11-02 Paintings and Photos

"Now take three of your basic colours – red, green and blue. Mix this with this, and you get fuchsia. Mix this with this, and you get puce." This was Dad's art teacher at our old cottage on Lake Simcoe, showing him how you make hundreds of different colours by mixing the primary colours in different proportions.
The friendship with his art teacher lasted for over a decade. I did not know I was colour-blind at the time, but I loved watching the master create magic. And although he taught Dad using oil paints, his specialty was watercolours which is a more difficult art form.
I wish I could remember his name, but he made a lot of watercolours as presents to Dad without signing them. They all were hung up in the store at 734 Bay Street. There is one of Dad shown here and others of Uncle James and brother Ian as a teenager.
Dad painted off and on for almost 30 years, and some were pretty good. I remember him buying a hundred frames at one time and storing them in our basement. The attached is one of the better ones. He gave all of them away to family and friends. Most went to friends in the Plymouth Brethren, whether they liked them or not.
Uncle Alex in Ireland used to send him postcards of Irish scenes, and that was the basis of most of his work. His problem was banging them out in two hours on the weekend in our basement. But in tribute to Dad, it is hard not to remember his paintings.
It was great fun when Dad commissioned a firm in Scotland to create a family crest. It was a real put-up job that looked so authentic as if it had been handed down over the ages. I loved the belt and the bloody hand of Ulster.
Another great memory was our family portraits. And as you get older and lose your parents, these family portraits become a form of family glue. Every time our Irish grandparents came to Canada, we had to have a formal family portrait. Getting brother Robert at age three to sit still is one of my favourite memories.
My favourite is the photo of the boys, as Dad called it. I had just begun teaching at Ryerson in the early 1960s and came to the store every day because I was helping Dad open branches. One day he said, "We are going to have a photo taken over at Eaton's, and I have asked the boys to come down with a jacket and tie." This photo is really about “Remembering Dad”.
I noticed Dad ageing around age 69, and the photo of him behind his desk at the store was taken in the late 1970s. Fighting your genetic package is difficult. Dad was all Devon which came from his mother's side. I do not know a Devon that lived into their 80s. Dad died at age 71.