David Bolduc is seen in 1977 with one of his works.James Lewcun/The Globe and Mail
What does it say about a man if more than one person, perhaps several, claim to have been his best friend in life? That seems to have been the case with artist David Bolduc, who died on April 8 at the age of 65, from brain cancer.
"I considered myself his best friend," says Alex Cameron - like Bolduc, one of Canada's foremost abstract painters.
"Everyone who knew him felt that way. David was like that. He was a very generous man, generous with his time."
They met in the early sixties, travelled frequently together, backpacking and painting in Canada and abroad, and worked out three times a week in the same midtown Toronto gym, Oliphant's Academy of Physical Culture.
For writer Michael Ondaatje, Bolduc was deeper and more learned than an infinite series of conversations would reveal.
"David was an essential friend," he said. "He was many-faceted. He was one of the best-read people I know, and so articulate. But you always felt there were many, many tributaries feeding into him."
Their relationship also had a strong professional dimension. Bolduc illustrated several Ondaatje projects, including Handwriting, a volume of poetry, drawings for Brick Magazine, when it was run by Ondaatje and his wife, Linda Spalding, and most recently, a suite of watercolour drawings for The Story, a project on behalf of the World Literacy Fund. He also provided drawings for Roy Kiyooka's Pear Tree Poems, and for poetry collections by Wayne Clifford, Victor Coleman and David Rosenberg.
When he was assembling Ink Lake, an anthology of his short stories, Ondaatje brought publisher Louise Dennys to Bolduc's studio. They intended to hire him to illustrate the cover.
He was happy to comply, but when he heard their vision, recommended another artist, K.M. Graham. "You should see her stuff," he said.
"How many artists would do that?" asks Ondaatje. "But that was typical of David. He was ambitious for himself, within himself, for his work, but not on the broader scale. He went the way he wanted to go."
Friend and gallery owner Jane Corkin echoes those sentiments. "There's no doubt that David was really a centrifugal force to the Toronto painters of his time," she says. "But he never cared much about the marketing of art. It was only about life and experience and travel - just to sit on a precipice or some beach in China and make drawings and sell them to tourists. It was about living the life. His imagination was really grand, and he was his own man from start to finish."
Writer and critic Gary Michael Dault also considered Bolduc his best friend. For the last several years, they met regularly for coffee at an Italian café on College Street and spent hours discussing books, movies and ideas.
"I never left without a list of books to read or films to see," Dault says. "He had one of the best-stocked minds I've ever encountered, enormously elastic. He saw tons of movies and read encyclopedically."
During his life, Bolduc occupied space in the most-respected ateliers of abstractionism.
Born on Feb. 10, 1945, and raised and educated in Toronto, he spent only one year at the Ontario College of Art (1962-63), then went to Montreal to study with Jean Goguen at the Museum of Fine Arts School (1964-65). His work was given a solo exhibition at the city's Elysee Theatre and included in a group showing at Galerie Soixante.
To earn money, Bolduc worked part time in a plastics factory, often crafting art from scrap pieces of polyethylene.
In 1966, he returned to Toronto and began working in the Royal Ontario Museum's conservation department - possibly his first and last full-time job. He mounted another solo show at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery in 1967, the start of a long but not always genial relationship. Indeed, several years later, after another solo exhibition, Lamanna decided to keep most of Bolduc's unsold paintings. Naturally, he asked for them back.
The owner refused - apparently not the first artist to be so exploited. Bolduc hired a lawyer to sue for their return, but there are conflicting accounts on whether the suit succeeded.
After that, he exhibited at the David Mirvish Gallery and, when it closed in 1977, with Alkis Klonaridis, who opened his own gallery after working for Mirvish. Later, he was affiliated for 27 years with Calgary's Paul Kuhn Gallery.
Coach House Press publisher Stan Bevington thinks he might have helped inspire Bolduc's legendary travel bug.
Their friendship also dated to the early 1960s, when both enrolled at the Ontario Art College. After their first year, they decided to see Canada - by hopping freight trains. "I think it was his first trip outside of Ontario," Bevington says.
For ever after, Bolduc hungered for travel; a 1968 Canada Council grant underwrote his first foreign expedition - across Europe to Turkey, overland to Nepal, returning home via Uzbekistan and Moscow.
He was gone eight months.
After that, there was rarely a year in which he did not pack his watercolours and set off for exotic places for months at a time - India (at least 15 times), Turkey, Mexico, North Africa, China, the Himalayas, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Paris, Spain, Portugal. He often sent postcards to friends, typically a brief line or two of text and a sketch of something he'd seen. For several years in the 1990s, Bolduc lived and worked in Paris and Morocco.
"My metaphor for David is 'the traveller,' " says Dennis Reid, another old friend and now director of collections and research at the Art Gallery of Ontario. "He was always on the move."
After he returned to Canada, Bolduc and Alex Cameron made regular treks to the Rockies and the Newfoundland forests. On many occasions, they bartered their art for helicopter access to remote places, spending their days painting, hiking, trout fishing, reading and sitting in the sun.
