The Voice: Recollections of Harold Town

Following the Arts The Voice: Recollections ofHarold Town When I think of Harold Town, dead at sixty-six ofcancer, I realize that what I will miss most is his gravelly, nasal voice, speaking in his down-to-earth way, but with the occasional theatrical flourish. To me he was satirically funny - and, worse, he was often right. I will always remember his imitations ofme as Polyanna, the girl with a good word for everything. Ioften felt likesomedowager with a big hat as I sat listening to him. But I always recognized his genius. For me he was an artist of unique panache and style whose gaiety and invention informed his life and work. He was lovable even when maddening. He was noisy, but he remained simple at heart. Once he said to me that his smart talk came from having been a kid who hung around a pool hall: "Ifyou weren't funny in a pool room, you'd betterbe a good bullshooter or something because it was a club-like atmosphere ." Town was, perhaps too much, the Voice. It was as the Voice I knew him best because I believed myself a good listener. When I was a young curatorat the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1972, Greg Curnoe and I discussed the importance oflistening to artists. The publicdoesn't respect what the artist has to say, we felt. In that instant, itseemed to me that I could accomplish something by becoming the archivist of living Canadian art. By 1975 I had begun to work with artists in my new capacity as director of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. Using a tape recorder as well as hand-written notes, I investigated specific areas of interest - first, the group so prominent in the gallery's guidelines , Painters Eleven; then women artists, since the artist whose collection founded the gallery's was a woman, Alexandra Luke; then artists who came after the Eleven but were related to them, however distantly; then the Canadian war artists, since abstract painters seemed to regard them as an interesting kind ofenemy. My search broadened: I spoke to 166 the relatives of artists - wives, widows, lovers, children - and to dealers, collectors, and friends. As an oral historian I found it vital to listen and not interrupt. Ihoped to providethat perfect ear for which every artist yearns. In my research I had at least onegreat Canadian predecessor, Marius Barbeau, and I liked to think of him biking around the FrenchCanadian countryside, collecting the folk songs and artifacts of French Canada. The songs I colJected were of the living, and sometimes they were not so much songs as barbaric yawps (as Walt Whitman said) of pain, as with Harold Town. Town helped teach me that the artist's words were not so much a record and log of progress but a way of developing spiritual strength, mine as well as his. Town required the curator to bean invisible lover as well as listener. He turned to me like a child to his mother, as if my presence was proof of an authenticity ofa life of hard work. On one memorable occasion, he insisted on showing me every one of the toy horse paintings he'd done up to a certain date - and there were several hundred. On another, he proved he was the first artist in Canada to use burned areas in collage. That time he swung canvases around so wildly that pieces flew and works scrapedagainst eachother. Horrified, Iheard the shuddering and scratching of frames hitting glass. The archivist and curators were to be evidence for Town of - what? Town once said, "I paint to defy death." We were to provide proof that he had defied death. But curators always fell short. They never understood enough, never knew enough. He never allowed them any power ofdiscrimination; certainly no one was permitted to edit a show of his work, a key curatorial function. He regarded curators as innately lesser beings, like serfs who didn't work hard enough. His lesson to me was that archival material, no matter in what depth, must always fall short ofcapturing the artist. The archival interview record is an accumulation ofpetty detail...