Canadian Conference of the Arts shutting down, cites government spending cuts

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OTTAWA – A cultural group founded by artists including Group of Seven member Lawren Harris is suspending operations after 67 years, a victim of federal spending cuts.

The Canadian Conference of the Arts, the largest national alliance of the arts, culture and heritage sector, said Tuesday it will start winding down its work immediately.

The NDP said the funding cut was retaliation for the conference’s opposition to government proposals to amend copyright law.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the Conservatives are punishing CCA for being a strong voice for the cultural community against the government’s changes to copyright legislation,” said heritage critic Pierre Nantel.

“As incredible as this may seem in a free and democratic country like ours, today, after 67 years of representing Canadian artists, the CCA is paying the price.”

The group said it was warned 18 months ago that the Harper government intended to end 47 years of funding.

It asked for two years of transitional financing while it weaned itself off public money, but was offered only six months of support.

The group said it found a lot of private backing, but its board decided it couldn’t make the shift in six months and decided to shut down immediately.

Conference chair Kathleen Sharpe said the organization made a concerted effort, but fell short.

“Despite our best efforts, transitional support of six months was not enough and we have simply run out of time to develop new revenue streams,” Sharpe said in a statement.

A spokesman for Heritage Minister James Moore said the conference got 60 per cent of its money from the federal treasury, including this year.

“Funding was provided to give the council the opportunity to work with individuals and groups it claims as its stakeholders to develop a new mandate and funding model,” Sebastien Gariepy said in an email.

“Our government has delivered unprecedented levels of support to the arts. We will continue to invest in affordable, effective programs that support culture in Canada.”

Alain Pineau, the national director of the conference, posted a farewell message on the group’s web site.

“This was not the way I was hoping to end my time with the CCA,” he said.

“But I leave knowing that all of us at the secretariat have given everything we had to make this transition a success.

“I can only hope that someone else will pick up the challenge. The Canadian cultural sector needs and deserves a CCA if it is to be effective and thrive.”

The conference was founded in 1945 to promote the interests of artists and the cultural sector at the federal level.

Pineau said the organization will be suspended in the hope that someone can eventually resuscitate it.

“We concluded that the best we could do in the circumstances would be to leave the organization in order, in a suspended state, in the hopes that a group ready to take on the challenge of re-launching this unparalleled instrument in the arts, culture and heritage sector would emerge.”

 

http://www2.macleans.ca/

sentinel

oil on panel

48 in (121.92 cm) x 48 in (121.92cm)

one step up

oil on panel
48 in (121.92 cm) x 48 in (121.92cm)

David Mirvish offers glimpse of hidden art gems

 

Wikipaintings.org Jules Olitski Purple Golubchik (1962)

By Martin Knelman Entertainment Columnist

For more than 30 years, the vast and exquisite art collection of David and Audrey Mirvish has been mostly an underground thrill for those who were lucky enough to savour it.

Most of it has been stashed away in various far-flung warehouses. Art experts, visiting VIPs, special friends and groups of college students have from time to time been taken on special expeditions to view it. And many treasures from the collection have travelled to important museums all over the world, as loans to prestigious exhibitions.

But for most art lovers, the collection has lingered somewhere between an intriguing rumour and a tantalizing off-limits attraction.

Five years ago I suggested during a lunch with David Mirvish, during which we were discussing Ken Thomson’s gift to the Art Gallery of Ontario, that it would be a fantastic gain for Toronto if the city could have a special museum to show off the Mirvish collection.

At the time, he rejected the idea, saying he intended to keep the collection private, and leave it as a legacy to his family.

But since then, he has changed his mind. And as this week’s bombshell announcement made clear, a dedicated museum for the Mirvish collection is a key part of the mega culture-and-condos project that he and Toronto-born architect Frank Gehry are proposing for a huge stretch of King St. W.

There is no guarantee that the project will be approved, and David Mirvish is not in any rush to publicize the collection, but he’s agreed to give Star readers an exclusive peek at some of this city’s most stunning and little-known art treasures that could be seen at a new museum.

“We won’t be able to go through everything today,” David Mirvish warned as we entered a non-descript, purpose-built east-end warehouse, accompanied by Eleanor Johnston, the curator of the collection. “We’ll just scratch the surface.”

Epic-scale paintings, mostly from the late 20th century by major artists of that period, such as Jules Olitski’s Purple Golubchik (1962), Morris Louis’ Kaf (1959), Kenneth Noland’s That (1962), and Robert Motherwell’s Figure With Blots (1943), are concealed among many racks until something is pulled out to be viewed by a visitor. In this group of international stars that includes Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler and Hans Hoffman, there’s one Canadian — Jack Bush — who gets a major role.

