Pachter Charles - Charles Pachter: Canadas artist

by Tom Smart

M oose Factory is comfortably tucked between two century-old houses in a tiny urban enclave in the shadow of Torontos Art Gallery of Ontario. Its cantilevered, glass-curtained second floor gallery juts out into the shady avenue like a chin. The odd modern incarnation of the building, the history of which includes spells as a food warehouse and a turn-of - the -century funeral parlour, is one of two homes and studios of Charles Pachter, artist and self-styled Canadian icon.

His second home is MOFO (Moose Factory of Orillia), which is more in the character of a growing compound of studios, a gallery and living quarters on the edge of the downtown blocks of Orillia, Ontario. Pachter is developing this once-forlorn neighbourhood as an expression of his big vision to incubate a rural artistic institute on Lake Simcoe, beyond the hubbub of the big city.

Urban and rural, modernist and iconoclast, colourist, and imagist, Pachter is an artist of many paradoxes. Painter, printmaker, sculptor, and designer, he has been a significant contributor to the Canadian art scene for over half a century. His distinctive, highly accessible art is woven into the very fabric of his countrys iconography and public consciousness. Pachters emblematic images are represented in public and private collections; his ubiquitous moose-crossing road signs can be seen along highways and roads across northern Ontario.

Pachter has always demonstrated a remarkable ability to be ahead of the times in anticipating cultural movements and developing local art scenes. From The Other Shaw Festival , the Artists Alliance, and the Artery in the 1970s and 1980s, to the many projects that kick-started the urban development of Queen Street West as an artistic nexus, he has always displayed a prescience for identifying trends early on and for nurturing creative opportunities that have benefited artists and communities enormously.

Well trained as an art student at Michigans Cranbrook Academy, Pachter brought a unique frame of reference to his way of seeing the world and making images, spanning two countries. His personal mode of representation also flew in the face of the tremendous forces of abstraction and minimalism that held sway in the art world when he was starting out as a professional artist in the 1960s.

He entered the art world at a time when imagery was being stripped from canvases, replaced with spare, colour-saturated surfaces and self-referential meaning. Pachter was and remains a bold imagist, a poetic painter. Through radical juxtapositions and dynamic arrangements of colours, and through his deeply literate and visual sensibilities, Pachter adapted an expressive strategy that was analogous to what our best poets and novelists at the same time were doing in words.

In his creative collaborations with Margaret Atwood we can see how closely aligned painting is to poetry, and how the language of one can broaden the vocabulary of the other in ways that expose foundational common truths that animate both creative forms. As is poetry, so is painting could be Pachters artistic motto.

An unashamed royalist, Pachter is also best known for his affectionate portraits of the queen. The most well known are the humorous, notorious paintings of Her Majesty sitting astride a moose. They created a stir when first exhibited more than three decades ago, yet these anachronistic images have endured and even multiplied with successive additions to the royal family. They are etched in some deep part of my consciousness, informing the way I see the world and my country. In broad strokes, Pachters art conveys the signs and symbols that form the strangely diverse mosaic of Canadian identity.

The portrait Leonard Wise paints of Charles Pachter in this book, often using the words of others, is of a passionate, impatient, and, at times, irreverent man whose creative impulse extends from finding in the life around him, in his history and his communitys roots, and in the defining principles of his country evidence of the fundamental stories that make us human: myths. He plumbs life and recreates it as art in all its comedy and tragedy, romance and sadness. For Pachter, life has an operatic dimension. He is a mythologist, devoting his considerable skills to shaking things up with grand gestures, profound feelings, sensual overloads, and glorious, splendid expressions of being human.