James Agrell Smith as Remembered by Me, his Son, Ken Agrell-Smith

James Agrell Smith

as Remembered by Me, his Son, Ken Agrell-Smith To Accompany James Agrell Smith: A Broader Picture – Drawings, Paintings, and Original Prints, August 17 to November 11, 2013, Curated by Mary-Beth Laviolette for the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery on the Celebration of 100 Years of Red Deer’s Incorporation and the Birthdate of James Agrell Smith

A short bio must precede the memory of what James Agrell Smith was to me, his son, Ken Agrell-Smith. He was the product of a time, a place and circumstances that ultimately became reflected in his life, his art, and in his relationship with my mother and me, relatives, and the broader those who were to discover this man and his work. I think as you read this remembrance, you will readily make a connection between each piece of information and the contexts for the man and the influences on his work. He willingly shared most of this with me at one time or another.

My father was born December 31, 1913 at Stettler, Alberta, the second son of Frank Agrell Smith and Elise Olga Horney.

His older brother, Frank, was born in January of the same year. When my father was born, his father was 60 years old, his mother just 18. Here is the story.

Frans Richard Agrell was born in Lund, Sweden and at the age of 16 left Sweden (we don’t know why) but ostensibly to meet an uncle who had made it rich in the California gold rush. Frans arrived at Ellis Island in 1869, but instead of California, he headed

to Texas for he had a love of the cowboy and the life of the open range. He became part of the opening of the American west.

His wanderings on the frontier encompassed being a range hand herding cattle from Texas north into the then Northwest Territories (British Territories). Remember that Custer’s last stand occurred in 1876 only seven years after my grandfather’s arrival in America. He ultimately hooked up with an outfit owned by two brothers whose surname was Smith. The Smith Swede Kid became the Frank Smith Kid. He apparently brought some of the first Herefords into the Cochrane area, and was caught in the subsequent range wars between the cattlemen and their herds against the fences and broken grazing lands of the sodbusters.

Traditional free range and river fords were now denied access to the cattlemen.

We know Frank was in the Last Roundup in Calgary but much remains to be known of what happened between his arrival in America and of his apparent pasturing of his cattle in the Hand Hills near Drumheller in the 1880’s. He lost most of his stock in the hard winter of 1906-07.

We know he had hollowed out a cave in the badland’s riverbank as a place to live where the Michichi Creek met the Red Deer River at Drumheller. He had a stone fireplace wall and glass in his door. Warm in winter. Cool in summer. The date is 1911.

On the prairie flatlands east of the road into Drumheller town and the Red Deer River valley is a correction line labeled “Horney’s Corner” on the township map in the county office.

of growing up and for many years after, my father was the single most important influence in my life. I remember him as an old man. [Remember he was 60 years old when my father was born.]

We were good friends and he understood the things I wanted to do. He believed in standards of excellence and in the potential of personal abilities. For many years I measured my endeavours against what I thought his standards would be.”

My father’s mother was the eldest daughter, born in Magdeburg, Germany of a German chemist, Ernst Horney and his wife, Olga Hornbach. They had initially immigrated to North Carolina from Germany also through Ellis Island. Free land attracted them to Alberta. In my father’s words he spoke of his grandfather “as the least likely of anyone to ever be a homesteader, anywhere.”1 So the story goes, unable to find suitable work he left to Montana for employment leaving the wife with five children on the homestead. Within the year he became ill and asked for his wife and youngest daughter to join him leaving behind the eldest daughter, Elise, to care for the remaining children and a few horses. [At this distance and time these actions cannot but be read with incredulity however…]

My father spoke of his father as keen to instill in his children the love and necessity of education and learning. Before he had left Sweden as a youth he had become interested in Linnaeus and his theories of plant and animal identification and had kept journals and drawings during his wanderings. He shared with his son the wonders of the natural world.

They would go on long walks on the unbroken prairie north of town where they gathered birds’ nests, eggs, abandoned wasp nests and samples of plants and grasses to identify and to draw pictures of them. “It was in those walks that my father taught me to see the world around me and the colour of the land and sky. I learned to read the clouds for weather signs and to appreciate the change of the seasons. I had my paper and pencils and we would draw and classify the plants and birds we saw”… and many other interesting things which they labeled and secured to the inside walls of their woodshed. This continued until the weather changed and his father’s last illness.

