The Chill Cool of Canadian Painting, and Wine Bars in Toronto.

I remember when I first returned for a long stay (3 months) in Canada after living for eight years in Provence, where yes the chilly Mistral blows, and there is sometimes even snow. However, in Toronto it was May, the merry month, so I went down to Kew Beach on Lake Ontario. A cap on my head, several layers of sweaters, jeans, socks and closed-in shoes, I sat on a bench in the sun. Supposedly, it was 70 degrees. As I shivered, I noticed the Canadians walking down the boardwalk in shorts, T-shirts, sleeveless garments, bare arms taking in the sun. There was even a lady on the beach in a bikini! Just when I thought there must indeed be something wrong with me, I noticed that none of the trees had leaves yet. The buds of the leaves were tightly wrapped shut, still fearful to open up. I sent a photo back to friends in France, saying, “The limbs of the trees and the limbs of the people are all bare. Qu’est que ça veux dire?” To me, it indicated that Canadians have a special relationship with the cold. I began to observe how that plays itself out in their painting.

Not many artists do landscape painting and figurative painting, but Valerie Palmer excels at combining both. The Toronto-born artist got her B.F.A. degree in Winnipeg, then moved to the far northern shore of Lake Superior, where she lives and paints. Tom Smart in his essay on her work,”Valerie Palmer: Portraits, Memories and Landscapes,” speaks of the passive poses and disengaged contemplation of her figures as part of what he calls here “mood poems.” In fact he says, “Palmer is a visual poet whose form is the painted emblem.”

What I see is the dissonance caused by this calm figure in a summer dress, standing before this partially frozen landscape. It fits into what artist and author John Seed calls “distupted realism,” in which elements not normally thought of as being together can be together, because in the universe everything is connected. Here these two strongly different elements are collaged by the movement of color from the icey blue of the lake, to the paler green waters near the shore, to the sandy tan of the beach, the deep green of the trees, and the soft reds of the dress – cold to warm.

Most importantly for me, the fine drawing of the figure is very crisp not unlike the way Botticelli did his figures, where the line is very important, moreso than the shading. The ice behind the figure is very precisely drawn, showing the sharp broken edges, edges that can cut. The distracted gaze of the young woman and the frigid background, both so precisely rendered, make one feel the cold emanating from the painting, while at the same time giving us a flush of warmth in the figure of Ayesha.

Here in another of Palmer’s paintings, we find the same dislocation of elements. These young people who wait for the train (which oddly looks more like a freight train than a passenger one) are dressed in indoor clothes. The young woman, although surrounded by snow, sits on a bench without any trace of snow on it. Her pose is upright and rigid, as is that of the young man who stands before the viewer with his arms folded. The two characters share the same physical space but do not seem to be connected, as both stare into the middle distance of their own private worlds. They chill. We viewers do too, as the cold leaves the confines of the painting to invade the atmosphere around us. This is what I mean by the chill cool of Canadian painting. Yes, it leaves us physically feeling the cool, but its disruption of our normal sense of reality also leaves us with an intellectually “cool” painting, very modern and very with it.

Klaas Hart is another Toronto native, who studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), went on to an apprenticeship with renowned artist Hank Helmantel in the Netherlands, where he refined his painting technique. In looking at the painting above, one sees very precisely rendered items done in cool blues, silvery gray, and off-white with a simple bluish-gray backpanel and a putty-colored foreground surface. The artist picks up the putty color in the trim around the envelops, in the interior coloring of the sea shell and on the stand for the blue dish. Even the glass funnel changes the color of the supporting surface to a grayish-blue.

The feeling of the painting is very modern and a bit hard-edged, but at the same time is softened by the nostalgia represented by the old-fashioned envelops, the decorative sea shell, and the plain, rather classic design of the dishes. This odd collection of items, hard to see all together as one theme, is called simply Still Life with Porcelain. Yet, while the artist may have just gathered a random selection of items, most of which were porcelain, this variety of items hint at all sorts of things other than porcelain. Perhaps they represent something more metaphysical, like all time and no time. That in itself would relate to concepts in modern physics, in which travel at the speed of light (still impossible for us) would create the View from C (C as in C²) where infinite instances of time exist all occuring at once (The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch). That makes this a cool painting in terms of its colors and also in terms of its cool ideas.

If we just stick to the use of the color palette, we can see how it compares with some famous still life paintings. The objects in Hart’s Garlic Painting are all in whitish gray, or silver against a deep blue-gray background. The support they sit on is once again a combination of a light putty and an indistinct tone of brown. When compared to the older paintings of masters like Chardin or Claesz, the precision in rendering is there, but it is Hart’s work which exists in a sharp, cool clarity rather than the warmer more natural colors in the other two paintings.

Let’s not think that Canadian artists have no sense of humor, ironic though it may be at times. Take a look at the painting above. The icebergs are as perfect as nature can make them. They really are ice sculptures that tower above the water, while skillfully hiding 10 times that height underneath the waves. The night is black, and the moon, so tiny and far away, is full but sheds little light. The light comes from the burning ship. The masts indicate that it is most probably a whaler. We see the lifeboat with the crew adrift in the blackness of the artic waters. The scene is a desparate one.

