I considered my childhood to be unremarkable by comparison. “And that,” I can hear my mother saying, “is how clueless you are.” My mother had her views on how miraculously fortunate it was for anyone to be have been born healthy, comfortable, and Canadian in the middle of the twentieth century. “You don’t know how good you got it, kiddo.”
4
Paint makers once created darkness with charred ivory. What resulted was the black you’d expect of so grim a process. If you were painting the flip side of my untroubled growing up, you’d use a colour like it. If, for example, you wanted to paint the residential school to which we, the well-meaning congregants of Melrose United Church, sent gifts at Christmas, you’d use it. If you were painting the industrial sludge that collected at the bottom of Hamilton Harbour, you’d use it. If you were painting crimes like these you’d want to use a black as awful as the burnt tusks of slaughtered elephants.
These days iron oxide is the most common foundation of colour’s absence in paint. Black’s components are bound with lubricant and minerals, and when the compound is thinned with linseed oil it can be used on the horizon to describe the haze of distance. When lightly but smoothly applied (like the underside of autumn clouds over Lake Ontario), black can be a metaphor for the uncertainty of distant memory. It can also evoke the mists of time.
You cut off his arms.
You cut off his legs.
You cut off his head.
How could you?
The huddle of boys I’m remembering under the back stairs, clang, clang, happened only a few weeks before Mr. Parsons had to drum how to spell “assassination” into our thick skulls (“double s, double s” underlined in red ink).
It was noisy at recess. It was like being inside a hedge full of birds.
Mr. Parsons’ black shoes. The bottom clang.
5
On December 27, 2017, our family—meaning Caroline, Blake, Janice and I—went to the Art Gallery of Ontario. I hadn’t been to the AGO since the day of Blake’s diagnosis. But an exhibit dedicated to the work of Guillermo del Toro, the film director, had opened and del Toro was a big star in Blake’s firmament. We all wanted him to see the show.
Pan’s Labyrinth had been released in 2006, Hellboy two years before that, and Blake was a fan: the same love of fantasy and B movies and animation and comic books. “Screenplay,” del Toro once said, and it is something I can perfectly imagine Blake quoting to me, “is the toughest form of writing…because you need to be in the present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.”
Del Toro is an artist who has followed a zigzagging path to becoming a director. Things didn’t follow a sequence—at least not a standard sequence, and Blake admired that. Del Toro worked as an actor and a makeup artist and an animator and a special-effects creator and a writer and a producer—a route that only in hindsight looked ingeniously plotted toward an Academy Award for best picture.
Going to the AGO was something we used to do a lot on holidays with Caroline and Blake when they were kids. Especially in that week between Christmas and New Year’s, when winter closed in and we hunkered down together in our tall, narrow, mortgaged-to-the-hilt red brick house. We were, I think it’s fair to say, a happy family. Money never seemed to stay very long in our bank account, but we generally had enough coming in to cover what was going out. Janice started her own design business. She wrote a book about colour. I took on whatever magazine gigs came my way.
Back then, when people who were our parents’ age asked, as they sometimes did (with an air of amused amazement), why our house was where it was, we said we liked living downtown. This was quite true. But really our house was where it was for the obvious reason. It was in one of the rundown, bikes-on-the-front-porch, dream-catcher-in-the-window, part student housing, part rooming house, part cool professor, part old Portuguese couple Toronto neighbourhoods that, in the 1970s and even into the 1980s, we could (just barely) afford. This was a lifetime ago, and although this was not quite so obvious then as it seems now, we were part of what was coming. Our property’s value increased tenfold in thirty years. We’ve never moved.
The AGO was close enough for us to walk to in even the worst of winter-holiday snowstorms. We had our route.
When they were kids, Caroline and Blake would choose the painting they liked the most and the one they liked the least of any room in the gallery we entered. Janice invented this game. And it turned out to be a good one.
My favourite was always Édouard Vuillard’s The Widow’s Visit (1898, oil on paper mounted on wood). It’s a painting I discovered when Janice and I were at the University of Toronto and I’d got up the nerve to ask her out. We went to the AGO one afternoon. And if anyone is wondering what to do on a first date, may I suggest: an art gallery.
The Widow’s Visit is not very big, not very colourful, and, on the face of it, not a whole lot of fun. A blurry portrait of three old ladies in a slightly too small middle-class Parisian apartment was not a crowd-pleaser as far as our kids were concerned. But it is the light on the apartment’s back wall, coming from a window the viewer cannot see, that makes the painting so great. I’d say. Look. But it was a hard sell. An acquired taste, I’d say—which is what my father said to me about buttermilk.
The best show ever with the kids was Keith Haring. Blake was nine. “A light bulb going off,” Blake said.
So of course Blake would want to go to the Guillermo del Toro show at the AGO. But it wasn’t easy for him to go anywhere by that December.
He was at home. He was being hit with bouts of pain that roamed unpredictably around his body.