It came to pass that the winter of 19111912 was horribly cold and mean. To water the horses, the children had to chop a hole in the river ice. Frank Smith took pity on them as they were unaccustomed to such work and took them in to save them from freezing or starving to death. Many of Frank’s herd perished that winter. Spring returned and so also did the absent parents, irate, believing their daughter had been living in sin, refused her their home. Frank and Elise were obliged to leave and were married to live in Stettler, Alberta in 1912. They had five children all of whom had Agrell as their middle name.

“While my mother never did understand, her sister, my aunt Margaret, made every effort to do so. Out of the goodness of her heart from her meager wages as a housekeeper, she bought for me a small black-tinned box of oil paints and brushes. Dear, laughing, skinny Aunt Margaret by her gift opened the door for me to all that was to come. What matter that I did not know how to begin and had no canvas. I had cardboard and my paints, and so began the life-long search to find myself as a painter and to use whatever gifts I could.”

Those early years reveal little except from the stories that have come out of archive materials about the time between preWorld War I and its end. My father has spoken as remembered as a child, he would have been 5 years of age in 1918, that his mother was treated poorly – denied service in stores and the like – because she was German. His uncle also was abused by local “heroes”. The face of ignorance and prejudice was met by his family too soon in the life of a small boy not yet of school age and unfortunately remembered by him. A scene to be repeated when my father was away as a seaman during WWII with added abuses heaped upon his mother and family in that narrow little bigoted town called Stettler – swastikas painted on garage and egged house!! The anti-German hysteria was the excuse for the malicious harassment and humiliating incidents. His mother lived in fear for herself and her two sons. “The town continued to be rife with sneaking harassments and prejudices with which I had to contend as I grew up and attended school.” These actions discoloured the lives of my father and his family for as long as they lived.

Also some other very special people in memory for him was a grade VI teacher who framed and hung around the classroom a series of his animal drawings and paintings where they remained until the school was torn down many years later, and an enlightened principal in his grade VII year who gave him access to the keys to the always locked library with permission to use the library after school hours. “I remember the feeling of a great feast spread before me the first time I unlocked the door into that dusty, musty room…(which) opened up broad horizons for me.” For many hours, until his death my father explored the powers and marvels held within the covers of books

My father liked school and found that learning came easy. It was not all prejudice and he had some good friends. “Over the years 1

ll direct quotations from my father come from notations he intended to be A used in his autobiography. page 2

He left school in grade X to work three days a week for a livestock buyer. He knew he had been cheated in the quality of his schooling and knew there was no chance for a university education or an education as an artist. Besides, his family was in need of financial support. “It had gradually become clear to me that I must get out of the community if I was to fulfill some measure of my promise and I came to understand that I had three choices open to me. I could stay in the town and rot, ride the rods like thousands of others looking for nonexistent jobs and living from handouts and soup kitchens, or join the navy for a regular salary so there could be money for home. Hopefully I could try to educate myself by seeing what I could of the world and its art. I had sense enough at sixteen to know that I must leave.”

He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy in Esquimalt, January of 1931 at seventeen years old to be a Boy Seaman. It would seem strange that a sensitive prairie boy would enlist in the navy yet it was not unusual for the prairie born to go to sea – open sea and sky not unlike the prairies. On his eighteenth birthday the end of December, he became an Ordinary Seaman. He had begun a sixteen year career with his first ship, the HMCS Vancouver. Barely turned eighteen years old his father died January 9, 1932. My father was at sea just off Acapulco when he received the news. He did not return home. What information I have of his navy years is held in his writings titled “Scouse” which primarily covers his first and early pre-war years of service wherein he learned how to be a man and the ways of the sea and of seamen and of his abilities as an artist.

Yet Seen Too Oft – one wood engraved sample – 1960’s 5”x 4” This designed block print book is about a boy and his crow discovering the seven deadly sins in a small rural town. The boy and crow are easily recognizable.

– exhausting fiction and non-fiction, literature, poetry, and art theories and history and the lives of artists.

One day my father found a young crow, fallen from the nest, and taking him home, cared for him until he was fully grown. “He was a handsome bird named Blackie and became a free flying member of the family.” He would become a part of my father’s lexicon and a persona in his art to be seen in feature in drawings in preparation for an engraved block-print book titled “Yet Seen Too Oft”, Blackie leading an easily recognizable boy through a town rife with the Seven Deadly Sins.

Untitled – sanguine pencil – 1941 6” x 6” This is the first drawing of me.

He married my mother, Grace Bullington, June 6, 1939 and immediately was posted to Halifax for the war years where I was born March of 1941. When my father enlisted, the navy held few vessels with only a small company of men but all part of an ancient fraternity and companionship of those who went to sea.