"David liked to joke that it sure beat working," says Cameron. But in fact, he worked prodigiously. Between 1968 and 2008, there was only one year - 1994 - in which new work was not featured in a solo or group exhibit.
Bolduc and his first wife, Candace, a childhood sweetheart, had three children, two boys and a girl, who for a time accompanied them on trips abroad. Then, one year in Portugal, Candace suddenly announced that she was leaving him, for another man. He returned home, alone, although the children eventually came back to live with him in Toronto.
"That killed him," says Corkin.
But he seldom talked about it. Cameron once dared to inquire about the breakup. Bolduc said simply, "She told me she didn't love me any more."
For Jeffrey Spalding, painter and executive director of the Cahén Archives in Halifax, Bolduc "was our leading maker of poetic, lyrical colour abstract paintings, inheriting the mantle of modernism from the likes of Jack Bush and Gershon Iskowitz. His works paid homage to his admiration for an inclusive array of places and tradition ... drawing upon our vibrant collective world artistic heritage: Persian miniatures, Oriental rugs, African art, Asian calligraphy and the splendors of the inventive progressive art of the modern age."
For several decades, much of Bolduc's work involved iterations on what Spalding calls "exotic or eccentric modernism ... his unique signature approach to central imagery abstraction ... a strong figure-ground relationship of a hovering main motif articulated in bold impasto colours squeezed and drawn directly from the tube atop a stained background."
Bolduc once told Spalding that for him "the vertical member - a figure, a tree, a stamen, a column, a mast, a pylon, a stele, a stack of colours, a line of organizational force, an armature upon which the rest of the painting was wound - began as the hands of a watch, both of them pointing straight upward to midnight."
In a 1991 interview, Bolduc acknowledged his repeated use of the motif, calling it "a formal problem.
"There's no way around it," he said. "It's like having a vocabulary of instead of 400 million words, of having about 30. Some of them are very redolent, they have great meaning, some have little meaning.
"You can't really make a narrative, but you make a haiku, a poem, a statement, a joke. Some of these words have almost limitless interpretation. Putting two of them together gives you the beginnings of a thought that the painting can somehow describe.
"It's limited, it's finite. … It's a condition I accept."
While some have said Bolduc was locked into a certain style, others dispute this.
It's true that he used the central image a lot, says Corkin. "But I own many watercolours and drawings of his that have nothing to do with central images. … He travelled between one kind of work and another and could paint light or dark. David just pulled it off. He always pulled it off."
As they had for the past several years, Bolduc and his second wife, Blaise, also an artist, were spending the summer of 2009 near Pouch Cove on Newfoundland's Avalon peninsula. One afternoon, driving back from St. John's, a policewoman pulled Bolduc over; his car had been weaving down the highway. He hadn't been drinking. On the spot, the officer suggested he might have a brain tumour and drove him to the hospital, commandeering a wheelchair so he'd been seen faster in the emergency ward.
A CAT scan quickly verified her hunch; within days, Bolduc underwent surgery.
The results weren't encouraging. The malignancy was one of the more aggressive kinds.
They gave him a year at best.
But Bolduc lived with a boundless optimism. Despite chemo and radiation, he plunged back into his work. In no time at all, he had produced an astonishing 40 canvases, 15 or so of which were ultimately shown in exhibition at Toronto's Christopher Cutts Gallery in March.
For Dault, the collection constituted the most impressive work of Bolduc's career, all the more striking given the circumstances under which it was created. "Breakthroughs in art are miraculous, and for the most part inexplicable," he said, reviewing that final one-man show - one of dozens he was accorded. "They are therefore easier to describe than to account for."
But the new exhibition, he added, gave "bracing evidence of just such a breakthrough." He'd always been enormously productive, but Dault feels at some level Bolduc must have been driven by intimations of his own mortality.
David Mirvish, one of the most astute observers of the contemporary art world, predicts that Bolduc will eventually gain the sort of respect now accorded to David Milne, widely considered among Canada's finest artists.
Jeffrey Spalding concurs, saying Bolduc will "take his place among a group of international innovators, including British painter Alan Davie, and the American school of modernist formalists, notably Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella and Helen Frankenthaler."
History will take care of the art. For his other many best friends, it's the man himself who will be missed. "I think what everyone will remember about David is his wonderful laughter," says Corkin.
"Physically, he was a smallish man, but his laughter filled a room in a gigantic way, exuding his fundamental optimism and joy."
In a posthumous tribute, several museums announced plans to exhibit his work, among them the National Gallery of Canada, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Appleton Museum of Art (Florida), Musée d'art de Jolliette, Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gal- lery, Canadian Centre for Contemporary Art, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kelowna Art Gallery, the MacLaren Art Centre and the Paul Kuhn Gallery.
Bolduc leaves his wife, Blaise, and children Ethan, Chris and Alexandra.