100 years strong: remembering Arthur Lismer and the Group of Seven

My mum and dad were very artsy and involved in the art community in Montreal in the 1960s. They hosted art shows in our home before artists could find galleries to represent them. My mother, Lila, was from Saint John, New Brunswick, and was very close with painter Fred Ross, who was her teacher at art school. (Several of his works are hanging in the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, Ontario.) Before he had a regular gallery, he showed his artwork at our house.

As well, my father, Alex, wrote the monthly art column in The Montrealer, a magazine from the 1960s and 1970s. Mum usually interviewed the art­ists and Dad wrote the story from her reel-to-reel recordings. A real tag team! So, our family was very involved with the arts.

Anyhow, my parents wanted us to have a good background in art and so they sent us to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on Saturday mornings to take art classes with Arthur Lismer. Most kids went to nursery school. We went to Arthur Lismer school.

Because I was so young, my recollec­tions are rather scattered. I remember how tall he was, but then again, being only six years old, I was pretty short at the time. I seem to recall he smoked a pipe. I remember how I felt like a real artist because we got to stand at an easel and paint. My older sister, Marcia, who took the class a few years previous to me, remembers the big art show at the end of the year, where all the artists’ paint­ings were on display and she got to dress up in her best outfit. My cousin Richard remembers the licorice pipes that we got at the end of the class on our way home.

I’m not sure if his classes had an effect on me, but I suppose they might have. Years later, I chose art as my field of endeavour and graduated from Concordia with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Maybe some of his teaching rubbed off after all!

As told to Ellen Bond and excerpted, with permission, from “The Group of Seven and me: A few degrees of separation,” published on Library and Archives Canada’s blog on May 6 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Group of Seven’s first formal exhibition.