Blake had almost no patience for the word “journey.” So, you should bear that in mind when I tell you that his journey began with bouts of pain he couldn’t explain and which (by the time he called me from the apartment on Bloor Street he shared with some musician friends) were becoming scary. That was the first such call, and it was the first of many trips to hospitals. So it’s not as if the bouts of pain were a new development. What was new by the December of the del Toro show was their frequency. Sometimes—especially at night, for some reason—he could not find a position that afforded him any relief, no matter how much hydromorphone and Tylenol and cannabis oil he took and how carefully we followed his instructions about arranging pillows and heat pads and ice packs.
One night the pain wouldn’t stop. I won’t try to pretend I have any idea what it felt like. But I will tell you what being the parent of a child in pain like that felt like: it felt like my nerves were exploding. I remember standing in front of him and crying—full-throated sobbing—because there was nothing we could do to help.
Blake was standing beside his bed in T-shirt and sweatpants because he thought standing might be better than lying down. It wasn’t. I didn’t know what to do. So I hugged him.
He was standing with his arms around me, mine around him. He let me take some of his weight. And he said: “That feels better.”
He was the one who gave the position a name. He’d call in the middle of the night sometimes that month. I was two floors up, phone beside the bed. He’d say: “Sorry to wake you.” He called it Jacob’s Ladder.
There were also times during this same period when he felt okay—as in, not all that bad. We didn’t treat these episodes of okayness as anything special, really. We regarded them more as status quo than respites. They were how Blake would feel all the time when he was better. And so, when his sister and his mother encouraged him to go to the AGO show, it wasn’t in the spirit of a special occasion. For the four of us to go to the Guillermo del Toro show in the week between Christmas and New Year’s was the most ordinary thing in the world. The only unusual aspect of Janice’s and Caroline’s idea was that, in the storyline from which Blake’s illness had steered us, it would have been Blake who was doing the encouraging. In fact, he probably would have already seen it, reporting to us at the dinner table how
much fun it was to wander through the curios of del Toro’s Dickensian interiors and what a surprise to come across an actual pianist playing an actual grand piano (Satie, Chopin, Schumann) in one of the show’s last mysterious rooms. Two weeks later we tracked down the pianist to play at Blake’s service.
Blake had always been incapable of keeping his enthusiasms to himself. This was especially true at dinner—a daily ritual on which Janice insisted. As kids, Blake and Caroline would tell us about movies or books or bands. So I am sure that in 2004, when he was seventeen, Blake would have talked about del Toro directing Hellboy, based on the graphic novel by Mike Mignola. It was right up Blake’s alley. But I have no actual memory of this happening. I wasn’t all that clear on who del Toro was when Janice came into my office two days after Christmas and said we were all going to the AGO, and I said that maybe I’d stay home and keep working, and she said: We’re all going to the AGO.
Blake had a lot of horror movies on various hard drives. On top of which: he had leukemia. Improbable plot twists were not necessarily incorrect. Blake felt.
What he was suspicious of—what he really strongly objected to—was literary display. It was for him the written equivalent of what in the world of real estate transaction is known as “fluffing” or “staging”—the cluttering of an interior with throw pillows and vases of flowers in order that prospective buyers don’t see what’s actually there. And I could see that Blake had a point. It did seem suspiciously literary, in what I was reading to him—on my laptop, in that hospital room—that things tied together as they did.
Blake sometimes employed an intently blank expression. This expression didn’t actually involve the raising of an eyebrow. But it had the same effect. Because what I told him was this.
The schoolyard chant about Evelyn Dick was being recited under the clanging stairs by a boy (slight, dark hair) who would, it so happened, be murdered himself a few years later.
Red check mark.
6
It wasn’t all that long before my mother died that Hartman and I agreed we would get together for a tour of Hamilton. Absolutely. I’d love to. It would be a pleasure. But spring and summer slipped by, and eventually, there we were: in the fall, on the gravel driveway of my parents’ old home. The leaves were still splendid. Perhaps because the sunshine was only intermittent, I don’t remember the brightest colours Hartman ended up using when he worked on his painting of that day.
At that time—the time you can see in the painting—Blake was in the first year of treatment. My wife, our daughter, Blake’s girlfriend Effy, and I were by then all familiar with two or three oncology wards in Toronto, a few infectious disease clinics, and several Toronto emergency rooms. A ruptured appendix and a rare fungal infection had complicated things that were already complicated enough with Blake’s cancer. There were viruses he picked up in the hospital and infections he may have picked up from the takeout he ordered (to my amazement) when he was in hospital. “Are you allowed to do that?” I asked. Blank stare from Blake in response.
There were operations. On his abdomen. On his shoulder. He couldn’t move his arms for a while. We had to, for him. There were rounds of antivirals. There were surgical wounds that wouldn’t heal. There was a hernia that grew and grew, and how Blake hated that paunch. There were a lot of painkillers. There was chemo. There were whacks of antibiotics.