Blackwood then takes us below those waves to see that what was terrible for the whalers was a stroke of good fortune for the whale, whose baleine plate shows as a type of wicked smile. It’s no wonder his book of prints is called Black Ice. As a Newfoundlander, Blackwood would know that the most treacherous ice is the black kind that blends with the color of the road or sidewalk, so you don’t know it is there until you go skidding in all directions. His work often shows the slippery sudden surprises in life.

Blackwood is a storyteller at heart, using the medium of printmaking to tell the seafaring stories of his native Newfoundland. His stories are of the people but also of the animals. Often, as in the print above, when the animals and the people collide, the people don’t always win. Fire Down on the Labrador is a cold painting for sure (will you ever forget the sharp crystalline blue-violet of those craggy icebergs?), but in his use of irony, the artist is not cold hearted.

I admit to being a proud graduate of Canada’s leading, and one of the world’s finest institutions of higher learning, the University of Toronto. I remember those Canadian winters of my youth and the chill in some of those May days of my more recent visits. I find that Canadian painters go for precision and perfection in their work that often allows a cool breeze of crystalline clarity to float off their paintings and into the minds of the viewer. Vive Canada!

The art presented in this article is used in accordance with Fair Use Policy for the purposes of critique, review and discussion. For more on the artists, visit these websites: Valerie Palmer Klass Hart and David Blackwood.

Sources include:

The Best of Canadian Contemporaries, catalog Loch Gallery

Black Ice: David Blackwood’s Prints of Newfoundland. ago.ca

“David Blackwood 81 Artworks” artsy.net

“Portraits, Memories and Landscapes,” an essay by Tom Smart printed in the show catalog Valerie Palmer Paintings, Loch Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Marjorie Vernelle is an artist, writer, college professor, and traveler. For more see the Pages at ofartandwine.com. Her author page is at amazon.com and her art at Vernelle Art Boutique vernellestudio.com.

Wine Bars in Toronto!

First, what are wine bars? Basically they are a type of “pub” that focuses on wine rather than spirits or beer. Wine bars are the perfect set-up for both enjoying a selection of wines but also learning about them. One of the joys of wine tasting is a real degustation, that French word that prepares you to taste something special. Notice here the classic long-stemmed wine glass that allows you to hold the glass by the stem, so as not to have your hand warming the wine. The amount in the glass is just a touch across the bottom of the glass. Remember, you are tasting, not having a glass with a full meal. The long mellow dark brown of the bar itself is a classic reminder of winecellars and barrels of flavorful wines fermenting and aging on their way to the moment when we have the pleasure of tasting them. Food that compliments the wine is available, but the focus is always on the wine, served, of course, in the appropriate glass. To get a good understanding of all that makes a good wine bar, “Qualities of a Great Wine Bar” is the article to ground oneself with (pinstackbowl.com). Since the focus of this blog post is Canada, and my old hometown (if only temporarily), Toronto, let’s see a few of what the city has to offer.

A series of Flights of Wine. A Flight allows you to taste three different wines.

Toronto is a city of neighborhoods and areas that have certain specialties. The Financial District’s specialty is keeping Toronto as the economic engine of Canada, and being that, one would expect that any wine bar there would be exclusive and very expensive. Au contraire mes chers amis. Reds Wine Tavern, located in First Canadian Place (still Toronto’s tallest building), does cater to the high-powered suits (the TV show was filmed down the street at Adelaide Place). The prices are still manageable, especially around 4:00 o’clock when select bottles are available for favorable prices. There are butcher boards of charcuterie and cheese or you can go for a full meal, with nothing topping $40. The wine cellar has 350 bottles, and there is a sommelier at your service. (Reds Wine Tavern) Please note, that Toronto has on-and-off closures of restaurants for indoor dining because of COVID restrictions.

As was mentioned before, Toronto is a city of neighborhoods, and one of the ones that has been trending is Leslieville. To the east of the downtown core, just beyond Riverdale, Leslieville is a locality of small shops, galleries, and restaurants that leave the “suited” atmosphere of downtown behind, in favor of a casual, relaxed, “being at home” feeling of a lovely neighborhood. Chez Nous is listed as being near Leslieville, though from the map it looks to me like Riverdale. However, as the two neighborhoods lie cheek-by-jowl, the main thing is that it is a cozy wine bar that specializes in Canadian wines. Yes, there is a wine industry in Canada. The snacks are simple but the owner, Laura Carr, knows the wines well, as she has visited all of those Ontario wineries. To get a bit of the Chez Nous experience, look at this little video on youtube.com.

Of course, I am partial to things close to my alma mater, and Bar Mercurio is a favorite of mine. Though it is ostensibly just a bar, the food is delicious, and there is a good selection of wine to go with. And if you believe as writer and local expert, Courtney Sunday, does “that the only meal without wine is breakfast,” you can cross the street and a few steps further down to 321 Bloor West to L’Espresso Bar Mercurio, which serves wonderful coffee and fabulous pastries in a classy Italian environment.

Just as there are “8 million stories in the Naked City,” there are many wine bars in Toronto. This post only gives a few of them. However, it is easy to see that whether you are downtown, go east along Queen St., go north along Yonge, or go west toward High Park, there will be a wine bar to suit you.

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©marjorie vernelle 2021

Coming Soon: “The Three Great Ones” Mexican Muralistas and Wines in Baja.

From the Mayan murals of Bonampak to the great 20th century muralistas (Rivera, Siquieros, and Orozco), Mexico expresses itself well in this grand style, and it is not to be left out when it comes to wine production either.