The collection also has some great sculpture of the same era, notably by the British artist Anthony Caro.

“Color Field works represent the core of the collection,” David Mirvish notes. That’s a movement that began in the early 1950s, flourished in the 1960s and lasted until the late 1970s.

Closely associated with abstract expressionism, with the line sometimes blurred, it’s based on the notion that colour alone can carry the weight of emotion. And in a spirit of wanting to explore how far they could take this concept, many of the most gifted artists of their era, especially in the United States, developed new methods, such as letting paint with vivid colors stain or soak into a canvas.

“The connection between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field is similar to the link between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism,” David Mirvish explains.

In a way, these works of art tell the story of David Mirvish’s own career first act, before he went into partnership with his father, Ed, and became Canada’s dominant theatre tycoon.

Anne Mirvish, David Mirvish’s mother, had been a practising artist for years. And it was with her encouragement that at 18, David Mirvish decided to open his own art gallery on Markham St.

Looking at pictures in New York, Venice and Paris, he was drawn by the romance and excitement of artistic breakthroughs. It wasn’t the old masterpieces that gave him a rush of adrenalin, it was the ones that pushed the boundaries and opened new frontiers.

It was his first encounters with the pictures if Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella that had that elusive quality he loved — images that thrilled him, moved him deeply and spoke to him in a new language, without telling stories in the usual sense.

This was the work he wanted to exhibit, to sell, to own, to share, and to champion. He proceeded to do so, encouraged by the New York critic Clement Greenberg, and an exhibition called “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” organized by Greenberg, that visited the AGO in 1964.

It came as a shock to the Toronto art world when in 1978 Mirvish closed his gallery, which by then had become a local institution. His reason was while growing into a big business, being an art dealer and gallery owner had stopped being fun.

“It’s very unusual for a major collection to be created by an individual as a reflection of his own personal taste,” says Gehry. “David puts his own feelings on he table. That makes it very special, and now he wants to share it with Toronto.”

It could be coming soon to a museum near you.

 

http://www.thestar.com/

Ontario budget cuts funding to arts community

JAMES ADAMS

In the next three years, the Ontario government plans to winnow tens of millions of dollars from its support of the culture, tourism and sport sector, including a 23 per cent reduction in funding to Toronto’s high-profile Luminato festival and modest decreases in operating assistance to such venerable institutions as the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

 

More ambiguous is the fate of TVOntario, now 42 years old. The McGuinty government wants to reduce its annual direct investment in the educational broadcaster – last year it gave $52-million against TVO’s total budget of $62.9-million – and find new sources of funding. However, Tuesday’s budget was entirely lacking specifics in how big a reduction the government wishes to initiate and where it expects to locate new revenue.

A 10-day annual festival started in 2007, Luminato was promised $15-million over four years by the McGuinty government, starting in 2010. But Tuesday’s budget reveals that Luminato will lose $1.5-million in 2012-13 and another $2-million in the next fiscal year.

Luminato CEO Janice Price said there will be no impact on this year’s festival, scheduled for this June, but she’d be “starting work now” on inputting the reduced commitment in plans for its 2013 edition. She was philosophic about the loss and, given that the festival’s annual budget is more than $13-million, said it wasn’t a death knell. “Who can be surprised? Given all the reports, everybody’s had to take some cuts. The province . . . has been very clear that everyone’s going to have to share the burden and we understand that.”

Meanwhile, seven cultural “attractions” – the AGO, ROM, the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Burlington’s Royal Botanical Gardens, Ontario Heritage Trust (a conservation agency) and Science North in Sudbury – along with the St. Lawrence Park Commission are on tap to take an almost $5-million cut over the next three years.

This should not prove too onerous: in 2012-13, the total reduction to be shared by the eight agencies is just $900,000. Since 2009, ROM and the AGO alone have been receiving almost $28-million and $22-million, respectively, in annual operating support from the province.

To avoid what it calls “overlap and duplication,” the minority government also plans to collapse four granting programs, including the Museums and Technology Fund, into one, saving $11-million in the process. Also included in the scheme is the end of the Entertainment and Creative Clusters Partnership Fund, started in 2006 under the aegis of the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Also closing are seven of the province’s tourism information centres, locations still to be announced. These closures and the province’s intention to “realign” more of its tourism marketing and support to the Internet is expected to save $3.3-million by the end of fiscal year 2014-15.