I await records of service years for exact documentation of the where, what and when of those years for I have so little informa-

Gluttony – graphite drawing – 1960’s 4”x 4” This is the finalized graphite drawing of the image waiting for engraving.

Both samples are bold in their style and image. page 3

tion about him during the war years. I have been told so little about his service years except of those times of fun and frivolity, not unlike many of those who, like him, attempted to forget whatever horrors they had met.

next of kin of those who had drowned; a fearful harbinger of the event yet to be confirmed. Still remembered by my mother – even at 100 years old.

Every time he missed dying he began to believe he was destined for other things and had best get on with his art. He dearly wished he could have been designated a war artist for the navy, nonetheless, he drew and even painted aboard ship – his messmates, daily taskings, ships, convoys, landfalls, ports, local people and scenes, skies and seas – quick sketches and fuller drawings even finished paintings that became talismans of his survival.

My father’s first ship was the destroyer HMCS Vancouver (K240). We know they were through the Panama Canal in 1934 and in London for George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935. He also served on the destroyer HMCS Fraser, the battle cruiser HMS Hood, destroyers HMCS Columbia and HMCS Uganda. He was also shore-based in HMCS Nadan in Esquimalt and HMCS Stadacona in Halifax instructing in Torpedo and Chemical Warfare Schools.

In 1939 at the opening of the war at sea, the Royal Canadian Navy consisted of: 12 ships (4 Skeena class destroyers, 4 Fraser class destroyers, 4 mine sweeper trawlers and 2 training vessels); 3604 officers and men in the RCN and RCNR.2 By 1945 at the end of the war: 775 ships (29 ships of the RCN were lost to enemy action or foundered at sea.); of the 106 522 men and women who served 2204 men had lost their lives at sea with 319 wounded in action. The Canadian population was 10 million. 3 These are statistics but when you put a face on them, the perspective changes –particularly for a sensitive young man who said, “If I had known what was before me, I never would have enlisted”.

In 1940, the HMCS Fraser (H48) with a complement of 145 men was lost on the 25th of June. All but 45 of the ship’s crew were rescued to be reassigned to the HMCS Margrave only to sink with all hands lost four months later October 22, 1940.

Those seamen had been my father’s shipmates – he had drawn some of their portraits to be sent home to their sweethearts and to their mothers.

Gracela – original graphite sketch – Nov. 1946 (Acapulco) 10 ½” x 9 ½”

The battlecruiser HMS Hood, the flagship of the British Navy, old but seaworthy, was sunk by the German battleship, Bismarck, who over the edge of the horizon in the Denmark Strait had fired three salvos from her 15” guns – one too long, one too short, with the third salvo finding the stack of the HMS Hood and the aft munitions hold causing a massive explosion and within minutes was sunk with only 3 survivors and with the loss of 1418 men. This event shook the Royal Navy, Britain, Allied Navies, and the World on 24 May 1941 [I was two months old].

In the instances of the sinking of HMCS Fraser and HMS Hood my father, in both, had been reassigned to other taskings prior to their final departures from port and to their loss. He had also lost shipmates when the destroyer HMCS Skeena (D59), commissioned in Esquimalt June 1931, was sunk October 25, 1944. Also others who had been shipmates were lost on convoy escort in the North Atlantic. And in Halifax, every time a ship went down, a little sheepdog named Lindy would howl at the doors of the

Gracela – guache – Nov. 1946 (Acapulco) 10 ½” x 9 ½” This was painted while my Father was on board the HMCS Uganda.

I know my father was haunted most by the comrades he had lost at sea. When war ended and he was deployed to Esquimalt from Halifax, he left behind a 3’ high plaster sculpture – a memorial to those “gallant torpedomen who gave their lives”; an angel standing protectively above a kneeling sailor. It is there today in

J.A.Foster. Heart of Oak A Pictorial History of the Royal Canadian Navy, Metheun 1985, p. 36 3 Ibid, p. 46 2

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HMCS Stadacona. Those who had survived the war were still its victims and remained so as damaged goods until their own natural deaths. My father left the Navy in 1947 with the rank of Chief Petty Officer. The peacetime navy was not the same one he had known. “Now,” my mother recalls, “he wanted to get as far away from the Navy as possible – which of course, was impossible to do.”

a major project not unlike those of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera of three 5’ x 7’ panels in oil, a work that took much time, planning and execution. Paint was paid for by Sterling, but he failed to honor a contractual handshake with my father. My father’s trust in people’s honesty was betrayed and he was unable to collect for this rather large and time consuming project.

