prison of the poet’s poverty and pain with the world outside, and represents the freedom he has finally found, the escape or flight of his soul. Clenched in his dead hand and scattered in the foreground are torn up papers, showing us the tatters of his rejected poems. The message is clear: the poet died for his art. The painting was a triumph for Wallis. It was his first exhibited work and his most successful. He painted it several times over. Whenever the need for money arose, Wallis created another Chatterton. The artwork is layered with tragedy, irony, and scandal. Wallis’s model was his friend George Meredith, a poet influenced by Keats, and a novelist. Meredith’s beautiful wife left him to run off with Wallis, with whom she had a child. Though he posed as the quintessential failed poet, he went on to write several bestselling novels and take seven nominations for the Nobel Prize in literature. The poet in the painting was declared, in his earliest days, an imbecile. He never knew his namesake, because his father died a few months before he was born. Prone to daydreaming, crying jags, and long silent spells, he was assumed to be a simpleton. Then, he surprised everyone when, barely out of nappies, he taught himself to read from a Bible and a trove of medieval illuminated papers stored in St. Mary Redcliffe’s, the Gothic church he liked to play in. Thomas lived for many of his childhood years in a children’s hospital, where in every spare moment he devoured books of heraldry, history, theology, and poetry, work by Chaucer and Spencer, John Weever and William Dugdale. By the age of eight he spent full days at work writing. By age eleven, he was writing for the Bristol Journal, and shortly after, for Middlesex Journal and Town and Country Magazine. He sought patronage for his work with limited success, and did administrative writing for a paltry paycheque. Although he was able to avoid the workhouses through his office jobs, he lived in abysmal poverty. He wrote 1200 poems before declaring himself a rejected failure, and swallowing the arsenic in 1770. Chatterton’s verse followed in the tradition of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, with flawless rhyme and metre atop a satirical undercurrent. They ponder history, spirituality, and man’s constant wrestling with death and meaning. But he was best known for perpetrating a brilliant literary hoax. Unable to find the acclaim he yearned for with his own poetry, his imagination took him back into the dusty mysteries of time of the cathedral he’d been reading in for all of his short life. There were old oak chests in the muniment rooms there, and Thomas helped himself to the forgotten and abandoned leftovers of parchment and vellum dating back to the 1400s. These ancient manuscripts had long been picked over: those deemed valuable removed and filed in archives, and others taken and used be congregants, including his father, to wrap the beloved books in their own libraries. Thomas loved the archaic writing on these documents, and began composing poetry in a medieval script and voice. AN EXCELENTE BALADE OF CHARITIE: Thomas Rowley,1464 Liste! now the thunder's rattling clymmynge sound Cheves slowlie on, and then embollen clangs, Shakes the hie spyre, and losst, dispended, drown'd, Still on the gallard ere of terroure hanges; The windes are up; the lofty elmen swanges; Again the levynne and the thunder poures, And the full cloudes are braste attenes in stonen showers. These were persona poems, and the persona was Thomas’s own invention, a 15th century poet-priest named Thomas Rowley. Chatterton’s extensive knowledge of history and theology and his poetic mastery made the work itself convincing, and skillfully written on the old papers, his audience believed they were a legitimate discovery found inside the old wooden coffers. Historians and publishers were excited by this epic find and eagerly praised the fictional priest’s contribution to the canon of literature. Many academics and historians refer to Chatterton as a forger, irate on behalf of all who had been duped. And he did forge the poems, so well that the belief in a writer-priest named Rowley continued long past the boy’s premature demise. But it was not really a forgery. It was an elaborate literary hoax, the creation of a character in writing so brilliant that the fictional character had true believers. It was a prank on parallel to adolescent phone calls, “is your refrigerator running?” only by a genius who outsmarted the great minds of the times. There is a long tradition of literary hoaxes aimed at mocking the experts and tastemakers of the literary establishment. In1988, Canadian cult writer Crad Kilodney, notorious for his demeanour of misanthropy, widely submitted the works of literary giants under the pseudonym Herman Mlunga Mbongo. Attached to this name, the writing of the greats was summarily rejected across the board. Thomas’s inspiration for the prank may have come from Horace Walpole, a dandy writer and tony politician he admired. Walpole’s now-famous Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, was first published as “from the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto." Chatterton sent his Rowley poems to Walpole and received due praise for them, but Walpole turned on him when he began to question the veracity of their provenance. Chatterton responded privately with “To Horace Walpole,” a