Editor's note: TVOntario's total budget for the past fiscal year was $62.9-million not $90-million as was previously reported. This version has been corrected.

 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Luminato, AGO face cuts in Ontario budget

The Encampment, an art installation by Thom Sokolski and Jenny Anne McCowan, is part of this year's Luminato festival. The Ontario provincial budget reduced grants to the festival. (Luminato)

Provincial funding for Toronto's Luminato festival is to be cut by $3.5 million over the next two years.

Festival organizers were expecting to receive $4 million from Ontario next year and $4.5 million in 2014.

Instead, the province will now commit to $2.5 million for each of 2013 and 2014 and there have been no discussions around funding beyond 2014, according to Luminato associate director of government relations Bradley Lepp.

The provincial budget, handed down by Finance Minister Dwight Duncan on Tuesday, also targets a number of the province's cultural institutions, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ont.

Funding for these institutions will be cut by one per cent this year and two per cent the following year.

The Ontario government is facing a deficit of $15.3 billion for the coming year. The funding cuts are part of a provincewide strategy to balance Ontario's books in five years.

 

http://www.cbc.ca/

Envelope Drawings by Mark Powell

London-based artist Mark Powell has chosen the backs of old envelopes as a canvas for these delicately rendered portraits of the elderly, using nothing more than a standard Bic Biro pen to create the delicate folds and wrinkles of their skin. I love everything about these. See much more of his work here and he sells a number of art prints over on Society6

Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto

 

Japanese artist Yamamoto Motoi was born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1966 and worked in a dockyard until he was 22 when he decided to focus on art full-time. Six years later in 1994 his younger sister died from complications due to brain cancer and Yamamoto immediately began to memorialize her in his labyrinthine installations of poured salt. The patterns formed from the salt are actually quite literal in that Yamamoto first created a three-dimensional brain as an exploration of his sister’s condition and subsequently wondered what would happen if the patterns and channels of the brain were then flattened. Although he creates basic guidelines and conditions for each piece, the works are almost entirely improvised with mistakes and imperfections often left intact during hundreds of hours of meticulous pouring. After each piece has been on view for several weeks the public is invited to communally destroy each work and help package the salt into bags and jars, after which it is thrown back into the ocean, a process you can watch in the video above by John Reynolds & Lee Donaldson.

Yamamoto recently finished a new installation at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina and will soon be in Los Angeles at the Laband Art Gallery where he’ll begin work on a new piece. You can stop by the gallery August 29, 30, 31 and September 4, 5, 6, 2012 from 12-4pm to see the work in progress which will finally open in its completed state on September 8th. You can follow along via his blog. (via fastco)

Damien Hirst's new statue is a dangerous monstrosity

The giant bronze woman holding up a sword in Devon not only resembles the art of totalitarian dictators, it is helping Hirst destroy British art

 by Jonathan  Jones

'Pseudo-allegorical pretension' ... the raising of Damien Hirst's statue Verity will begin this weekend in Ilfracombe, Devon, weather permitting. Photograph: Apex

A while ago I suggested that Damien Hirst is like a deluded dictator. Maybe this seemed a trifle strong, an unnecessarily extreme analogy to describe Hirst's decay from lively young mind to arrogant purveyor of kitsch. But have you seen the giant statue he is raising at Ilfracombe in Devon?

I invoked dictators' artistic fantasies to suggest the level of badness and self-delusion in Hirst's figurative paintings, but the bronze woman of Ilfracombe invites a more direct comparison with the art of totalitarian regimes.

She will stand colossally over the harbour, holding up a sword that will spear into the sky. There is no subtlety to this oversized statue, and nothing avant garde, either. It is a banal image, cast in metal in a way that gives it an unjustified air of authority. It looks exactly like something you might have seen in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

I have actually stood beneath a statue on this scale, and with this kind of pseudo-allegorical pretension: a vast monument in Russia that commemorates the Battle of Stalingrad. In fact, the resemblance is very close. Like Hirst's statue, the huge female figure that crowns the Stalingrad memorial holds a giant sword. To be fair to the creators of the Stalingrad statue, they were trying to mark one of the most epic battles in history. But the style they used is that of Stalin's propaganda art – vulgar, brazen, crass.

Hirst's statue in Devon revives the ugly vacuities of art in the age of the dictators. It really is a monstrosity.

So what now for British art? What does it mean that Hirst, who made British contemporary art famous in the 1990s, and who is still a huge popular draw as his show at Tate Modern proved, has turned out to be such an excruciatingly terrible artist?