Here was father, a man who had served his country in war to be betrayed by one who had stayed home and made it good. This became another example that would caution his relationships with potential usurers in the future. He would always remember the betrayal, harbour resentment and became increasingly more cynical of hypocrisy and, frankly, more protective of his artistic vision. He was forced to find employment to support his wife and son and went to work as a public servant in the post office.

One of my first and re-occurring remembrances of my father occurred once he became a civilian and had left the sea behind to move to Chilliwack, BC. I was six years old. I was often awakened during the night with his screaming and hollering. I also remember his pacing the floor and his having to have a smoke outside in the midst of wind and rain storms. Change in atmospheric pressure seemed to bother him and night seemed generally to be an uneasy time most of his life. The only explanation I ever received from my mother was that he was dreaming or thinking about the war. Those terrors, today, we now attribute to post traumatic stress (PTSD). His return to civilian life was not an easy nor happy one, for like most surviving servicemen they returned home as changed men.

Mural Photo: The Activities of the Chilliwack Valley – oil – 1947 5’x 7’ This is one of three murals, painted in oil, of Chilliwack’s identifiable locals and locations, industries, and recreational activities with Mt. Cheam and Little Mountain in the background.

I came to know my father as a gentle man, addicted only to his art who saw the world a bit naively – as an innocent – although having been hurt, striving to get past any impediments to his ability to work at his vision of what he had to say and to do in his art. He read voraciously and was always drawing and painting.

Probably the most enlightening moment for me was the experience of the purging of his work before we left Chilliwack for Red Deer in January 1954. In the fall of 1953 he had built a bonfire in the backyard. Pictures: canvasses, sketch books, tempera panels, oils, watercolours, finished works, works in progress, ideas partially developed, etc. all going up in smoke. Not understanding, I asked why; for there were some of those pictures I said I really liked. His response was quite straightforward, “Well, Bud, most of this is me learning my craft, the trials and errors, works in progress. They will not be left as my artistic legacy. It’s mine to do with as I wish.” I understood. A lesson learned and applied by me in later years to my own creative work.

Dulce Et Decorum Est – charcoal – 1945 (Halifax) 14” x 14” “The old Lie: ‘Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori’ – It is sweet and fitting (seemly, right) to die for one’s country.” These are the words of poet Wilfred Owen, written between October 1917 and March 1918. In my father’s response at the war’s end in 1945… “not bloody likely!”

He wanted so desperately now to be an artist who could follow his life long dream. He had much support with commissions for portraiture and family pictures, personal keepsakes; he was hired by the Chilliwack Progress (newspaper) to do a series of drawings of local people. His career was progressing well with a major commission to paint murals of local people and the industries of the Fraser Valley by a Mr. Sterling of the Peaks Café. This was page 5

Both my mother and I were often the subject if not the object of the drawing or the painting. Yes, personalized portraiture intended in some but in others a body gesture or posture to be incorporated into a portrait of someone else. Speaking of subjects - as those moments would allow, my father in the post office, would quickly sketch a nose, ear, eye, hairdo, a design on a sweater, a body angle, clothes, hats, groupings of patrons, etc. which became a source for development as a more complete design element in his picture making.

self-sufficient from her youth and fiercely independent as she still is today at 100 years old.

My mother assisted as spiritual supporter, defender of my dad, working along beside him to assist in all the printmaking by ensuring the print paper was at just the right moisture content in blotters before the paper was placed on the inked blocks to print.

That would be as recorded 1200 prints from 30 wood engraved blocks, 2 wood cut blocks and 12 miniature wood engraved blocks. Yes, my mother sublimated herself to enable his process in whatever medium with which he was working. Quite amazing results really!

My fondest memories of my father contain within them art in some variety. As with his father before him, he also shared with me the means to see the real world with an eye to analysis, principles which I would apply to my craft about picturization, composition, texture, movement, perspective, the control of the eye through geometric direction, contrast and angle of vision (point of view) as a theatre designer, teacher and director.

My education in Red Deer was expanded during my grades 7 to 12 school years by my involvement with the local Community Theatre, The Cothurn Company. Interestingly my adult friends became my parent’s friends and vice versa because we all seemed to share something in common. Teachers, musicians, potters, actors and poets, consumers of classical music, opera, jazz, art and artifacts and literature – all of whom cherished their culture and were willing to share with me and my parents. They all enriched me by opening my eyes to other art forms and all of whom were responsible in no small part for my university, theatre and teaching career of some thirty-eight highly successful years. Most importantly was their support of my father’s artwork.

