Tag Archives: art

Remembering Evangeline Campbell, resolute wordsmith

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Two weeks ago on April 28, I attended a memorial for Evangeline Campbell (1934-2018), also known as “Vange” and even “Mrs Campbell” in days gone by when children addressed their elders with respectful titles.

On the eve of Mother’s Day, I’m thinking of her. She is in my thoughts not only as the mother of Rebecca and Naomi — friends I’ve had the good fortune to have known for 80 percent of my lifetime — but also as a friend.

At Evangeline’s memorial, which took place in the upstairs space at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa, I was struck by the eulogies. They mostly centered around letters — letters she had written, letters others had written to her and unwritten letters. As I listened, I thought about how she had penned and openly voiced her struggle with writing them — as I have — and as probably all letter writers have done at times.

But what struck me most of all was how many letters she had written and what a big impact they obviously imprinted on the lives of her friends. This got me thinking, and today I took the letters I had received from her out of a box to re-read them.

She wrote to me mostly over the five year period when I lived in London from 2008 to 2013.

The letters are packed with information — written in neat longhand, often on multiple cards on different dates, but placed in a single envelope to send overseas. Some include Post-It notes and in one, two small gifts: a hankie and a welsh spoon — for me, a reminder of a long ago stay and family walk at Buck Farm near Wrexham, Wales on her recommendation.

Keepsakes within keepsakes, thoughts on thoughts, as well as caring concern and aesthetic ruminations on art, textiles, literature and imagery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She was an artist. She was dissuaded from art school into a university library science program to study for a career. A similar fate of so many artists it would seem, but in fact putting her into an avant-garde of Canadian women who were university educated, married career women, with children.

Her career and a job with the federal environment ministry took her to Washington for conferences a few times, and she stayed at our home in Georgetown after they were over, enjoying art and culture. Highlights included a Shirley Horn concert, music at Blues Alley, One Step Down, visits to Dumbarton Oaks, textile and other museums — once with her husband Douglas — and always with my parents.

In 2013, I moved from London to live in Bogor, Indonesia. She thoughtfully rang me when I was visiting Toronto for Christmas to wish me good fortune before I returned to Bogor.

The last time I saw her, she took as a gift one of the pussy hats my mother and I had knitted for the Jan. 21, 2017 Women’s March (on Washington) to protest President Trump’s derogatory anti-women remarks.

On March 18, two months after the march, Evangeline, Douglas and Rebecca visited for lunch and she left wearing the hat.

Almost 10 years earlier, in 2007, she had written in a card after a visit to our home in Toronto that she wished she could have made her way around the living room to examine the pictures more closely.

She and I were both born when the sun was in the sign of Taurus — a few days and quite a few years apart. I tried to remember to write to her on her birthday each year from Indonesia and later Mexico where I moved in 2014  — countries with unreliable postal services — by email, but there were gaps.

“Neuf heures de matin,” Jean- Jacques Sempe

I found a descriptive and tedious email I sent last year when I was in Nairobi attending a conference on the fall armyworm pest. Not exactly the kind of note one wants to receive on their birthday, I thought in retrospect.

At the conclusion of the memorial, friends were told they could take letters and cards addressed to them that she had started writing and which were left unfinished.

“Summer Peace,” Vladimir Rumyantsev

There was another box of blank cards and I took several. I am quite sure she would have been likely to send me the card pictured  on the left featuring a cat peering out a window at a cityscape from a chair, a representation of “Neuf heures de matin,” by Jean- Jacques Sempe.

Compare it with “Summer Peace,” on the right, featuring a cat and an angel on a branch, a reproduction of a watercolour by Vladimir Rumyantsev, she sent to me in 2011 because she loved the image: “Our idealized image of old England,” which never actually existed, she wrote.

I’m not sure who will receive the cards I selected, since letter writing is now almost a thing of the past.

This at least is certain, fond memories of pleasant times will prevail.

***

In the shadow of his wife: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

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An exhibition featuring the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera currently on show at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario
(AGO) would have sparked heated debate in the late 20th century, but in today’s post-feminist world the pairing sidesteps controversy altogether.

In the past, celebrating a woman artist side-by-side with her husband would have been seen by feminists  as a sign of her oppression by the patriarchy. However, traditional feminist debate about women artists, which has historically centred on a fight for individual recognition in a male-dominated art world — so common in decades gone by — is not mentioned in the AGO show or in the exhibition catalogue.

Instead, curator Dot Tuer inverts the tradition that would have cast Kahlo in Rivera’s shadow and celebrates Kahlo’s artistic abilities, proposing that the powerful feminine themes of her work have eclipsed the outmoded activist bent of Rivera’s.

Rivera reached international renown as a communist mural painter in the 1920s, depicting the Mexican revolution and class struggle, while Kahlo — 20 years his junior — was at the time more modestly acclaimed by the surrealist movement and the Mexican art world for works focused on her own personal suffering.

“Rivera no longer looms larger-than-life in the public imagination as Mexico’s greatest muralist accompanied by a much younger and diminutive wife,” Tuer says in the exhibition catalogue. “Instead, Frida is seen as the iconic artist with Diego cast in a minor role as her much older and philandering husband.

“Numerous exhibitions have enshrined her as one of modernism’s most profound women artists, whose self-portraits embody both the physical suffering she endured after a debilitating bus accident and the spiritual anguish caused by Rivera’s infidelity and her inability to have children.”

Rivera’s reputation declined during the Cold War and with the rise of abstract expressionism, Tuer writes, his work now dismissed as cartoonish political propaganda, despite major retrospectives in Mexico City, London and Detroit since the mid-1980s.

These supportive claims for Kahlo’s work must surely mark sweet victory for such feminist art critics as Lucy Lippard, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock who struggled in the latter part of the 20th century to stake a place for forgotten women artists on gallery walls in the world’s major art collections.

Also for such artists as Judy Chicago who sought to generate valid “herstory” through her internationally recognised “Dinner Party” and “Birth Project” art exhibitions of the 1970s and 1980s.

The installations, which featured ceramic plates and tapestries, named women whose importance Chicago said had been largely written out of history. She argued that craft — typically ghettoized along with artistic women — should be considered art and that art made by women should be taken seriously by the establishment.

Such universal concerns led eventually to the creation of a women’s art museum in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1987.

“By its very existence, the National Museum of Women in the Arts challenges the unequal representation of female artists in other museums, in galleries, and in major shows and offers an important and national alternative space,” wrote art historian Alessandra Comini in the 1987 museum catalogue.

Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting, which closes at the AGO on Jan. 20, 2013, before re-opening at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art on Feb. 14, offers an unapologetic perspective on Kahlo as an equal with her husband, not as a victim toiling in his shadow.

More than 80 drawings and paintings, accompanied by photographs of the couple show how their lives were intertwined, despite troubles that led to their divorce and remarriage.

Not long before Kahlo died in 1954 at age 47, she referred to Rivera as “my child, my son, my mother, my father, my husband, my everything.”

Rivera referred to Kahlo’s death as the most tragic day of his life.

“Too late now I realised that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida,” he said.

Picture credit: Hospital Henry Ford, 1932, oil on metal, from the
Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico. Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society, New York.

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Addendum

I painted this plaster cast, a copy of one Kahlo wore and painted, for a production of a 1994 play titled “Frida K” produced at the Toronto Fringe Festival.