Everyone except me seems to fall into one of two equally complacent camps on this. First, there are the people who hated Hirst all along, never saw anything there but fraud, and now feel cosily vindicated. But they are wrong: there is nothing clever about being closed off to the new, and Hirst, let's say from 1988 to 1995, was an unexpected, dazzling exponent of new ways to make art, who seemed driven by a real obsession with mortality.

Now, it is all turning to dust and misted formaldehyde.

I find the second form of complacency laughable. For many people who love contemporary art, there is simply no problem. Hirst is a faded light, sure – but that has no wider significance. British art today is replete with good, interesting artists in all media whose diverse creativity makes the commercial age of Hirst seem a long time ago. We've moved on.

Rubbish. That's like saying there were lots of artists in late 1960s New York who made Andy Warhol look old-fashioned. In retrospect, it is Warhol who defined the American art of his age, full stop. Hirst dominates British art in our time. He is the most successful British artist ever. He has taken the commercial logic of pop to levels undared by Warhol or even Jeff Koons. When histories of modern Britain come to be written by later generations, it will be Hirst whose art shapes the image of these times.

Hirst invented the "young British art" generation when he curated the exhibition Freeze. Most were minnows in his wake.

We will be judged by him. He made modern British art, and he has destroyed it. Don't you understand? This time is going to be remembered as what Hirst is making it, with his bronze statues and hideous daubs – a dark age for British art.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

The Skewed Sculptures of Evan Penny

Do not adjust this blog post, and no I didn’t have an accident in Photoshop. This is the recent work of Canadian artist Evan Penny who creates stretched and skewed sculptural portraits that tower over 9 feet tall. Some of his other work is actually hyper-realistic, in that he uses silicone and other materials to mimic the texture of skin and hair down to the detail of every last follicle on a large scale. In 2007 Penny began working with an advanced 3D scanning process that allows him to skew objects virtually and then print them in foam using a rapid prototyping method, using the resulting framework as a base for the rest of the sculpture.

Sketchbook Illustrations from Mattias Adolfsson

Within the sketchbooks of Swedish artist Mattias Adolfsson, strange comic book robots are seen running amok, fantastic steampunk-esque machines sputter to life, and airplane pilots find themselves facing interfaces encumbered with thousands of switches, dials, and tubes. It’s a world that is absurdly complex and meticulously drawn using only a finely controlled pen and a few brushstrokes of color.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/

Sketchbook Illustrations from Mattias Adolfsson

Within the sketchbooks of Swedish artist Mattias Adolfsson, strange comic book robots are seen running amok, fantastic steampunk-esque machines sputter to life, and airplane pilots find themselves facing interfaces encumbered with thousands of switches, dials, and tubes. It’s a world that is absurdly complex and meticulously drawn using only a finely controlled pen and a few brushstrokes of color.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/

He wants you to love our art

He wants you to love our art

DEIRDRE KELLY

When Toronto's Ash Prakash bid $1.9-million on a Tom Thomson oil sketch last May, he did what he normally does after single-handedly boosting the value of a historic Canadian work - he tried to slip out the door.

Reporters besieged Mr. Prakash. They wanted to know why he had spent so much on Pine Trees at Sunset, a work that a New York gallery owner had purchased less than a decade earlier for a mere $189,000, and which now hangs in Mr. Prakash's Rosedale home.

To get to the heart of that question, you would have to ask another one: Who is Mr. Prakash? It turns out he is the most influential Canadian art collector and dealer you have never heard of. "He's always shunned the spotlight," says Michael Weinberg.

The Toronto plastic surgeon is one of Mr. Prakash's clients.

"But if you were to shine one on [Mr. Prakash] you'd see he's the most powerful art dealer in the country."

Mr. Prakash, who is in his early 60s, is now collaborating with David Thomson - no relation to Tom - on choosing and hanging works from the Thomson family's celebrated private collection for the Art Gallery of Ontario, which opens to the public on Nov. 14.

The unveiling will be the culmination of Mr. Prakash's long relationship with Canada's wealthiest family. He was a trusted adviser to Mr. Thomson's late father, Ken, and helped him acquire works by Cornelius Krieghoff, James Wilson Morrice, Lawren Harris, J.E.H. MacDonald and Tom Thomson, among others.

"My father would often mention Ash late in his life, as they shared a deep friendship," Mr. Thomson said. "Ash and I met and forged a strong rapport soon after my father's passing. ... The two of us hold strong beliefs and we celebrate each exchange, however volatile."

