At the beginning of his career as an artist Joe Fafard, having graduated in the USA and taught a while at the University of Regina, decided to come home and make works of art that paid tribute to the people he understood best. So his first pieces of sculpture, in plaster, wood, earthenware and even flocking, with a coating of oil paint and lacquer, were of his family: Mon Père, Ma Mère, Groszmama (in scarf and meticulously reproduced wheelchair), Oncle Eli. He made them smaller than life-size, with their hands often disproportionately large.
From these beginnings he went on to make likenesses of other local people, an Old Gent aged 107, the village priest, a Cree Man with enormous, veined hands, and other anonymous people whom he gave ironic names: The Merchant of Pense, George II and King.
As time went by, his figurines became more lifelike. Wandering Spirit (1979) is an eye-catching aboriginal with silver hair, kneeling, naked, in contemplation on the ground. Only his face and sagging stomach show his age; his arms and legs are the muscular limbs of a young man in his prime.
I'll never amuse other people if I can't amuse myself
Fafard says, and among his early pieces are the Four Horsemen, not of the Apocalypse exactly, but sardonic models of fellow artists or art teachers on comedy horses, on wheels or padded hooves, with phallic heads, their riders unmistakably of the 1970s.
In the 80s and 90s the sculptor branched out to depictions of his favourite artists, Cézanne, Auguste (Renoir) and Cher Vincent. Fafard identified with and even looked rather like Van Gogh:
Almost like a Messiah, he opened the door for artists of the twentieth century
he enthused. His clay heads coloured with acrylics in deference to the individual style of each artist are larger than life. More recently, in the last two or three years, he has made sculptures of Frida and Diego, a detailed, neatly coloured piece in tribute to that Mexican couple, and of Emily and Friends, i.e. Emily Carr—a far messier bronze as is appropriate to that artist's slap-it-on-thick approach to painting—her "friends" being her pet monkey, her lap dog and her horse.
As an alternative to his sculptures, or as preparatory studies, Fafard drew very good charcoal sketches of his subjects. I saw one of Renoir and several of horses and cattle.
Having mastered clay, he moved on to the more challenging medium of bronze or steel, experimenting as he progressed from one idea or technique to the next, and now the animals became his preferred theme: five Assyrian Cows thin as Giacomettis with a variety of patinas (green, yellow, blue, grey/indigo and brown), then a more realistic cow with newborn calf, entitled Victoria and Albert (1988), a Picasso-like Taureau and the bull, Géricault, whose photo illustrated my previous blog post. One of his bronze bulls, Royal Sweet Diamond is not only true to life but also life-size! He talks of the"architecture" of an animal like this or like the elegant horse Silvers, now owned by our National Gallery.
The last exhibition room was filled with a single exhibit, Running Horses (2007), the steel "cut-outs" of seven horses and four foals, their manes and tails streaming behind them.
So after supper (smelling delicious as we came in out of the snow to eat it) the favoured ones sat around in the living room while four children rushed around upstairs and downstairs, playing hide and seek with walkie-talkies. From a recent immigrant's point of view, it was interesting to see which topics of conversation were the most lengthily discussed: how to chop down maple trees, how to shingle roofs, the habits of wild turkeys, and Monty, whom some of us hadn't met before, turned out to be a great raconteur, holding the floor with his account of how he and his wife fought wind and waves on a yachting trip to Hamilton, across Lake Ontario.