poem he never sent. Walpole, I thought not I should ever see So mean a heart as thine has prov’d to be, Thou who, in lux’ry nurst, beholds with scorn The boy, who friendless, penniless, forlorn, Asks thy high favour- thou mayst call me cheat. Say, didst thou never practise such deceit? (After Chatterton’s untimely death, Walpole softened. “I do not believe there ever existed so masterly a genius,” he said of the boy poet.) Chatterton was a prolific and talented writer but members of his class were seldom taken seriously. The entire Rowley fabrication was meant to show what he was capable of. In another irony, when he tried to confess that he had written the priest’s poems himself, he was not believed: a young man of the precariat could surely not produce such skillful, historically knowledgeable poems. He was a child prodigy, yet the works in his own name continued to go unnoticed, rejected, or unpaid. That Chatterton suffered for his art is known absolutely. He was half-starved, unable to earn enough to cover his lodging and meals in long office hours as a scrivener, writing legal contracts or property documents. He stayed up until the wee hours in his attic working on his poetry, and like the painting shows, he was known to tear up poems he deemed worthless because they did not meet his perfectionist standards. But even so, what is almost true is not completely true. The entire tragic Romantic myth of the poete maudit and tormented starving artist, purified, or made real by poverty and suffering was invested in the suicide of this marvelous boy, too pure for this cruel world. It’s a pervasive notion we still romanticize today. Great artists are tragic, destitute and depressed, uniquely incapable of managing their lives. But it turns out that Chatterton more than likely wanted what the rest of us want: to live, to survive, to have the chance to grow and thrive and prove himself, however that would have played out. Many scholars today have changed course as records reveal another story. The revised edition reveals that Chatterton was so bent on life, he was taking nasty prescribed medication with a high-risk profile, like toxicity and accidental overdose: arsenic. His affliction was much more mundane than a writer’s desolation, a condition commonplace at the time: gonorrhea. Arsenic was believed to be a cure. Chatterton was buried in the pauper’s cemetery for Holborn’s Shoe Lane Workhouse, his remains unmarked, in a mass grave. Lorette C. Luzajic  Frenzy, by Władysław Podkowiński (Poland) 1893 Frenzy What is passion, if not a runaway train to which one clings for dear life, or a powerful stallion rearing up on hind legs, foaming at the mouth, dark and dangerous and wild? Władysław Podkowiński’s 1893 painting scandalized eastern Europe in its month on display at the Zacheta, and ushered in the era of Symbolist painting in Poland. Twelve thousand people flocked to the national gallery to see the massive, volatile depiction of a naked woman, arms and legs wrapped tightly around a frantic bucking steed, face upturned and head thrown back. From those thousands, not one brave enough to buy the work from the struggling painter who lived on fumes and slept on the floor. The ten-foot tall canvas was executed entirely in black, brown, and fiery orange, with the redhead’s tresses roiling into the storm of the stallion’s mane and motion. You could say she was the anti-Godiva, nowhere close to vulnerable and saintly. The legend of Godiva was about a pure and wholesome beauty devoted to justice, who rode naked on horseback through town in protest of taxes eating the poor. Here, instead, was a woman astride, given completely over to desire, in the throes of ecstasy. The title, Frenzy of Exultations, or, usually, just Frenzy, said it all. In another kind of frenzy, on the 37th day of the show, Władysław Podkowiński entered the gallery and stabbed the canvas with a knife, ending its exhibition. The artist had been very upset about not finding a buyer for the artwork. He had given all he had to that painting, body and soul. Podkowiński was severely ill with tuberculosis and worked to complete the art in utter exhaustion for months, often working from his bed. Some said the price was simply too high at 10 000 rubles, a ridiculous ask. Other accounts say there actually had been an interested patron, but he offered a third of that and his offer was turned down. From Podkowiński’s point of view, he understood the value of this work, that it was his magnum opus, a painting unique in all of art history. Plus, the chance for rest and real medical treatment was on the line. His life literally depended on that sale. Then there was the other side of the story: his fury towards his muse, Ewa Kotarbińska, whose husband had hosted the artist at his estate. People were talking: some said that the beautiful brunette’s face bore only a passing resemblance to the woman on the horse, but that clearly the artist had seen her body for himself and portrayed it accurately. Other stories held that when he had made his desires known to her, she had rejected him, refusing to leave her wealth and marriage for a starving artist. She banished him from the house to the rainy gardens overnight. Already sick, this was the nail in the coffin. Nine months following the exhibition of Frenzy and the vandalism of the painting, Władysław Podkowiński was dead. He was 28 years old. The artist’s stormy