Mr. Prakash is sacrificing some of his carefully guarded anonymity for the sake of Independent Spirit, a glossy new hardcover he has written about Canadian women painters from 1850 to 1940. He spent five years researching and writing the 410-page tome, which features the work of trailblazers like Emily Carr, the lesser-known Mabel May and modernists such as Marcelle Ferron and Paraskeva Clark.

"I have been at the centre ... of Canadian art for the last 30 years, but the fact that I have kept a low profile reflects how I think," Mr. Prakash said in a rare interview. "I personally believe that the enjoyment of art is a deeply felt passion, and there is a certain solitary element to that enjoyment. I have clients as reclusive as I am."

Mr. Prakash is also the author of Canadian Art: Selected Masters from Private Collections, which was published in 2003 and sold 5,000 copies in French and English. He knows too well that books on Canadian art are not big sellers. "This is the national tragedy," he said. "People don't want to know about their own culture."

It's an especially sore point for Mr. Prakash, a physicist's son of Indo-Egyptian heritage who moved to Canada from India, via California, in 1968, when he was 23 years old.

He bought his first Canadian painting nearly 35 years ago. It was an impressionistic Maurice Cullen landscape he saw in a Montreal gallery window. Mr. Prakash walked in and asked the late art dealer Walter Klinkhoff how many visitors he was expecting at his Cullen retrospective. Only 300 at most, Mr. Klinkhoff replied.

"I almost cried," Mr. Prakash recalled.

"I thought, this is a new country! Where is the vision? It might seem strange for someone of my background, a new Canadian, being so passionate about the subject. But I am. It's always troubled me that the multicultural policies of our nation have led it away from an understanding of its own roots. ... In my small way, I am trying to rectify that."

The desire has propelled Mr. Prakash's life's work.

The divorced father of two grown children is short and slender, a fastidious dresser who walks with a slight limp because of a weak ankle.

He has two science degrees, but no formal education in art history or visual arts.

"Van Gogh never took a lesson in painting," Mr. Prakash said. "Now, I'm not comparing myself to Van Gogh, but there lies the issue. There are certain forces in life that are just intuitive."

While working in Ottawa as an adviser on information management in the governments of Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney, he taught himself art history, gathered an impressive art collection of his own and built his reputation as a dealer. He has helped place works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin and others in private collections in Canada, he says.

Today, he runs an art consulting business out of his home, with help from son Tony, and shares his passion as leader of an informal posse of collectors in Toronto. The group, which includes Dr. Weinberg and his physician wife Laura Schiffer, collectors Fred and Beverly Schaeffer, former Goldman Sachs Canada chair George Estey, gallery owner Alan Loch and investment manager Richard Self, meets six times a year to discuss papers each writes on specific works.

Independent Spirit is also part of Mr. Prakash's quest to expose Canadians to their own art.

Published late last month, the book has already won accolades from such art connoisseurs as Guy Wildenstein, director of the highly regarded Wildenstein Institute in Paris. He called it "a pioneering book."

Closer to home, David Silcox, president of Sotheby's Canada, which sold Mr. Prakash the Tom Thomson last spring, described the book as "an amazing accomplishment."

"He's done a lot of original research, and he writes particularly well. He's passionate about Canadian art, as this book shows."

Mr. Prakash's scholarly bent is what distinguishes him from other private art dealers, says newer client Mike Tims, vice-chair of the board of trustees of the National Gallery of Canada.

Working with Mr. Prakash is a one-on-one tutorial in Canadian art history, he said.

"He can analyze a work and then describe how it fits into the artist's entire body of work ... he will tell of the work's uniqueness or rarity, and whether or not the collector is likely to ever have the opportunity to buy a comparable work again."

He is already turning a keen eye to this fall's art auctions, in particular the Sotheby's auction of Canadian art that will take place in Toronto at the end of November. Significant works are up for grabs, including rarely seen paintings by Lawren Harris, Emily Carr and Frederick Varley.

Mr. Prakash is expected to attend. But in keeping with his reclusive ways, he will not say if he is buying.

"In any event, it is not about me," he said. "It is about the art, I have always maintained that. I have looked at Canadian art when no one else wanted to, when there was no prestige to it. And I am

still looking at it, and still

enjoying it."

 

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/

He wants you to love our art

He wants you to love our art

DEIRDRE KELLY

When Toronto's Ash Prakash bid $1.9-million on a Tom Thomson oil sketch last May, he did what he normally does after single-handedly boosting the value of a historic Canadian work - he tried to slip out the door.

Reporters besieged Mr. Prakash. They wanted to know why he had spent so much on Pine Trees at Sunset, a work that a New York gallery owner had purchased less than a decade earlier for a mere $189,000, and which now hangs in Mr. Prakash's Rosedale home.