The picture of the world broadened even further for me when I was fortunate enough to accompany my parents on a sales trip to the Glenbow Foundation. Because of my honest interest in the Indian artifacts – arrow points and pottery on display in the boardroom - I was asked if I wanted a summer job. Thus began three summers as an archaeological field assistant which in turn opened another three summer’s work with the Research Council of Alberta as a field assistant to a Pleistocene geologist. I was ever supported by my parents and blessed I was for their parental enlightenment and for all those who, along my journey, cared for me and for what I was to become as an adult.

After my father left the navy in 1947 until his death on September 6, 1988, some forty years, it appeared to me that my mother’s job and happy labour of love was to aid and abet a man driven by his artistic vision and his desire through his art to articulate the human condition as he saw it. I believe that my mother was the greatest stabilizing force in our family life. She had been strongly

Portraits of my Mother and Father – watercolour – 1985 10 ½” x 6 ¾” This last pair of portraits of my parents was done three years prior to his death in a soft neutral palette for both, his cool and hers warm.

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The artist’s world is a lonely world and so also is the life of any who would accompany that journey. By and large theirs was a happy relationship, mother enjoying the journey. Red Deer was good to them. Banff was a happy interlude in an idyllic highly supportive environment. Many supported and appreciated his work along the way. Please look to the acknowledgement page.

personify the creation of order out of chaos, of exacting meaning from the welter of experience…The wood engraver chooses to believe… [that] with every stroke of the burin the engraver reiterates the divine command ‘Let there be light’ p.106 The quote seems so well to articulate not only my father’s wood engraving but the subject matter, the form or any medium used, but also his over-riding intentions in composition and execution toward the clarity of the image. He would thrill as much to the engraved line as to the pencil marks on a new clean sheet of paper, or to the brush stroke of oil paint on a sized canvas. Without sounding overly pretentious, every finished work, regardless of medium, would have to meet my father’s strict and exacting expectations. If it did not, it would be abandoned and most likely destroyed.

As a personality, as obviously revealed in his art, my father was truly the product of all of the events of his life… his childhood, his navy years, his postal service, his retirement and of every impacting environment, visual memory and also of so many people who were even a casual part of his life’s journey. Nothing had ever gone unnoticed, unobserved or unrecorded, ultimately to be used somewhere in his artistic images.

Because of my father’s strong literary knowledge, he would often attach or source his work on a literary reference, for example: “Yet Seen Too Oft” has reference to Pope, Essay on Man II: “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, as, to be hated, needs but to be seen, yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.” and as in “So Spake the Shade”, an imaginary re-telling by drawings and some text of the banishment part of the Odysseus legend placed in a 1930 context.

My father was a naïve and unsophisticated wayfarer who recorded his observations as he journeyed, who believed that the resulting artistic works would be respected and appreciated for their craftsmanship and artistic images by any who would make the effort to step into the shoes of the artist to see the world through his eyes…and even to work at it if need be…and he would probably add… “and the rest be damned.”

Here was a man who naively but honestly believed in the inherent goodness of men and pitied “the poor bastards of the world” who had been dealt a rotten hand. He was a shy, and a very private man, self-conscious, sensitive, unsophisticated, socially awkward, afraid of embarrassing himself publicly. Yet he was no shrinking wall flower. He was proud of and was highly protective of his art. He would open up to very few – never explaining – letting his art speak for itself. Believe it, he often revealed a wicked sense of humour. He dearly loved his grandchildren and often drew and painted their portraits…and animals on request.

He cherished his deep friendships and willingly engaged in communication with them. He shunned hypocrisy and fawning and did not suffer fools longer than it took to see through them.

James Agrell Smith was a naturally-born artist, completely self-taught in whatever medium he chose to work. He became proficient with pencil, ink, charcoal, chalk, watercolour, guache, oil, egg tempera, wood engraving and wood cuts.

His vision in his art was original, authentic and honest in its portrayals of man, animal and nature. The image was rendered with all its superficial truths and deeper meanings intact. This was a highly perceptive man who was compulsed to create, to analyze, and to interpret what he saw – without prejudice. His intent was always to tell it as it is, without editorializing. My father’s subject matter ranged from the exquisitely delicate and beautiful to the most coarse and horrific grotesque; from the boldest realistic truths to the lyrically mystical.