horse and rider was, one way or another, the end of him. There is no parallel artwork in the artist’s portfolio. Frenzy is considered the first Symbolist painting in Poland, the movement sweeping Europe, born from the belief that realism did not actually portray the real world. The mystical undercurrents of life, the hidden, esoteric, mythological, and unconscious were the keys to understanding humans and history. Symbolists in poetry, other literature, and visual art sought to show the deeper truth through metaphors, to both tell their stories and decipher the world around them through symbols. Podkowiński was known as a highly skilled magazine illustrator. After a trip to Paris where he discovered Monet, he was credited with bringing Impressionism to life inside of Poland. His gauzy, drowsy, sun-dappled ponds and gardens were populated with innocent children at play and happy ducks. With white picket fences! They were sweet trifles, lovely, and forgettable. It was his illness that drove Podkowiński into the subterranean recesses of his mind. He was face to face with the grim reaper, declining in the prime of his life. Death was consuming him from the inside out. He began to draw various rigorously detailed skeletons, and turned his attention from light to dark. Tuberculosis is a bacterial respiratory infection known in those days as consumption, because of the way the illness consumed you. In the late 1800s, upwards of 70% of people who lived in cities were infected. The disease has been traced back at least 9000 years and found in mummies, and is thought to be much older, even millions of years. It has been around much longer than humans. We often associate TB with tragic poets and artists like John Keats, Amedeo Modigliani and Edvard Munch. But it affected everyone, especially city dwellers who lived in close proximity and squalor. One in seven people in Europe in that era died from TB. Tuberculosis is still the world’s most deadly infectious disease, with over a million deaths per year. The vaccines are only moderately effective and antibiotic treatment is complicated, often involving four different drugs for a period of up to two years! In the context of what Władysław Podkowiński was facing, as a gifted young man with hopes and dreams rapidly going down the drain, nothing about the painting or its attempted destruction seem like madness after all. The profound disappointment in his rejection from the object of his affection would have stood in for all of his chances at love and life. And her sensible sentencing of a lusty youth to the outdoors after inappropriate advances, if that is what happened, could literally have accelerated his inevitable demise. Seeing her power, both sexual and financial, from his destitution and looming destruction, his obsessive desire and need is understandable. In his mind, Ewa held power over his life. Interpretations of the artist’s Frenzy draw from symbolist ideas as a whole. Certainly, there is the heady pleasure of an unapologetic woman and a visual representation of orgasm. But the painting also looks terrifying, showing the power and danger of desire and obsession, and the struggle between life and death. Though the woman is in rapture, the horse looks quite deranged, suggesting that in experiencing the pleasures of life, we are often oblivious to the headlong collision course with death. In ancient mythology about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the black horse represents famine and hunger. Thinking of hunger symbolically, we see ourselves completely consumed, driven mad by desire. But sex and passion are, of course, symbolic of the life force itself, for obvious reasons. After the artist succumbed to his illness, the painting was repaired. It toured to Moscow, Lodz, and St. Petersburg. In 1904, it was given to the National Museum in Krakow where it remains a prize part of the collection. In the absence of the artist’s voice, we can only speculate on the exact meaning and intention of the work. But one thing is certain: this painting about life was about death. Lorette C. Luzajic ** Poems and stories inspired by this artwork: https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/ekphrastic-writing-responses-wladyslaw-podkowinski  Children in the Garden, by Władysław Podkowiński (Poland) 1892  Portrait of Madame de Florian, by Giovanni Boldini (Italy) probably 1888 Giovanni Boldini’s Portrait of Madame de Florien The woman is pretty in pink, an ice cream cone or swirl of cotton candy under Giovanni Boldini’s brush. She is a whirlwind of cerise satin and soft lace, limbs and torso and upturned throat impossibly long. The viewer’s eyes follow her swan profile, the strong line of her nose, past the single gleaming rope of pearls adorning her tender decolletage. Her slim fingers splay suggestively, invitingly, framing the mystery of her small, elegant breasts. Boldini, from Italy and working in Paris during the Belle Epoque, was a society portrait painter extraordinaire, known for his whirlwind, razzle-dazzle aesthetic, as if the beauty of his subjects was a kind of electricity. In 1933, Time Magazine crowned him the “master of swish” for this frenzied quality. Countless beautiful women of status hired the painter, and also became his lovers. He immortalized them in a whirling thrum of vivacity, attuned to the most enchanting aspects of their personalities and their sartorial