To get to the heart of that question, you would have to ask another one: Who is Mr. Prakash? It turns out he is the most influential Canadian art collector and dealer you have never heard of. "He's always shunned the spotlight," says Michael Weinberg.

The Toronto plastic surgeon is one of Mr. Prakash's clients.

"But if you were to shine one on [Mr. Prakash] you'd see he's the most powerful art dealer in the country."

Mr. Prakash, who is in his early 60s, is now collaborating with David Thomson - no relation to Tom - on choosing and hanging works from the Thomson family's celebrated private collection for the Art Gallery of Ontario, which opens to the public on Nov. 14.

The unveiling will be the culmination of Mr. Prakash's long relationship with Canada's wealthiest family. He was a trusted adviser to Mr. Thomson's late father, Ken, and helped him acquire works by Cornelius Krieghoff, James Wilson Morrice, Lawren Harris, J.E.H. MacDonald and Tom Thomson, among others.

"My father would often mention Ash late in his life, as they shared a deep friendship," Mr. Thomson said. "Ash and I met and forged a strong rapport soon after my father's passing. ... The two of us hold strong beliefs and we celebrate each exchange, however volatile."

Mr. Prakash is sacrificing some of his carefully guarded anonymity for the sake of Independent Spirit, a glossy new hardcover he has written about Canadian women painters from 1850 to 1940. He spent five years researching and writing the 410-page tome, which features the work of trailblazers like Emily Carr, the lesser-known Mabel May and modernists such as Marcelle Ferron and Paraskeva Clark.

"I have been at the centre ... of Canadian art for the last 30 years, but the fact that I have kept a low profile reflects how I think," Mr. Prakash said in a rare interview. "I personally believe that the enjoyment of art is a deeply felt passion, and there is a certain solitary element to that enjoyment. I have clients as reclusive as I am."

Mr. Prakash is also the author of Canadian Art: Selected Masters from Private Collections, which was published in 2003 and sold 5,000 copies in French and English. He knows too well that books on Canadian art are not big sellers. "This is the national tragedy," he said. "People don't want to know about their own culture."

It's an especially sore point for Mr. Prakash, a physicist's son of Indo-Egyptian heritage who moved to Canada from India, via California, in 1968, when he was 23 years old.

He bought his first Canadian painting nearly 35 years ago. It was an impressionistic Maurice Cullen landscape he saw in a Montreal gallery window. Mr. Prakash walked in and asked the late art dealer Walter Klinkhoff how many visitors he was expecting at his Cullen retrospective. Only 300 at most, Mr. Klinkhoff replied.

"I almost cried," Mr. Prakash recalled.

"I thought, this is a new country! Where is the vision? It might seem strange for someone of my background, a new Canadian, being so passionate about the subject. But I am. It's always troubled me that the multicultural policies of our nation have led it away from an understanding of its own roots. ... In my small way, I am trying to rectify that."

The desire has propelled Mr. Prakash's life's work.

The divorced father of two grown children is short and slender, a fastidious dresser who walks with a slight limp because of a weak ankle.

He has two science degrees, but no formal education in art history or visual arts.

"Van Gogh never took a lesson in painting," Mr. Prakash said. "Now, I'm not comparing myself to Van Gogh, but there lies the issue. There are certain forces in life that are just intuitive."

While working in Ottawa as an adviser on information management in the governments of Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney, he taught himself art history, gathered an impressive art collection of his own and built his reputation as a dealer. He has helped place works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin and others in private collections in Canada, he says.

Today, he runs an art consulting business out of his home, with help from son Tony, and shares his passion as leader of an informal posse of collectors in Toronto. The group, which includes Dr. Weinberg and his physician wife Laura Schiffer, collectors Fred and Beverly Schaeffer, former Goldman Sachs Canada chair George Estey, gallery owner Alan Loch and investment manager Richard Self, meets six times a year to discuss papers each writes on specific works.

Independent Spirit is also part of Mr. Prakash's quest to expose Canadians to their own art.

Published late last month, the book has already won accolades from such art connoisseurs as Guy Wildenstein, director of the highly regarded Wildenstein Institute in Paris. He called it "a pioneering book."

Closer to home, David Silcox, president of Sotheby's Canada, which sold Mr. Prakash the Tom Thomson last spring, described the book as "an amazing accomplishment."

"He's done a lot of original research, and he writes particularly well. He's passionate about Canadian art, as this book shows."

