BILL C-32

The proposed “modernization” to copyright in Bill C-32 threatens to take away the rights of creators. I will give one example to illustrate how this would happen were this Bill passed into law.

As it now stands, revenues are collected through Access Copyright for photocopying services and paid to writers. The problem is that Bill C-32 would expand the current purposes of the broad exemption of “fair dealing” to include “education.” This would allow educational institutions to photocopy any books without compensations to writers. You might think that’s good because it saves money for students. But I ask, why should writers do their work without being paid? We don’t expect that of teachers, nor do we expect that of people in any other professions. So why should writers work without being paid for writing?

Consider this: 600,000 Canadians work as writers, artists, performers, composers, songwriters and producers. Our sector contributes more than $46 bn to Canada’s GDP, more than twice the value of Canada’s forest industry.

And yet, Bill C-32, instead of protecting our rights, as copyright has done for centuries, under the pretext of “modernization” Bill C-32 threatens to take rights away, making our future, and the future of Canada’s digital economy more precarious.

I suggest that you contact your Member of Parliament to ask him or her to work to have this badly written law fixed.

ALMA DUNCAN (1917-2004)

I suppose that normally I would not have a lot of interest in drawings and paintings of industrial scenes, but an artist who hangs out on catwalks in a factory to get a good view of a scene has a certain appeal to me. Alma Duncan’s interest in machinery began early in her life when as a child in Philadelphia she had the task of making lace as part of a textile show, and she knew early in her life that she would be an artist because she thought making pictures was very exciting.

Duncan attended McGill University in Montreal and also studied art with Ernst Newmann and Goodridge Roberts at the Art Association of Montreal. The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) hired Duncan, first in the Graphics Division and later in the Animation Department. There she met the photographer Audrey McLaren in 1951. The two became life partners and formed a film-making company, Dunclaren Productions.

A touring show of Duncan’s work, initiated by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario in 1987-1988, focused on her depictions of factories and machinery, the big stuff that men (no women in these paintings) did to make our society hold together, from oil refineries to ship building to making paper. The show was called “Alma Duncan and Men at Work.” In this exhibition, Duncan’s acute powers of observation were obvious in the way she positioned workers and machines. Now she is still known for her drawings of industrial scenes.

Duncan moved back and forth between her several media throughout her career. During the 1950s she made a series of chalk drawings of women. Along with her drawing and film making, from time to time she also worked in teaching and gave talks on a variety of art-related topics such as animation and collage.

During World War II she was given permission to sketch war industries, and some of these works are in the collection of the Canadian War Museum. She is also represented in the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, among others.

Sources
Joan Murray, "Alma Duncan and Men at Work 1943 to 1986" (Oshawa, Ontario, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 1987.
Library and Archives Canada

JACOBINE JONES (1897-1976)

Jacobine Jones was born in England. When she was a child, her Danish-born mother encouraged her and her brother and sister to explore their world. Fortunately, her mother also fostered Jacobine’s spontaneous interest in art. As Natalie Luckyj explains in her book on the artist (see below), her childhood drawings include a happy family of birds with the father leading the flock and the mother at the rear - an indication of Jacobine’s feeling about her family.

Jacobine was educated at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London where she experienced the companionship of a circle of other students also passionate about art, and developed her technical skills in sculpting. In her final year of her studies, she won an award for a stone carving, which was purchased by an art gallery in Glasgow.

In 1932, Jacobine came to Canada for a visit that stretched into more than just a visit. She went camping in northern Ontario with a friend two years after her arrival, an experience that led her to adopt Canada as her home. She became a teacher at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto; there she became the first woman to be chosen as the head of any department - she took on the sculpting department.

Jones’s work was primarily figurative and representational, though she was open to a more abstract approach in later years. She came into her own during a period of time when architectural sculpture was popular; she received many commissions from both corporations and also from government. Her work can be found in private collections, and in such public museums as the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the National Gallery of Canada.

Source
Natalie Luckyj “Put on Her Mettle: The Life and Art of Jacobine Jones” (Manotick, Ontario: Penumbra Press, 1999)

DOROTHY STEVENS (1888-1966)

Dorothy Stevens is an artist for whom little archival information is available, despite that her work as a print maker is outstanding and her work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery and the Canadian War Museum.

Dorothy was born and raised in Toronto. Her father was a painter and recognized his daughter’s talent, so he sent her to study abroad. She attended the Slade in London as well as the Académie Colorossoi in Paris. During the First World War, Dorothy requested a commission from the Canadian War Memorials Fund. As a result, she created etchings of workers in the shipbuilding yards and munitions plants, focusing especially on female workers whom she captured in poses that suggested the fluidity and grace of dancers. These works are part of the collection of the Canadian War Museum.

Dorothy was a teacher at the Ontario College of Art, and became known as a portrait artist. Her favourite travel destination was Mexico, where she painted portraits of the people as well as landscapes.