splendour. And like his frenetic, slippery style, he himself was tough to pin down, a man with many models and muses, but no wife. Until he had finished painting, that is. At the age of 86, Boldini married Emilia Cardona, sixty years younger. One particularly beautiful lover was Madame de Florian, the subject of the most famous painting of Boldini’s career. Its date of creation is widely contested, with sources pointing at a range of dates from 1888, when Marthe was 24 years old, to 1910, when she was in her forties. Whatever her age, Boldini’s passion and devotion was evident in every stroke. The portrait was a secret for at least a century. It was not seen until 2010, eighty years after the death of the artist. Along with the painting, it was Marthe, too, who was forgotten. After her death in 1939, she drifted into obscurity in the mists of time. Initially a humble seamstress from a modest family, Marthe had been a great beauty from the Paris half-world, the society that lived in the twilight margins, at the fringe of respectable society. In the gilded world of the Belle Epoque, or “beautiful era,” before WW1, there was a parallel society in full swing, one that rejected the Victorian mores of the era, one that prized beauty, art, music, and pleasure above all. It was a society of spectacle and indulgence, and the arts bloomed from the attention that wealthy patrons lavished on them. Fashion, too, blossomed. Haute Couture and French lingerie were ushered into the world on the bodies of the beautiful women mingling on display at operas and parties. The fluid, sensual curves of Art Nouveau embodied the era’s aesthetic in jewelry and wallpaper. Marthe had two infants named Henri, “paternity unknown,” the first deceased at three months old. Legend says she was hired to repair garments for the legendary courtesan Cora Pearl, and grew fascinated with the demi-monde. She herself became a demimondaine whose beauty was widely pursued. If she was not quite at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of courtesans, the crème de la crème as it were, Marthe certainly held her own with several prime ministers as her patrons. In the Belle Epoque, the courtesans were the queens. They ruled everything. These celebrities were known as “les grandes horizontales,” and grand they were, glittering in gorgeous gowns and jewels and silk stockings. But they were hardly “horizontal,” rather, women on top. They were prestigious, and did not associate themselves with the much more common streetwalkers or brothel attendants. Sadly, those impoverished women were quite literally a dime a dozen, in those times. While most of the grand courtesans came from humble origins, they competed for the wealthiest, most exclusive lovers, like men who owned businesses abroad or who lived in palaces. The courtesans expected to be established in mansions, furs, diamonds, carriages, and horses, with an eternal spigot for impulses and the finest Champagnes. And it wasn’t just about the money: these women were free to live on their own terms, love who they wished, travel, learn languages, attend the theatre, drink, and gamble. They wielded significant power as patrons of the arts, influencing tastes and becoming investors and collectors. The courtesans achieved their ranks for a variety of reasons: skills in the art of seduction and the boudoir, of course, but perhaps their performances outside of the bedroom were much more important. Spectacle was key: the more flamboyant and luxurious her personality, the bigger her clients. Most essential was being good company. A good conversationalist was smart, witty, and well informed. These women learned independently about those things that interested them, especially art, music, history, and business. Marthe’s portrait by a fashionable painter as lover was stunning but hardly unusual. If the courtesans were “kept” by wealthy gentlemen, artists in the era were “kept” by the courtesans who collected them and became their patrons. The women had some dependency on the painters, too, to ensure their likeness could be both looked at and preserved. What was unusual about the story of Marthe modelling was not her identity or her love affair with Boldini, but simply the way that the painting is a time capsule to another era, Marthe frozen like Sleeping Beauty for a hundred years, awakening in the age of Instagram to invite us backwards, to Paris and the golden age. Perhaps few visitors to her home after her retirement would have seen the greatest Boldini of them all. And certainly, Marthe had no idea when she died in 1939 that she would be resurrected, and that her story would be told in no less than four novels, capturing the public’s imagination. (The Paris Apartment, by Michelle Gable; Paris Time Capsule, by Ella Carey; The Paris Secret, by Karen Swan; The Velvet Hours, by Alyson Richman.) Certainly she would not have anticipated that her granddaughter, to whom she bequeathed her Paris apartment, would have to flee south to get away from the Nazis, or that the girl would never return but would pay the monthly rent for 70 years. It was only then, at the time of Marthe’s granddaughter’s death, that the rent went unpaid and the apartment entered into. And inside, under decades of dust, was another world, another time. Marthe’s realm was untouched for seven decades. It was a world of endless mirrors, of fleurs de lis wallpaper in ivory and pale