A quote from Brander a Brandis’, White Line eloquently defines my father and his work: The clarity, the uncompromising precision, the disdain for vagueness and uncertainty of a wood engraving satisfy a certain kind of personality…careful planning and logical development of visual ideas are activities that page 7

My Father’s Legacy Catalogue of Finished Works Awards

1200 Prints from Wood Engravings, Wood Cuts and Miniature Wood Engravings 80 Paintings in Watercolour, Guache, Oil, Egg Tempera

G.A. Reid Memorial Award – Canadian Painters, Etchers and Engravers – 1953

70 Drawings in Charcoal, Chalk, Sanguine, Conte, Sumi Ink (Brush), Pen and Ink

Province of Alberta – Achievement Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts – 1979

160 Drawings in Graphite

Published In Canadian Forum – 1950’s and 1960’s

30 Drawings in Mixed Mediums; e.g., Charcoal and Chalk

Beaver Magazine – 1958

3 Murals 5’ x 7’ Panels in oil

Whetstone Journal – University of Lethbridge – 1973

300+ Unfinished works including sketch books, drawings with notes and working drawings for translation to other mediums.

Alberta Artists’ Image Bank – Alberta Art Foundation – 1973 Best of Alberta – Tom Radford and Harry Savage – 1987

Not included are: •

the finished drawings for a graphic engraved block print book, Yet Seen Too Oft;

•

or the finished drawings as drawings for a book, n Thus Spake the Shade;

•

or all the drawings and paintings of the grandchiln dren;

•

a nd who knows how many other pictures in all mediums that were gifted or commissioned works with no record kept; e.g., Albert Ervin Ohlson – 1944 – Pencil 28” x 25” in Red Deer Library.

Printmaking in Alberta (1945-1985) – Bente Roed Cochran – 1987 White Line: Printmaking in Canada Since 1945 – G. Brander a Brandis – 1990 Aspenland: Local Knowledge and a Sense of Place – CARMN – Red Deer – 1998

Exhibited and Toured To Banff, Brussels, Calgary, Dundas, Edmonton, Halifax, Hamilton, Japan, London(Britain), Montreal, New York, Paris, Portland, Red Deer, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria

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The Pictures You must forgive me for focusing on my father’s drawings which I believe to be the true mark of the man as an artist. The selection of paintings I have included is especially meaningful to me as are the wood engravings included with this remembrance. All are historical reference to the artist’s journey, even including Mary-Beth’s selections, a scant sampling of the body of work.

I also have been interested in the process of the development of his ideas as he moves from medium to medium alike; included below the 1945 portrait of me first done in pastels as a working drawing for his earliest surviving egg tempera.

He had done a portrait of me, also in egg tempera, in 1941 but it was burned in a farm house fire. Both pictures easily stand alone as works, not dependent on the one as a cartoon for the other, not unlike the three studies in different mediums and size of “Fencepost” included in the show.

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Navy

Freighter – watercolour – 1935 7” x 11” “mine the scream of the cloudy gull and the deep-lung’d freighters’ wail”

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Buoy Scraper – pen and ink – 1946 8”x 10” I thought it appropriate to include navy taskings by father’s shipmates. (drawn/painted on HMCS Uganda)

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Halifax

Sisters in the Rain – wet water colour – 1944 16” x 15” I include this picture because it is so stylistically different. Yet through a rain streaked window it is probably still his realistic style.

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Halifax by Moonlight – guache – 1944 18” x 15” A very pastoral scene in the midst of war out a window.

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Family

Anne Furgason (1863-1956) – pen and ink drawing – 1947 11”x 9” This drawing of my mother’s grandmother at 82 years was in preparation for a drybrush watercolour and ultimately finished as an egg tempera of the subject.

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Anne Furgason (1863-1956) – egg tempera – 1947 11”x 9”

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Portrait of Artist’s Wife – graphite – 1947 11.75” x 9” Original graphite drawing for egg tempera shown in exhibit.

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Roy Bullington (1878-1971) - charcoal on purple toned paper – 1948 8”x 6” This is a very true to life portrait of my mother’s father at 70.

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Oils

Ken – oil – 1952 10”x 8” An oil painting of me at eleven years old

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My Three Angels – oil – 1958 20”x 24” Cothurn Company was a blast for six years for me. They were responsible for my support, to this day, of community theatre – so many great friends, so much positive influence. My father had often drawn me in character.

Such a loving tribute and memory in paint. Joseph Rutten, the top ‘angel’, taught me everything he knew about theatre.

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Prints

Clyde Team – wood engraving – 1951 9”x 11” This seldom seen work, his second horse portraiture, is a study of harness and work horses groomed for show, solid, massive, and muscular horse flesh.