Selected Sources
www.fineartandantiques.ca/.../gallery stevens.html
cwahi.concordia.ca/sources/artists

YVONNE McKAGUE HOUSSER

Yvonne McKague Housser (1898-1996), a highly regarded educator and painter, studied at the Ontario College of Art before travelling to Paris to study there. Later, she studied in Vienna under Franz Cizek, Arthur Lismer’s mentor in art education for children - Lismer was an influence in Yvonne’s thinking about art. While travelling abroad, Yvonne was exposed to French modern art; Cezanne’s influence can be seen in her work.

Besides working as a painter, Yvonne was also a teacher at the Ontario College of Art. Of all the painters of that time, Lismer was the one who influenced her most. Yvonne was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters and an adviser for the Toronto Art Students’ League patterned after the Students’ League in New York City.

Yvonne made many sketching trips to glean subject matter for her paintings, scenes from mining towns and other villages in Northern Ontario over a ten-year period, from 1925-1935. Her friends often accompanied her: Rody Kenny Courtice, Prudence Heward and Isabel McLaughlin. Yvonne’s paintings from the North were different from those of her predecessors (paintings that gave the impression of lifeless towns) for their evidence of human habitation - details including curtains and lights shining from the windows in night scenes.

A letter from Yvonne to Paraskeva Clark in 1950 reveals her admiration for her friend’s work. Apparently Yvonne was late for an opening at an exhibition and arrived during a talk Paraskeva was giving. In a letter to Praskeva she apologized and concluded with “…perhaps before I die I shall be able to paint a bit of green foliage so that it sings - as yours does - I hope so.” This is an example of how the women artists of that time had a true appreciation for each other.

Two years after Yvonne’s marriage to Fred Housser, in 1936 he died of a heart attack. Her personal tragedy seemed to take her into a new direction in her art. She was one of the artists who was strongly influenced by the move to abstraction in the art world - she studied with Hans Hoffman in the 1950s in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Yvonne’s work can be seen in major museums in Canada.

Selected Sources
Library and Archives Canada Artist Files
"Yvonne McKague Housser," Joan Murray (Oshawa: The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 1995)

MARY ELLA DIGNAM (1856-1938)

Mary Ella Dignam was one of those artists who showed an interest in art when she was a young child. Her inclination was hard to miss because she sometimes pulled wool out of carpets to get coloured material for making her pictures. This interest in art stayed with Mary Ella as she grew up. Fortunately, her parents could afford to pay for art classes in London, Ontario not far from their home.

Later, Mary Ella went to New York and studied at the Art Students’ League in Manhattan and also traveled to Europe. She lived an unconventional life for her time; she was married and had children and still followed her professional interests as an arts educator and developed her career as an artist.

Moulton College in Toronto (a girls’ prep-school founded by Susan Moulton McMaster, the widow of Senator William McMaster who founded McMaster University) hired Dignam to establish an art department and be its director.

Dignam knew that women in Canada had little opportunity to develop as artists and began using her energy to change this situation. She started the Women’s Art Association of Canada (WAAC), an organization still alive today with its own building, purchased in 1916, in Toronto. She was also active in other arts organizations.

From what I’ve learned, I think that Dignam, despite her ideas about women - revolutionary for her time - painted oils of “ordinary” subjects that included landscapes and flowers. Nevertheless, she exhibited her work widely and gathered praise from critics, along with having made a great contribution to having women recognized in the art world of her time.

Selected Sources
Library and Archives Canada Artist files
www.womensartofcanada.cahistory

PRUDENCE HEWARD

For some time I have been wanting to write a series of short blog posts about Paraskeva Clark’s contemporaries, and other female Canadian artists in our history. The first one is on Prudence Heward.

Prudence Heward (1896-1947) was a major figure painter in the 1920s and 1930s when landscape painting dominated Canadian art, especially in English Canada where the Group of Seven held sway. Heward grew up in a large Montreal family - her father was a business man, an executive of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Heward’s mother encouraged her daughter’s interest in art, who studied at the Art Association of Montreal and in Paris, where she met Isabel McLaughlin. The two became friends and often went sketching together. Heward was a co-founder of the Canadian Group of Painters, the group that formed in 1933 in Toronto after the Group of Seven disbanded. She was also a part of the Montreal circle known as the Beaver Hall artists, friends who shared their love of painting and were active in the Montreal art world.

Using a brilliant colour palette, Heward’s paintings of women showed that she saw them as strong, complex people, not as weak and passive, which is how many artists of the day portrayed them. She exhibited her work and won several awards for her painting and was included in international exhibitions of Canadian art in the 1920s. Her paintings now hang in Canada’s major collections.

Unfortunately Heward suffered from fragile health, and in 1939 her nose was injured in a car accident, which intensified her asthmatic condition. She went to California for treatment in the late forties and died there in 1947.

Selected Sources
Barbara Meadowcroft, "Painting Friends: The Beaver Hall Women Painters" (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1999).
Library and Archives Canada www.collectionscanada.ca "Prudence Heward"