Easy to say.........
Remembering the crazy battles that were fought over the National Gallery’s purchase of “Voice of Fire “ in 1990, to the tune of 1.8 million dollars (now worth about $40million!) I do remember various people saying “I could’ve done that! “. The fact is they couldn’t and they didn’t. It takes a huge studio to paint such a painting and a pretty large artist mind to contemplate such a thing. It’s an artist’s mind that goes around thinking about such things and giving them lasting meaning by what they do.
Joy MacFadyen did.....
Perhaps the same simple argument applies to the works in a celebratory exhibition that we plan to open on October 23 on our Gallery X website. People could say, I could’ve done that “but they didn’t, but Joy MacFadyen did. (Here is the Zoom link for that 7:30pm virtual opening for “Celebration of Joy”, https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82921538826 ) Of course we are looking forward to all of you attending!
Others don't do what artists do....
That is the thing about artwork. Artists do what they do and other people don’t do what artists do. It’s a simple little fact, here we have an artist who practises Art, to the exclusion of others who do other things. Sometimes what an artist produces is truly significant and has meaning far beyond what was originally expected. Take for an example you might paint a portrait of one of your neighbours, but as a singular piece it doesn’t carry much weight. If, like Joy MacFadyen, you paint over a hundred portraits of your neighbours, friends, and acquaintances, even their dogs and cats, it then becomes a remarkable accomplishment even if that is not what was intended in the beginning. It also becomes significant because it is an intimate expression of a single person over a lifetime. What I mean is, a hundred people could paint a hundred portraits in a month, and even though that might be significant, there is no doubt that if a single person does that over a lifetime it certainly is significant, and likely a lot more intimate, and also more meaningful.
Immediate Recognition........
Of course saying Joy was intimate might sound a bit strange but artist do convey a certain intimacy in their work unlike any other. They hold their brush a certain way. Nobody else’s way. They choose certain colour combinations that are their own choice. They choose compositional placements, they are consistent, they choose sizes to work by, and in the end you have a person you will recognize in any painting they have rendered. When I go to a watercolour show I don’t need to see the signature to know the work of such as Ray Cattell, Rayne Tunley, Rudi Stussi, Neville Clark, Linda Kemp, Maryanne Ludlum, Fred Brigden, and on and on. Their personal and intimate selves are right there, immediately recognizable on the paper. I daresay you might be able to readily recognize Andy Warhol, Picasso, the Group of Seven, and many impressionist painters the same way.
And so it is with the portraits painted by Joy MacFadyen. I would now know them immediately, having worked on preparing her exhibition, and having examined all those images,. They have meaning, style, integrity, honesty, and a permanency which is the provenance that goes with them to any owner.
A landmark for posterity.......
At times, pride in one’s community seems to have disappeared into the great melting pot of globalism, and its social media of knowing anything from anywhere, but I think we should note that in the growth of our 650,000 person community these portraits are a landmark collection that are now noted for posterity. Fred Savard, Nikita Marner, Doris McCarthy, and many more Scarborough artists fade into oblivion without us saying their names and marking them as pioneers in The Arts of Scarborough.
Joy MacFadyen is one of those artists who will be a constant remarkable artist in the history of our community. And people could still say “I could ‘ve done that” but Joy MacFadyen actually did paint all those paintings and we are going to take a good look at them in our virtual gallery on Wednesday October 23, 2024
Peter Marsh BA CSPWC OSA SCA TWS September 2024