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Draped Head – wood engraving – 1954 3½” x 4½” This is an interesting print because it is the shape of a holly tree trunk cut from a neighour’s tree that was being removed. Endgrain holly is very hard. The surface of the block was finished and dressed to a glass-like smoothness by my father. The image was designed to fit the shape of the block. The engraved print, because the block was not type high, needed to be hand burnished. Wetted Mulberry print paper, imported from Japan, being a very tough paper was the paper of choice. The same process was used for the “Man in a Fur Hat” 1954. The burnisher was a large soup spoon with a padded handle made to fit the hand.

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The Goose Hunter – wood engraving – 1957 8”x 6” This would become the subject also for a large oil painting of Pat Smith. Well known as the heart of Red Deer Post Office, Pat happily posed for this work. He and my father were very good friends. page 22

Child and Blackbird – wood engraving – 1958 6”x 8” The source of derelict farm implements from the Bullington farm became iconic images of abandonment and of a fortitude to stand against the elements. “Child and Blackbird” is an image that screams of suffocating isolation and human loneliness.

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Snowbound Binder – wood engraving – 1968 8”x 6” This work contains within it the dual images of a binder buried in snowdrifts and a sailing ship buffeted by consuming waves at sea, a powerful image with naught but the wreck as the subject matter.

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Graphite

Elise Olga Smith (1895-1964) – graphite – 1964 12”x 9” My Dad’s mother. A fine drawing.

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Annette – graphite – 1968 22”x 15” Wow! What care and detail!

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Marty Oordt – Poet – graphite – 1973 12”x 9” This was either prep for a painting or wood engraving. He did finish a full length charcoal. See Marty’s accompanying poetry with “Meadowlark” in the exhibit. page 27

These are four lovely graphite drawings delicate in line and contours of four little grand-kids.

Trish – graphite – 1983 12”x 9”

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Jessica – graphite – 1983 12”x 9”

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Jennifer – graphite – 1983 12”x 9”

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Paul – graphite – 1983 12”x 9”

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Thus Spake The Shade – book of graphite drawings – 1972-74 (Banff ) book size 17”x 11” A sailor profanes the gods and in punishment he is banished from the sea, cursed, to be driven inland to the place where no one knows what he carries on his shoulder – an oar.

This was an odyssey-like vehicle for my father to record time, place, people, and events in a 1930’s context as the sailor fulfills the curse traveling from the west coast to Erskine, Alberta.

The initial two images I have chosen reflect the parallel between sea- sky- prairie, 9”x 9”;

Thus Spake The Shade: Teiresias Sequence 14 – graphite – 1974 9”x 9”

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Thus Spake The Shade: Teiresias Sequence 23 – graphite – 1974 9”x 9”

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the next three again in contrast, 15”x 9”;

Thus Spake The Shade: Sea Sequence 5 – graphite – 1972 15”x 9” page 34

Thus Spake The Shade: Journey Sequence 42 – graphite – 1973 15”x 9” page 35

Thus Spake The Shade: Prologue 1 – graphite – 1972 15”x 9” page 36

The banished seaman [check the likeness], who tells his story to the artist who records it. 12”x 9”.

Thus Spake The Shade: Prologue 2 – graphite – 1972 12”x 9”

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Two examples of the journey sequence, magpie on barbed wire – a recurring theme. 12”x 9”;

Thus Spake The Shade: Journey Sequence 50 – graphite – 1973 12”x 9”

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and the final sampling that you will have seen in another context (“Artist at Work” in the exhibit); and the child image is also reflective of another motif, joyless and alone in a field of thistles with an abandoned cast off … and the carousel horse is unable to stand. 15”x 9”.

Thus Spake The Shade: Journey Sequence 52 – graphite – 1974 15”x 9” page 39

Acknowledgements Bob Steele – British Columbia – looms large as a fellow printmaker, supporter, mutual friends who for many years exchanged letters about art and ideas and exchanged their art.

First, I must thank the many who supported the career of my father as an artist over the duration of his life; those who respected his art and were enthusiastic and supportive of his ideas, personal vision and artistry.

George Weber – an Edmonton serigraph artist who collaborated with my father and the CPE in establishing a Western Canadian foothold with juried shows coming from the west to Ontario exhibits – a long time friend and colleague.

Lorna Johnson – Executive Director of the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery who initiated this long overdue exhibition and who spurred a recalcitrant son to dare to finally open the boxes and boxes… to let the world see those artistic treasures within. What a lovely celebratory idea to share Red Deer’s 100 years with that of my father. This family is deeply touched and appreciative.

