by Heather Atkinson
My late mother was a painter, talented, visionary, highly intelligent and technically excellent. We spent hours together talking about art during the last year of her life. It was a topic that even dementia couldn’t tarnish for mom because mom was an artist until the day she died.
Wherever we encountered art, whether in the hallways of Almonte General Hospital or Almonte Country Haven or in the showrooms and public spaces in downtown Almonte, mom dissected for me the hidden tricks of the artist. “Look here, the bridge,” she would say, pointing to some part of someone’s work, inscrutable to me until mom explained it. “Meant to draw the viewer’s eye to this, the focal point. See the colour used here, the complement to the colour used there… the darks and the lights playing together.”
Together we reread her art books, with their various explanations of art and dissertations on the artists themselves (I learned that Picasso’s abstract works were inspired by African masks) and together we would dissect her own work, an absorbing and joyous experience for us both.
“Art always ask questions that need answers,” declared mom. “Art makes you stop and look, not once but often because each time you look art will surprise you.”
Mom gave her art away. At the end there was nothing left to distribute, every work had gone home with an appreciative audience. Dad tried vainly to monetize mom’s work but she would have none of that. “If I get paid, then I have sold myself. My art is me, and I mean to share it.” (Lucky mom had dad as a patron.)
And so I thought of mom when my son placed one of his metalworks inside the corral by the Naismith statue in downtown Almonte several weeks ago. She would have got a kick out Bryant’s metal sculptures, applied the same analysis as she did with any art. Bryant’s medium is old metal, rusting car parts, pistons, chains, oil barrels, leftovers from his automotive business, saved from interment in the dump to be reincarnated as their creator’s fire pit art. He resurrects the disparate parts and stitches them together as Frankenstein did his monster, anatomically correct but improbable skeletons, with cylinder head bolts for clavicles, wearing stove pipe hats (haha, get it?) and dreadlocks (2012 Audi timing chains), chomping on stogies (bolts from engine blocks), skulls with red eyes (Christmas bulbs) popping out of holes in the rusty metal like jack-in-the-boxes, sprung.
Momento mori? Dust to dust, ore to rust?
An anti-smoking campaign?
Bryant grins when I ask him. “No clue where my ideas come from or what the piece is going to turn into. Depends what parts I have on hand. Blame it on my weird muse for bringing it all together.”
Bryant’s art makes me look, not once but often, as mom said art must do. Took me some time to see what was there all along in one piece: a skeleton in a stove pipe hat hooking a fish, the gaping catfish mouth, silver staring eye, and bifurcated tail once a piston.
Like mom, Bryant believes art is to share. He wants to display his pieces in public spaces, let folks take them away to enjoy as functional art. (Most pieces double as fire pits.)
This week Bryant’s piece was removed. “Either someone wants it and took it, which is fine, or someone hates it and had it removed, which is not fine,” he told me.
I called around. Sadly, three complainants had the piece removed by Public Works where I retrieved it. John Gleeson had kindly set it aside rather than discard it because he knew the creator would eventually claim it.
All of which begs the question: What is art? Who gets to decide?
Is the statue of Mr. Naismith staring down at a tomato basket art? It’s made of metal, technically excellent and yet one viewing is all I need to satisfy my curiosity. I see at once that the creator is depicting an artist in the act of being inspired. With a tomato basket as muse Naismith would create performance art as elegant and intricately choreographed as ballet. For me the work is proficient and interesting only because the story of Naismith is interesting.
Others will disagree.
That’s what art does, it forces debate. Consider David whose private parts were censored off and on over the centuries according to the prevailing zeitgeist ever since Michelangelo shared his creation with the public in the 16th century. Or Theodor Geisel demoted to racist, his beloved Dr. Seuss books now banned in some parts of North America, or Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party reviled by another female artist as reducing women to vaginas.
Art needs to be hated and loved to do its job. To do that, art needs to be seen.
The three complainants who objected to Bryant’s art won this round. Nevertheless, Bryant intends to do what he set out to do: leave his art hidden around town for people to find, enjoy and take home if they wish. The complainants are free to take it away too. Who knows, on their way to the dump Bryant’s art might inspire them to take a second look.