Mr. Prakash's scholarly bent is what distinguishes him from other private art dealers, says newer client Mike Tims, vice-chair of the board of trustees of the National Gallery of Canada.

Working with Mr. Prakash is a one-on-one tutorial in Canadian art history, he said.

"He can analyze a work and then describe how it fits into the artist's entire body of work ... he will tell of the work's uniqueness or rarity, and whether or not the collector is likely to ever have the opportunity to buy a comparable work again."

He is already turning a keen eye to this fall's art auctions, in particular the Sotheby's auction of Canadian art that will take place in Toronto at the end of November. Significant works are up for grabs, including rarely seen paintings by Lawren Harris, Emily Carr and Frederick Varley.

Mr. Prakash is expected to attend. But in keeping with his reclusive ways, he will not say if he is buying.

"In any event, it is not about me," he said. "It is about the art, I have always maintained that. I have looked at Canadian art when no one else wanted to, when there was no prestige to it. And I am

still looking at it, and still

enjoying it."

 

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/

The Collector: How Ash Prakash became the preeminent art dealer for the country’s wealthiest families

A look at the reclusive art collector renowned for his connections, his discretion, and his secret stash of multi-million-dollar masterpieces

By Leah McLaren | Photograph by Daniel Ehrenworth

One evening last November, at the Sotheby’s auction in the ROM’s Currelly Gallery, Ash Prakash entered into a heated bidding war with David Loch, a Winnipeg-based art dealer. The coveted object was a dreamy, impressionistic early-20th-century canvas by the Quebec artist James Wilson Morrice entitled Evening Stroll, Venice, which depicts a moody twilight scene of women bustling past the gondolas on the lagoon. Prakash wanted the painting for his personal collection, and put in several bids. He paused as the price soared over a million—he hadn’t expected the piece to be so dear. He knew through the grapevine that Loch was bidding on behalf of a client, which only hardened his resolve: he was spending his own money, and he was determined to win. 

After a tense tussle, Prakash prevailed with a bid of $1.5 million, setting the evening’s record price. He scooped up two other paintings by Morrice that night: a sketch for $83,000 and a garden scene for $232,500. It was a triumph for Prakash, but not an unusual night’s work. His other record-smashing purchases in recent years have included Tom Thomson’s Pine Trees at Sunset, for nearly $2 million in 2008, and the following year, at a Heffel Fine Art auction in Toronto, four landmark Group of Seven works for which he racked up a bill of nearly $9 million in one night.

Ash Prakash. A wizard’s name. Soft on consonants, couched in rhyme. The perfect name for the retiring man who, over the past three decades, has quietly built a reputation as the pre-eminent authority on blue-chip Canadian art, buying paintings for himself as well as a group of wealthy collectors who pay for
his expertise.

Now Prakash is determined to push the objects of his adoration into the international spotlight. Late last year, he helped organize the first international Group of Seven show at a major European museum, the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. The show, which got rave reviews, went on to tour Norway and the Netherlands and contains significant pieces from Prakash’s own collection (most notably a room full of Lawren Harrises). It will make its final stop at the McMichael gallery in Kleinburg next month. Prakash’s hope is that the exhibit will help boost the profile of Thomson, Morrice and Emily Carr, and place them alongside Monet, Manet and Van Gogh in the world’s estimation. The show will also, of course, make the hundreds of artworks in his personal collection incalculably more valuable.

Prakash does not hand out business cards or have a company website. He operates below the radar. He is 66 years old and so relentlessly cordial, his manner so restrained, that he reminds me of one of those buttoned-down British Raj characters in a Forster novel. His modernist Rosedale house, which overlooks the ravine, contains only a tiny fraction of his massive collection of paintings—the lion’s share is in high-security storage facilities scattered around the city, the locations of which I’ve sworn not to reveal.

Prakash made his name bidding for Canada’s richest family, the Thomsons, who also happen to own the world’s largest, and most priceless, collection of Canadian art. He first worked for the patriarch, Ken, in the latter stages of his life, and later for his son David, who took over the family business, and with whom Prakash maintains a close friendship.

Like many professionals who work closely with the fabulously rich, he resists the word “client,” which he considers crass.

 

Last fall, Prakash bought James Wilson Morrice’s Evening Stroll, Venice for $1.5 million (Image: courtesy of Sotheby’s)

But for lack of a better word, his clientele currently consists of a few dozen families with whom he keeps in regular contact, including the grocery store magnate Donald Sobey, the GTA plastic surgeon Michael Weinberg, the co-founder of Sila Holdings and 24 Hour Fitness clubs Leonard Schlemm, the head of strategy at RBC Wealth Management Mark Fell and the movie producer Jake Eberts. Once every year or so, he invites his clients to view a small, meticulously curated catalogue of recent acquisitions in his tiny, nondescript rented office at Bloor and Avenue.