The Art Gallery of Alberta, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery, Red Deer College, University of Lethbridge, University of Calgary Collection, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hart House, CPE Archives, Northwest Printmakers Archive hold his works in their permanent collections.

Staff and Colleagues of MAG: Valerie Miller – Collections Coordinator who was my liaison, Kim Verrier – Coordinator of Exhibitions and Registration, and Harley Hay – Videographer

Yvonne Johnson and Morris and Hazel Flewelling stand out as major collectors of my father’s work both the wood engravings and earlier works in other mediums not only as collectors but as cheerleaders who wished to access the artist in his journey and would become close friends in the process. Tom Chapman has nearly all his wood engravings

Mary-Beth Laviolette – Curator for making some sense out of a body of art work, most difficult to access and to select. No easy job to identify the pictures that could be markers of my father’s career. Her curatorial moxie, her care, her respect for his art and artistry, her eloquence and intelligence in her analysis of the works for this exhibition are much appreciated.

Other Red Deer locals who were ever supportive of my dad: Alice Hogan, Wyn Alford, Alan Gibb, Trudi Fellner, Doug and Audrey Andrews, Pat and Edna Smith, Joseph Rutten, Charlie Glebe, and the Kerry Wood family.

Rochelle Ball – Curatorial Administrator of the Art Gallery of Alberta for initiating a neophyte into the complexities of Copyright Law and of Conditions to be met in the handling of an art estate Thank-you

And the Out of Towners: Roger Boulet – ex-curator of the Edmonton Art Gallery – very supportive of my father

The Alberta Cultural Development Branch and the Alberta Art Foundation – particularly Les Graf, a real cheerleader – who purchased many of his works for their collection and for making available my dad’s work to a larger Alberta audience and for international tours.

Dave Nance – probably the closest I will ever come to having a brother, was close to both my mother and father, and holds most of his prints and some major large scale drawings and paintings.

The Glenbow Foundation who own many of his works including the wood engraving block of “Caribou Cowboy”, and have featured them often in exhibits and toured his works…

Marty Oordt – poet, whose words accompany the image of the wood engraved “Meadowlark” and who shared the joy of the prairie and the Alberta sky.

Catherine Whyte of the Whyte Gallery (Archives of the Canadian Rockies) who mounted several one man shows of his work and herself as a great patron allowed, for the first time in his life, a studio space and reasonable cost for accommodation for my father to work – with much gratitude and affection. Her nephew, poet Jon Whyte, shared many artistic/philosophical discussions with my dad.

Harry Savage, Bill Latta and one not to be forgotten, Connie Barber, who gave my father his first commission when he returned to civilian life to be an artist – as I recall portraits of her two daughters.

Bente Roed Cochran – an apology for a father who in sickness was turning his back on all intrusions – you received nothing from him to support your efforts on his behalf.

Canadiana Gallery – most supportive, sold many of his prints.

Thank-you to my family, my wife, Heather, our kids, Trish, Jessica, Jennifer, Paul, our grandkids and, of course, Great Grandma Grace for their support of and contributions to this endeavour, and especially to Trish for the photography of the pictures and the layout. Good job by Green Darner Communications.

Peter Savage and wife Shirley – artist and collector who kindly assisted my mother with my father’s bio for G. Brander a Brandis’ curated The White Line: Wood Engraving in Canada Since 1945 Exhibition, Tour, and Publication – always supportive.

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I am sure there are others whom I have not intentionally omitted who were staunch supporters, purchasers or commissioned work for gifts or for themselves… who aided and abetted the growth of my father and who have his art gracing their walls.

With Many Thanks.

I hope that you will look to Mary-Beth Laviolette’s text and selected picture images on the internet as well as her curatorial selections for the live exhibit. I have tried not to overlap too much and I trust that the images accompanying her article will act as the container for my selections.

Thanks.

Enjoy the Exhibit!

Wayfarer Press Copyrighted Image Copyrighted Name of Press This Remembrance is Dedicated to my father’s legacy: his child; grandchildren and greatgrandchildren—Trish Agrell-Smith and her husband Troy Lissoway, their children Callum and Gemma; Jessica Agrell-Smith and her husband Mundeep Chana, their children Keiran, Lyra and Raman; Jennifer Agrell-Smith; and Paul Agrell-Smith—who are the inheritors of his gifts.

Note: Copyright is registered as unpublished literary and artistic work in “Remembrance” to the estate of James Agrell Smith and his son, executor, Ken Agrell-Smith.

Copyright 2013AGR Email: agrell1@shaw.ca page 41