He’d been healthy and fit all his life and then suddenly, he wasn’t. He totally wasn’t. It was like fucking Job. That’s how it seemed sometimes, and it was never just Job. Always fucking Job. By the time Blake was told that the fungal infection he had somehow picked up was extremely dangerous and extremely rare, he said: Why am I not surprised? I was there once when a young doctor (more or less the same age as Blake) stood beside his bed, flipped through his chart, and said, “Wow.”
Platelets and hemoglobin became subjects of daily conversation. We talked about them, asked about them, wondered about them, read about them, worried about them. We were learning about the weird emotional cycles caused by steroids. We were adjusting to the waxing and waning of Blake’s energies.
And then things took a turn. This was around the time of my mother’s death. This was five months before the day you can see in Hartman’s painting.
Blake’s counts were not good. Definitely not good. On the day of my mother’s funeral, Blake was back in Princess Margaret Hospital. There were doctors and nurses around his bed a lot of the time. He was extremely thin.
The translucence of his hands made me think of polished statuary. And that’s as far as I would allow that avenue of thought to go. It was something I did a lot in those days—consciously steer away from obituary pages in newspapers, sorrowful music, movies with sad endings, statues of Mary with her grown, dead son in her arms. I tried to avoid anything that contradicted what I was looking for when I stepped into Blake’s room. Sometimes the things I hoped to see (energy, humour) were there and sometimes they weren’t. But I never took the pose of the Pietà’s Jesus as Blake’s natural state although that was sometimes exactly what he looked like. Really exactly.
Even when he was pale as polished Carrara marble Blake had a confidence in which I believed. Dogged, determined, defiant—these three words were part of a private ritual I conducted every morning. They were the description of Blake on which I insisted to myself—especially when the disease seemed to be dictating different terms.
Dogged, determined, defiant. Dogged, determined, defiant. I began this silent prayer when I was making coffee. Dogged, determined, defiant. Every morning had to begin with those words. I never told anyone this. Especially not Blake.
“It’s not my time,” he said to us on the day of my mother’s funeral. There was something so matter-of-fact in his tone of voice that we all believed it. So his sister stayed with him in the hospital in Toronto. They’d always been close. They’d always been pals.
And Janice and I drove to Hamilton. I could show you in the painting where my mother’s funeral took place. And Blake was right. It wasn’t his time.
7
John Hartman’s preoccupation is light. He thinks about it a lot when he is beginning a painting. Mostly he thinks about light by mixing his colours on a large, glass palette and picturing their effect. He pictures what they will be like immediately, of course. He has to predict how they will resonate with other colours at the instant of their application to the surface of a painting. Even a limited palette can, by juxtaposition of pigment, produce a wild, kaleidoscopic composition. But the artist has also to consider: What will the effect of the colours be with some saturation of the paint’s oil into the fabric? With time? With the white light of the gesso shining back through the translucence of age?
If a painting draws you into the world it creates, there is reason to suspect that you are in the presence of a good one. And this is something I should point out about living with a work of art. What I’ve discovered is that not only does a painting create what Hartman calls imaginative space, it draws you into that space.
Were you to ask me what it is that makes good art good (Édouard Vuillard: The Widow’s Visit) I’d sputter for a while but eventually I’d say, It asks questions. Not that there are not other considerations. Technique. Execution. Composition. Skill. There’s a checklist. And I’m not suggesting there shouldn’t be. But if you are looking at a painting that doesn’t ask questions there’s a pretty good chance you’re standing in front of what my father would call “a dud.”
For example, I wondered: Why, when Hartman depicts the city of Hamilton in the background with such thick intensity, does he sketch the neighbourhood in the middle ground so economically? This wasn’t a criticism. It was a question—not necessarily a question with an answer, but a question that became part of my experience of looking at the painting.
Hartman’s approach immediately raises another question: Why does it work? In a more literal world, the middle ground wou
ld be more filled-in than the background, not less.
Of course, nobody sees this painting the way I see this painting—which makes my judgment of it of no use to anyone. But when you are able to spend a good deal of time looking at a work of art (sometimes in natural light, sometimes in bright electric clarity) you do get drawn in. Believe me, you do. You can look at it from across the room and you can look at it up close. You can move around. You can stay still for as long as you want, unhurried by the current of a crowd at an art gallery. You can daydream about it. You can enter its imaginative space.
Were Hartman’s painting not a painting at all, but a panel in a graphic novel, the boughs of mature deciduous trees, in October, just to the left of my head, would be understood by experienced graphic-novel readers to be the representation of the subject’s wistful memories. This isn’t quite a portrait of an old man, but we’re getting there. Autumn is what the picture is about.
Hartman has used D. L. Stevenson oil paints (a Canadian company, he is quick to point out) since he was an art student in the early 1970s. Once Canada’s leading manufacturer of fine-arts paints, D. L. Stevenson appealed to Hartman’s quiet, steady nationalism. But nationalism wasn’t sufficient on its own—a practicality that seems very Canadian to me. D. L. Stevenson is good paint and he’s accustomed to it. Painting light is tricky enough without having to think about being patriotic.
Likeness Page 6