His route to success was unconventional: no Ivy League art history degree, Sotheby’s internship or eponymous gallery for him. Apart from some recreational painting as a child (a hobby for which he showed “limited promise,” he says), he did not take a serious interest in collecting art until his mid-30s.

His reputation is so lofty that most of the friends and associates I spoke to objected to labelling him an art dealer, despite the fact that he has, for 30 years, made a handsome living buying and selling paintings for profit. They prefer the term “collector” or even “connoisseur.” Prakash himself has a characteristically elegant way of sidestepping categorization: he simply doesn’t call himself anything at all.

A traditional dealer buys paintings with clients’ money in exchange for a commission. Prakash does it differently: he buys paintings with his own cash, either for his personal collection or with an individual collector in mind. He acts as a value investor, storing paintings in inventory and later selling them to collectors once the price has appreciated. “The way I work tends to baffle other dealers, who say, ‘Where’s his gallery?’ ‘Where’s his catalogue?’ ” he says. “But my way is to buy art that I love. Within my circle, if a collector comes to me and says, ‘I’m in a mood to acquire,’ then I’ll show what I feel like selling and put a price on it. It’s as simple as that.”

He has a better sense than anyone in the country of where, outside of the major public galleries, most of our great historical art is stashed—he keeps tabs on who buys what at auctions, and hears gossip from curators and other dealers. Mark Hilson, a partner at Toronto’s Romspen investment corporation and one of Prakash’s long-time clients, told me the story of how he once lost a signature Lawren Harris at auction to an anonymous bidder. “I regretted letting it go,” he says. “For two years afterward I kept thinking, ‘When does one like that come along?’ ’’ Prakash offered to help him find and obtain it. “It takes a great deal of delicacy and incisiveness to enter into,” Hilson says. After a month, Prakash found the Harris and convinced the owner to sell it to Hilson for just above the auction price.

Prakash was born in Ambala, India, a small city in the foothills of the Himalayas. At the age of 15, without consulting his parents, he entered an essay contest run by the U.S. State Department through the American embassy. His essay, called “Journey to the Moon,” examined the goals of the Kennedy space program. Thousands of children entered to win five prizes of a scholarship at an American school, one of which went to Prakash.

When he told his father, a physicist, that he was going to America, his dad objected. He felt his son was too young for such a journey. But by that point, Prakash, halfway to the moon himself, couldn’t be talked out of it. The trip took five weeks by boat, first to the Netherlands and then across the Atlantic to New York City. “The ship was transporting cattle on the lower deck, so it was very unpleasant,” he says. “I was lonely, lost and seasick—and at the same time, I knew there was no going back.” Prakash was sent to attend high school in Berkeley, California, where he was billeted by a Jewish-American couple, the Rosens, who became his second family. He eventually went on to study business management at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan, putting himself through school by working part-time in a bar and a gas station. It was at Michigan that he met and fell in love with a Canadian student.

He believes the early difficulties of his immigration were formative. “I think everyone should go through that in life. Struggle gives you a zenith from which you must focus on moving ahead.” He smiles and articulates an Eastern metaphor in faintly accented English: “From this corner comes a lotus in a cesspool.”

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Mosaics Created from Thousands of Hand-Cast Resin Flowers and Candy

What Remains, 35,000+ hand cast urethane flowers

What Remains, detail

What Remains, detail

What Remains, detail

What Remains, detail

A Rose By Any Other Name, 15,000+ individually hand cast urethane pieces of candy, 75 pounds

A Rose By Any Other Name, detail

A Rose By Any Other Name, detail

A Rose By Any Other Name, detail

New York artist Kevin Champeny merges aspects of painting, sculpture and mosaics with his large-scale images of skulls, flowers, and other objects. While the idea of creating images using thousands of components like this might not be particularly new, Champeny challenges himself by creating each tiny element by hand. He starts by building silicone molds of the original pieces, then casts them in color (meaning nothing is painted, each hue has to be mixed and cast) using various poly-urethane resins. The final objects numbering in the tens of thousands are then painstaking glued to a surface piece by piece, meaning that the entire process for each artwork spans several months to design, sculpt, mold, and cast. Amazingly the skull above is made from over 35,000 handmade flowers while the rose uses 15,000 resin candies. You can see much more of his work on his blog.

 

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/