A Lifelong Connection

I work in the woodshop at the AGO, building crates for the safe transport of artworks going out on loan. This full-time position, as assistant packing and crating technician to senior tech Julie Seddon, marks a shift from 25 years of itinerant work as a preparator/art installer at the AGO and other galleries around Toronto.

I entered this stream of gallery work some years after graduating from the Experimental Art Department at OCA (what became OCADU) in 1988. The four-year OCA diploma program followed two years of visual art/humanities at York U and U of T. My interest in artmaking and capital-A Art had roots in early childhood. I spent a lot of time buried in a sketch pad. In my mother's family, there were two commercial artists. My father was passionate about classic and modern art, as well as literature and classical music ̶ he was keen that all of his six children be artists of some kind.

Growing up in Toronto, the AGO was a part of my life from early on. I took at least one art class, painting, at the Gallery School. And there remain on display works in the AGO Collection that I have known since childhood. Three works come to mind's eye promptly. First, the luxurious-tousle-haired, smooth-faced introspective youth Icarus – to me he has the face of a concert-musician, a flautist? His fine strong wings over his shoulders, his stern-bearded father at his right ear instructing him forcefully.

Another indelible memory from the Old Masters Collection: under a dark troubled sky, a white-bearded, bare-chested man, a biblical figure I guess, seated in a striking diagonal posture, his body enduringly muscular, his upward gaze anxious...and is there a large bird looming overhead?

Finally, a modern personage, whose presence is as strong as the two mythical-historical figures I have mentioned, and yet she stands here with the past faint on the horizon behind her. I would go so far as to call her an elemental spirit of the AGO. I imagine her moving about freely, visiting her favourite works by night. She is as dramatically posed as the bearded prophet and as captivating ̶ and tousled ̶ as Icarus. But her presence is more personal. She is an I. Looking back at us. She seems physically present in our present space, as if standing live in an ample niche in the wall in the very room we contemporary viewers stand in. She is present tense--it is as if this portrait had been finished downstairs overnight, brought up and hung on the wall by my colleagues before public hours, the paint still wet, and she, The Marchesa Casati, might turn up, stopping beside you (you early-bird, first patron of the day who knows the PSOs by their names), to appraise it herself.