Acknowledgments

M y interest in the lives of artists grew, as I did, in the countryside just outside the tiny village of Blair, on the Grand River in Waterloo County, Ontario.Memory layers scenes and seasons, saturating them with music and art.Most days seem still, configured by the sound of my mother's piano.Yet often enough the atmosphere was convivial, filled with the harmonies of musicians at play; fervent conversations, stretching days far into the night, were swallowed by the hills or by dawn.To maintain a certain decorum, as I recall, religion and politics were avoided topics, but life and art were ready surrogates and argument a common pleasure.John Martin was my champion contender.He and Carl Schaefer taught at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and, in the summers of my adolescence, came to teach up river at the Doon School of Fine Arts.They both became family friends and through them I caught a glimpse of the larger world of art in Canada.Mostly, though, there were music and musicians.Active throughout the region, many played in the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony or sang with the Preston Operatic Society; a few jazz musicians moonlighted with the dance band at Leisure Lodge.Others were church soloists (including my grandfather, John Wildman, who had a fine tenor voice) and a few, active on farther, perhaps grander stages, were sojourners.Maria Tippett's description of the place of the arts in English Canadian communities at mid-century, in Making Culture, rings true for me.Making and attending to the arts were critical activities; meaning lay in or beyond or through art.How radically artists who knew modernism conditioned my own views has become clear working through the matters of this book.Emily Carr's words and images, the details of her life and the words of those she in turn has stirred, bring my early world to mind.My principal questions were shaped there.The midnight voice of John Martin remains quintessential, as do his enthusiasms and the sweet agonies of his life-sweet because his art and religion Xlll

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.