Emily Urquhart - The Age of Creativity

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Praise for The Age of Creativity

Wise and thoughtful, The Age of Creativity leads us through the landscape of imagination. The bonds of familial love, the workings of memory, the drive to create, and the process of aging are all explored with Urquharts trademark blending of intelligence and warmth. This important work delves into the life of an artist who surveys the transformation of his work over decades and the parallel trajectory of his life. Urquharts beautifully crafted memoir celebrates the longevity and the universality of the creative spirit alive in us all.

Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender:
The Call of the American West

This is a gift of a book, an ode to late style, a daughters devotional, a fascinating dive into art history, but above all a radical detonation of accepted notions of aging and art. Emily Urquhart is a curious and frank guide, who captures her subject with clear and perfect brushstrokes.

Kyo Maclear, author of Birds Art Life

The Walrus Books

The Walrus sparks essential Canadian conversation by publishing high-quality, fact-based journalism and producing ideas-focused events across the country. The Walrus Books, a partnership between The Walrus, House of Anansi Press, and the Chawkers Foundation Writers Project, supports the creation of Canadian nonfiction books of national interest.

thewalrus.ca/books

Also by Emily Urquhart

Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family, and the Mystery
of Our Hidden Genes

The
Age of
Creativity

Art, Memory, My Father, and Me

Emily
Urquhart

Copyright 2020 Emily Urquhart

Published in Canada in 2020 and the USA in 2020
by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The age of creativity : art, memory, my father, and me /
Emily Urquhart.
Names: Urquhart, Emily, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200206230 |
Canadiana (ebook) 20200206249 | ISBN 9781487005313 (softcover) |
ISBN 9781487005320 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487005337 (Kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Urquhart, EmilyFamily. | LCSH: Urquhart, Tony. | LCSH: Children of artistsCanada Biography. |
LCSH: PaintersCanadaBiography. |
LCSH: Fathers and daughtersCanadaBiography. |
LCSH: Creative ability in old age. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.
Classification: LCC ND249.U76 U76 2020 | DDC 759.11dc23

Book design: Alysia Shewchuk

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program
the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the
Government of Canada.

For my parents

When I am a hundred and ten, everything I do,
be it a dot or a line, will be alive.

Katsushika Hokusai

Contents

The Earth Returns to Life

King and Queen

Corkboard

House Among Trees

Untitled

Raft of the Medusa

Articulated Lair

Starry Night(s)

The Runner

Cross-Stitch

The Wreck of Hope

Sun in an Empty Room

Epilogue: Sunset

Acknowledgements

Prologue: Still Life

I saw the two of us framed in the mirror behind the bar. The mirrors surface was smoky and dim, an effect of the candlelight flickering from the tables behind us. There were several rows of glass liquor bottles on the counter below the mirror, as well as a silver-lidded mason jar filled with sugar cubes, a modest pile of white napkins, and a half-peeled lemon in a white porcelain bowl. It was as if wed stumbled into a modern version of a Flemish still life, those highly realist tableaux of abundance from the seventeenth century, where iridescent bunches of grapes nestle beside oysters, quivering in their open shells, half-poured wine sat stilled in glassware that is Godlike and shiny, and the gem of a lemons interior is exposed by its uncurled peel.

Who is that old guy in the mirror? my father asked. He was winking at himself, at me, at the passage of time.

I lifted my phone and captured an image of us my father, at eighty-four, his face thinner than Id seen it before, his beard as white as his hair, a tan cashmere scarf thrown across his shoulder, and me, at forty-one, half his age, a sweep of brown hair hanging into my eyes, a self-conscious half-smile, a string of red beads around my neck. He was looking up, and I was looking down, concentrating on taking the photograph of our reflection, adjusting my lens to include the lemon, the sugar, the white napkins, and the glass bottles, then waiting for a flicker of light to illuminate our faces.

The Dutch still lifes were a record of abundance, of wealth look at what weve reaped and of talent, but they also marked an important shift in the story of art. For the first time, there was no discernible subject at the heart of these works. There was no Greek myth, no Biblical prophecy. Instead, they were a study of shape and form, light and shadow, and of objects grouped in space. In this way, the Dutch artists took the first steps towards abstraction in art. They created antecedents to larger studies of light in impressionism, of form in cubism, of the abstract, non-figurative works that followed from the nineteenth century onwards. If I looked long enough at these still lifes, I could see my fathers abstract expressionist paintings, those towering canvases that were the backdrop to my childhood.

These still lifes were not without narrative, however. There was an undercurrent of caution to the works, ever present, always a reminder that the depicted luxuries were ephemeral no goods could bind the human spirit to earth. The memento mori of these banquet scenes, innocuous, beautifully uncurled, was often the lemon: a peeled fruit will begin to rot.

And now, four centuries later, here was the peeled lemon, sitting almost aglow, in the white bowl on the lip of a bartenders counter. We were living on the fringes of our time of plenty by then, holding on, grasp growing fainter. My father was struggling with his memory, and his pace had slowed, but his work or, rather, his vocation, as he called his daily art practice continued unabated, revealing creativity to be an act as inevitable and constant as death itself.

The image of me and my father in the mirror was a conflation of life, art, and time. It was an echo of the years we travelled Europe together, looking at art, as I wandered, learning how to see, and my father sketched or studied the work of the great artists whod lived long before him, as hed done since he was a young man.

In recent years, these were memory tours for my father, as he turned the album pages of postcards hed collected from the churches, towns, museums, and pilgrimage sites he visited over six decades, ranging from the soaring turrets of a Gothic cathedral to the minute a single white bone resting on velvet and encased in gold and glass, the relic of a long-gone saint. In these souvenirs he re-travelled the landscapes of his memory, drawing on the many tiers of his long, long life, and returned fresh-eyed and anew to his practice.

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