green, of magnificent candelabra and elaborate gold carved picture frames, of floral porcelain basins, of velvet cream coloured drapery, of chinoiserie pottery. A taxidermy ostrich, now quite dusty and dead, was once an exotic treasure of decadent opulence. And in the middle of all of it, the centrepiece, and the masterpiece. Boldini’s painting, valued now at three and a half million, leaving Marthe, too, untouched, infinite, resurrected, the goddess of the story. Lorette C. Luzajic  Voice of Ire: on Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire I was still a teenager when a big brouhaha broke out in Canadian media and around the dining room tables of people who loved art and outrage. In 1989 and announced a year later in 1990, the National Gallery of Canada had blown $1.8 million dollars on three vertical stripes of red and blue paint by American abstract expressionist colour field painter Barnett Newman. The work had been exhibited at a fair in Montreal and purchased with our tax dollars during an economic recession. As the Canadian weekly newsmag MacLean’s wrote later, “Public umbrage boiled over.” Barnett Newman’s works are common belt-notch purchases for curators and so most museums have one or another version of his zip paintings. He is hailed as an artist concerned with spiritual meaning, depicting Bible stories and Jewish concepts in elegant minimalism. His works are hailed as a million-dollar protest of American wars and imperialism. Voice of Fire was no less than God speaking to us through the burning bush in the Old Testament. “My goal is to give the viewer a feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality, and at the same time, of his connection to others, who are also separate.” Say what? I was between worlds in that era, extricating myself from high school and family, having just landed fresh and naïve in the big city, Toronto. My entire adolescence had been steeped in the passionate embrace of paintings and sculptures. For me, art and art history was at once substance and escapism. And I was of two minds about this particular controversy. I was a young writer on board with rebellion and anything anti-establishment. But I was also keenly aware that the National Gallery was, after all, the establishment; and that such money could go a lot further supporting artists of less fame and more talent. More, I didn’t like the painting. Almost no one liked the painting. MP Felix Holtmann said it for all the struggling commoners: “It looks like two cans of paint and two rollers and about 10 minutes would do the trick.” The intelligentsia mocked him as a clueless and blundering pig farmer. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones would gush later about the painter’s blue and white stripes, Onement VI, selling for more than forty million: “a powerful example of his ineffable style at its height of confidence and magic. A single white line divides a flat expanse of blue: it seems to rip open the universe, a crack in space and time.” he wrote. “Great art is essentially priceless.” But the greatest and ever-acerbic art critic Robert Hughes emphatically declared Newman “by far the least formally gifted” of the new minimalist abstract artists in my prize signed copy of The Shock of the New. “He had no discernible talent as a draftsman.” Hughes attributed any success the painter had to his temperament. “…He was tenacious and argumentative, and his reductive cast of mind served him well in the studio.” Newman’s admirers were just “avid for one more hero in an age of entropy.” He went on to say that “Their simple, assertive fields of colour hit the eye with a curiously anesthetic shock. They do not seem sensuous: sensuality is all relationships.” Hughes took the words right out of my mouth. This is exactly the nothingness I felt when standing before the giant stripes, on a visit to Ottawa three and a half decades later, finally seeing the infamous work in person for the first time. In that time, I have myself become an artist with “no discernible talent as a draftsman.” A few decades have convinced me even more profoundly of the importance of other skills and values in art: meaning, aesthetics, symbolism, creativity, texture, contrast, innovation, imitation, provocation, protest, ritual, to name a few. Though I do not share the staunch modernist’s rejection of traditional art, being a huge admirer of the wonders of our artistic past, I do not share the old western art academy’s rejection of modern or multicultural digressions from their viewpoint. Art is an incredible journey of different cultures, different eras, different skills, and different perspectives. And so I desperately wanted to feel something less ambivalent when I got there. I was at least expecting to be in on the joke. Lorette C. Luzajic  Voice of Fire, by Barnett Newman (USA) 1967  Voice of Fire at National Gallery, Ottawa. photo by author.  I'm Lorette, an award-winning mixed media artist; a widely published poet and writer of flash fiction; founding editor of two literary journals, The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw; founder of The Ekphrastic Academy where I teach art appreciation and creative writing; and much more. Looking at art and learning more about it has been my lifelong obsession and fuels all of my creative and professional practices. Here, you will find occasional essays and musings on art and artists. Enjoy! |