Generally speaking, Joe Fafard isn't hard to find. Ask friends or family for the artist's whereabouts and the answer is almost invariably “in his studio.”
The 65-year-old Saskatchewan native, famous in large part for his extensive series of sculpted cows, is nothing if not prolific. His long-time friend, biographer and curator Terrence Heath said he chose the 80 pieces of Fafard's art currently on display at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., from the two to three thousand he suspects exist, largely in private collections.
The exhibition, a retrospective of Fafard's 40-plus-year career, is making its third stop in a six-city tour after appearing in the halls of its joint creators, the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina and Ottawa's National Gallery of Canada. Heath said the exhibition seemed a natural companion to his biography of Fafard, titled Joe Fafard, a project he began in 1987 but only completed last year.
Fafard's enormous body of work comes both from an artistic drive to create and from the blue-collar work ethic of Saskatchewan's farmlands. Indeed, Fafard has never strayed far from his birthplace of Ste. Marthe, Sask., and now lives on an acreage near Lumsden, 35 kilometres northwest of Regina.
Saskatchewan artist Joe Fafard with his artwork at McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont. (Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail)
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In the mid-eighties, his growing love of bronze was hampered by the lack of a good foundry in the area (his first large bronze cows, created for TD Bank, had to be cast in Vancouver). Rather than move, he bought four adjacent lots in Pense (west of Regina) and started his own foundry. The seven-person staff he hired to operate it is still intact 23 years later.
“It's an extension of my capacities to have this kind of arm, this team of really good workers and technicians who can solve my problems when I have them,” he said.
But to suggest Fafard is all work and no play would be a gross misrepresentation. He is soft-spoken and thoughtful, and a mischievous chuckle frequently breaks through when he describes the more cheeky aspects of his work.
At one end of the McMichael gallery, in a room housing statues of former prime ministers John Diefenbaker and Pierre Trudeau, is a bronze portrait of Jean Chrétien commissioned by the “ petit gars de Shawinigan's” son-in-law. Fafard said he tried to portray Chrétien as a “challenger,” holding a glove in one hand as though preparing to initiate a duel, his other hand plunged in a coat pocket as a reminder that Chrétien rarely revealed his whole agenda.
“It's not a question of trying to be mischievous or funny, it's just that's the way things are. It's necessary,” he said.
Also striking is the maturation of Fafard's work as he branched out from clay figures to ceramics, bronze and even laser-cut steel. One sculpture entitled Antoinette, a skeletal X-ray of a cow cast in bronze that Heath describes as a “drawing in space,” stands in stark contrast to the meticulous clay figures of neighbours, colleagues and Saskatchewan's Métis peoples characteristic of his earlier career.
“I think of it as a kind of a vocabulary. You start with a vocabulary as a child and build it up and build it up, and you eventually come to a more complete vocabulary, but you don't abandon the words you learned as a child,” he said.
And with Fafard's increasing mastery of such materials came an ever more piercing study of the individual as a unique entity.
Both Heath and Fafard himself cite a portrait Fafard sculpted of his father shortly after his death in 1972 as a turning point in his career. Until then his sculptures had a prominent element of caricature, and he credits his melancholic contemplation of his father's character with making him more attentive and sympathetic to the individual, whether human or animal.
“I felt I really needed to try to somehow revive him, to try to bring his presence back into my life and the life of the family, so I did that portrait maybe a month after he died. It also taught me something, that there were greater possibilities for portraiture than I had given it at that point,” he said.
Fafard explained that he soon cast his glance farther afield, turning his focus to artists with whom he felt a particular kinship, such as Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Auguste Renoir, and attempting to mimic and evoke their tendencies with his own technique. Fafard is particularly fond of a nearly two-dimensional bust of Cézanne he said pays tribute to the way the French painter flattened his landscapes.
But Fafard will also always be known as “the cow man,” a label he wears comfortably. Cows are the undeniable hallmark of Fafard's collection, and were partially responsible for his shift to bronze as his projects became too large to be sculpted in clay. He speaks fondly of their movement, their individuality and their close connection with humans for thousands of years.
“I always used [cows] as a kind of plastic material that could speak of ideas, that I could explore aspects in art through this image that is the cow. For instance, a musician that has a violin. He constantly uses the violin and brings the sounds out from it. Well, maybe the cow is a bit like an instrument to bring out certain things,” he said.
Fafard said he is most pleased with the exhibition because it offers visitors an opportunity to judge his work on its own merit, outside of the hierarchy of Canadian art. But visitors would be wise to reserve any final judgment on his career as he laughs off any suggestion that the exhibition and Heath's biography are signs that he plans to spend less time in his studio.
“For me, that's not an end. It's sort of, like, mid-career.”
The Joe Fafard exhibition continues at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., until Sept. 14 (905-893-1121 or 1-888-213-1121).
