As an artist, Ken Danby's work was loved more by the people than it was revered by the critics. Although his works were bought by museums, he found his best, most rewarding and lasting appeal among private collectors and purveyors of popular culture. A superb draftsman and a prodigious and prolific artist of his own time, he was a realistic painter who reflected quotidian events, natural landscapes and athletic prowess to mass audiences, rather than an abstract expressionist who created troubling, edgy canvasses for an intellectual elite.
"His way of doing things was not in the wind, and that immediately interested me," said Walter Moos of Gallery Moos, the first major Canadian dealer to take Mr. Danby on in the early 1960s. "I think he will finally get the appreciation in this country which it merits - I'm talking from museum officialdom. His artistic legacy is immense."
Kenneth Edison Danby, who was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., the year after the Second World War ended, was the younger son of M. G. Edison Danby, an assessment commissioner, and his wife Gertrude (Buckley). At first it seemed that his older brother Marvin was the artistic one; Ken certainly always credited him with inspiring his own early attempts.
Ken attended Cody Public School, where he became known as the school artist. By the time he was in Grade 6, he had won first prize in the school hobby show, was regularly creating murals for special events and was talking about a career as an artist. He graduated to Sault Technical and Commercial High School and then the Sault Collegiate Institute, where he won a high-school poster contest when he was 16. Art was a major part of his life, but not the only one - he joined the air cadets and spent much of his free time hiking and canoeing.
At 18, he enrolled in the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, where one of his teachers was Group of Seven member J. E. H. Macdonald. Other students called him Vincent because of his goatee and the fact that he was a loner who seemed to be obsessive about drawing and painting. "I was intense and almost fanatical about drawing and did hundreds of studies, mostly in pen, during my first year," he told his biographer, art critic Paul Duval.
Mr. Danby was at odds with OCAD, mostly because he was a realist painter and the school was interested in design and experimentation. Abstract expressionism, which had become wildly popular in the United States after the Second World War, and the colour field and pop art styles that it spawned, were about as artistically distanced from his preferred precise figurative works as Vancouver is from Toronto. Frustrated and disenchanted, he quit art school in 1960 after completing his second year and went home for the summer to work as a set designer at a local television studio. He returned to Toronto in the fall and immersed himself in the coffee-house culture of Toronto's Yorkville district, while taking on a succession of stop-gap jobs: painting sets for CFTO television studios in Kleinburg; setting up window displays for D'Allaird's, a chain of women's clothing stores; and working as art director for the Mariposa Folk Festival, designing all its posters, advertisements and brochures.
He landed a full-time job doing layout and illustrations for the now defunct Toronto Telegram in 1961. About the same time, he had his first solo exhibition of 13 abstract and non-objective paintings at the Pollock Gallery in Toronto. The combination of the job, the gallery show and a visit to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo - where he saw an exhibition of the work of U.S. realist painter Andrew Wyeth - gave him enough confidence to turn away from abstraction and follow his original instincts, concentrating on representational painting in a realist mode.
The next spring, he quit the Telegram to turn freelance. Still struggling six months later, he consulted art dealer Walter Moos, who agreed to become his dealer, an arrangement that lasted for the next three decades. The following year, Mr. Moos showed him as part of a three-man exhibit at Gallery Moos. By now Mr. Danby had found his palette and his medium. Using his black cat Kimbo as a model, he made a painting with a cloudless blue sky executed in egg tempera, a medium he would use many times and in many of his most successful paintings. The painting, Fur and Bricks, won the Jessie Dow Prize at the Spring Exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
After a summer painting on Manitoulin Island, Mr. Danby had a one-man show at Gallery Moos and proved his commercial appeal when the work sold out on opening night. Prolific and industrious, he held an annual show at Gallery Moos for many years. Mostly, he continued to paint nature scenes in egg tempura, although he accepted a commission to create a portrait of Pierre Trudeau for a Time magazine cover in 1968 and began experimenting with silk-screening to produce multicoloured prints and serigraphs. He began showing and selling them in the early 1970s in Canada, Germany and the United States.
In 1972, Mr. Danby created what many consider the iconic hockey painting. At the Crease shows a masked goalie crouched in the net, left hand outstretched, right hand clutching his stick. The anonymous player represents every goalie who has ever waited for a shot to test his or her mettle, but it also captures the tension of that moment when the arena goes silent and fans stop breathing as all become one with the solitary figure down on the ice. The painting is owned by a private Toronto collector.
At the Crease has such resonance that it has been widely reproduced in books and magazines. Indeed, Mr. Danby's early artistic hero, Mr. Wyeth, saw the image in print some years after it was first exhibited at Gallery Moos and he wrote the artist a letter saying, "I think your painting, At the Crease, a terrifying and exciting picture." Some fans have insisted that the goalie is modelled on Ken Dryden, the former Montreal Canadiens netminder, but Mr. Danby always refused to say, believing that the player should be whomever the viewer wishes him to be. As an indication of the painting's significance in popular culture, Mr. Danby put the image on a hockey mask as a fundraiser for spinal cord research and it raised $15,100 (U.S.) at a charity auction on NHL.com in November, 2006.
Although Mr. Danby continued to use his trademark egg tempera, he never stopped working with other media. He designed a set of Olympic coins, he painted a series of Olympic athletes in watercolour, he made portraits and prints and he also turned to oil when he began to paint large canvases in his final decade. He received many honours, including the Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada.
Sunday, Mr. Danby, his wife, Gillian, and some friends arrived in Algonquin Park for a three-day canoe trip on North Tea Lake. Mr. Danby was hoping to collect images of fall colours for a planned series of paintings when he suffered an apparent fatal heart attack and collapsed. After his party summoned help, an air ambulance arrived and lowered two paramedics to the lake before airlifting him to North Bay General Hospital.
It is tempting to imagine ironies both cruel and poetic in the death of Mr. Danby, the realist, while canoeing in the same wilderness (although at a different lake) where expressionist landscape painter Tom Thomson drowned 90 years ago. The coincidences and the metaphors may not bear serious scrutiny - they interpreted and represented nature in different ways - but both men loved the wilderness and were exploring its richness when they died suddenly and before their time, causing great shock and grief to their families, friends and admirers.
KEN DANBY
Kenneth Edison Danby was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., on March 6, 1940. He died in Algonquin Park on Sept. 23, 2007, probably of a heart attack. He was 67. He leaves his second wife Gillian, his three sons and his extended family. Funeral arrangements are not yet complete.