Beyond the Beyond: Toller Cranston

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.
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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. 
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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 , via Wikimedia Commons

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 , via Wikimedia Commons

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. 
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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.
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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.
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Watching him, we sail away, beyond the beyond.
 
 Lorette C. Luzajic