A detail from Towards London No. 1 by Jack Chambers.
Jack Chambers: It's an apt name, don't you think, for this artist? The surname sounds weighty, with a whiff of the biblical about it (John 14:2: "In my Father's house are many mansions"). There are intimations of hidden depths and secret knowledge, of strategic retreats into contemplation and meditation, then restless exploration of one sanctum sanctorum after the other.
All these associations are palpable at Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario, which this weekend opens an ambitious survey of the highly variegated art and history of Chambers, who died, too soon, in 1978, age 47. Light, Spirit, Time, Place and Life marks a comeback of sorts for the Ontarian sometimes called "the Canadian Vermeer," whose last comprehensive exhibition was almost a quarter-century ago.
"Chambers's heyday was in the late 1960s and 1970s ... when Canadian nationalism was ascendant," noted Toronto freelance critic/curator Sarah Milroy in an interview this week. Milroy, with art historian/ former AGO chief curator Dennis Reid, brought the exhibition to fruition. Admittedly, Chambers's greatest fame was and continues to be in Ontario, not least because Chambers was a potent painter of place and for him, London, Ont., city of his birth (and death), was the place of places.
Chambers's unabashed regionalism "is an issue" in appreciating the artist, said Reid, a friend of Chambers since 1966. But then Chagall was a regionalist, too, he argued, who "in painting out of the particularity" of the peasants and onion domes of his native Vitebsk, "managed to strike a chord" among millions. Certainly in Chambers's heyday, people in Edmonton and Truro, N.S., recognized iconic paintings such as 401 Towards London No. 1 and Sunday Morning No. 2. But 40 years ago, Chambers also had what Milroy calls "resonance." "He was much published [in art magazines] He was considered the artist's artist. He'd had a one-man show in Manhattan [in 1965]" Stan Brakhage, the legendary American experimental cinéaste, proclaimed Chambers' short film, R34, from 1967, "the greatest film on the creative process I've yet seen." A 1970 painting Victoria Hospital sold for $35,000, then the most ever paid for a work by a living Canadian artist.
These accomplishments, among others, have "assured Chambers's place in the art history of Canada," according to University of Toronto Chambers expert Mark Cheetham. But "what subsequently happened to the reputation," said Milroy, "is that it kind of dissipated like the mist. Now what we're trying do is pull it together and consolidate."
The AGO is not alone in celebrating Chambers's work right now. Earlier this year, London, Ont.'s Museum London mounted an exhibition, co-curated by Cheetham, of his 1966-67 "silver paintings" (so-called because of his use of aluminum paint) and five of the seven 16-mm "personal" films he shot 1965-70, R34 among them . The show is now at the McMichael art gallery near Toronto. In addition, next fall Tom Smart, the London-born former director of the McMichael, is publishing his book on Red and Green, the daunting potpourri of quotations, writing and esoterica Chambers started after being diagnosed with leukemia in 1969.
Chambers was mystical – a seer (someone devoted to what Milroy calls "relentless looking") and, occasionally, a man of visions. Raised a Baptist, he became a Catholic during a lengthy apprenticeship in classical art in Spain, only to lapse upon returning to London in 1961 to tend to his dying mother. ("He brought back a Spanish way of seeing," notes Smart, "painting southern Ontario as if it was outside Madrid.") Two years after his leukemia diagnosis, Chambers was back in the fold – his return prompted, in part, by a vision he'd had in a hospital room of "a round glow of light that grew instantly to the size of a volleyball."
Told he'd be lucky to live even a year, Chambers hung on for nine. He pored over books with titles like The Energy Field in Man and Nature and The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist, all the while pursuing sundry miracle cures, even travelling to India where he fell under the sway of the guru Sathya Sai Baba.
"The search went on" in the art, too, said Reid. The work – mostly drawings in graphite and/or coloured chalk on paper, or watercolours – came with less frequency, of course, and in smaller formats, a notable exception being the radiant Diego Reading, a varnished oil on wood. Largely of things close at hand (a spoon in a glass of water, flowers, tree branches), they verge on the evanescent but are all the more intense for that. "The thing for Jack was capturing the moment because in contemplating where you are ... the visual point of view, he experienced these fractions of time that are profound," Reid remarked. Even as death approached, "he was still on the verge of something new, at every turn."
Jack Chambers: Light, Spirit, Time, Place and Life is at the Art Gallery of Ontario through May 13. Jack Chambers: The Light from the Darkness/Silver Paintings and Film Work is at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., through Jan. 15.