This Was

The Artful Life of Kim Ondaatje

Sumac Publishing, Toronto

“A certain rapt attention: trying to imagine what it would be like to live my life occupied soley with the study of time past and time passing.”

                                                                                 W.G. Sebald.

After many years of looking closely at and into her deceptively simple visions of what it means to be alive, it eventually occurred to me that this important painter has a superior skill at capturing the fleeting moments of rapt attention that Sebald often references. Even further, the true subject of Kim Ondaatje’s enigmatically domestic representations on canvas, emblematic of a restrained and austere aesthetic, has always struck me as being precisely that: a personal study of time past and time passing. And as an admittedly fetishistic reader, I was reassured when I initially first thumbed to this book’s index and bibliography to see who’s who and what’s what, there to find a key reference to a favourite poet/critic of mine, Gaston Bachelard, from his gorgeous book The Poetics of Space. Thus becalmed, I instantly recognized that her work, which I have viewed with great pleasure over many years, is precisely that: her visual diary of the poetics of space. Sometimes interior, sometimes exterior, sometimes in between the two, but always about embodied space and how we choose to occupy it.

Ondaatje, AKA Betty Jane Kimbark, is a gifted Canadian painter who toiled in the pictorial realm with a vivid persistence of vision totally committed to depicting the everyday reality we all tend to dwell in. In that regard this artist shares a certain visual vibe with Malcolm Rains, Edward Hopper and John Ballantyne, with a distinctive style lodged comfortably somewhere in between her fellow Canadian artists Mary and Christopher Pratt. Although she came of age during the heady days of abstract expressionism, she eschewed abstraction in favour of representing what can be seen, shown and known. She thus seems to likewise embody an insight first opined by the great French painter Gustave Courbet way back in 1830, just as the modernist era was about to vigorously commence: “Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is the negation of the ideal.” But the ever energetic Ondaatje also, somewhat paradoxically, managed to embrace both the real and the ideal at the same time in both her life and her work. In this welcome new biography of the life of an important artist and arts activist, one that the author Lola Tostevin accurately calls an “inventive life”, we are given access to the inner recesses of what made her such a significant and diversely situated cultural figure.

    She continues to occupy a quiet but vital place on the map of contemporary Canadian art, and at 94, after producing decades of subtle and introspective images culled from her daily reveries, she remains a noble landmark. Paintings such as Ondaatje’s, who is not exactly a household name with the same ring as the Pratts, perhaps owing to the prolific parallel work she also did in documentary photography, filmmaking and publishing, are invitations to a ritual of looking that engages our imaginations far above and below the apparently straightforward substance of the images represented. They are what they appear to be: placid architectural spaces, portraits of both interiors and exteriors, still life’s with rooms and buildings instead of fruits or flowers, designed and built landscapes at once tightly contained and yet fully open to conjecture. For me, her rich and full life has also been an artful one in the most literary sense of the term: finding a way to be an artist, mother to six kids and wife to two accomplished authors, DG Jones and Michael Ondaatje.

    In this fine biography from Toronto-based Sumac Press, Tostevin brings us the advantages of her first hand close contact with Kim, as a person, a painter, a mother, a friend, and a chronicler of her lengthy engagement with the important politics of public art. Born in Toronto in 1928, Ondaatje studied at both the Ontario College of Art and McGill University, completing an MA in Literature at Queens. The literary life, for which she had a love at least as deep as what she felt for painting, would occupy her in a very dynamic way, starting with her role in bringing Michael Ondaatje’s earliest books to the attention of Coach House Press, and continuing through her own publishing of several books, most notably Old Ontario Houses, 1977, Small Churches of Canada, 1982, and Toronto, My City, 1993.

If anyone encountering this creative being in any number of diverse social and contexts were to describe who and what she is, they would be accurately characterizing her, at least in terms of their own mileu. For there are more than a few different Kims, as evidenced by everything she did besides make art. Printmaker, farmer, teacher, mentor, writer, climate activist, she is actually a constellation-like they. Michael Gibson is a dealer representative specializing in the acquisition of her work. As he describes her standing as a late career painter of considerable, albeit gentle influence influence on Canadian art, “Ondaatje has, for the past forty years, lived on her farm near Verona, Ontario, where she continues to work on her “final landscape,” a long-term garden project.

     But back in 1965 she was still painting full time, exhibiting, and also even lobbying for something truly historic, something extremely important which places her in a pantheon all of her own making. One of the many accomplishments that makes her so important to all of us who have worked in the public art and culture domains was her co-founding, along with fellow artists Jack Chambers and Tony Urquhart, of Canadian Artists Representation, the first arts organization in the world to establish a fee structure for gallery and museum exhibitions of living contemporary artists. This pinnacle alone resulted in her being awarded a Governor General’s Award for Visual Arts for outstanding cultural contributions, in 2009.

Abandoned Orchard, 1964

    The reader benefits greatly from the close relationship that developed between the artist-subject and her biographer Lola Tostevin, a friendship that resulted in an in-depth sharing of papers, writings, journals, sketches and above all, her extensive library of vivid memories. At one point Ondaatje had considered memorializing her jam-packed creative life in an autobiography, and asked Tostevin to see if publishers might be interested. As the author attests in this present book, a tome that grew out of a documentary and archival urge they both shared, responses from the book world were somewhat muted, with one editor archly asking “Who is Kim Ondaatje?”, an off the cuff editorial remark that formed the impetus for the biographer’s mission.

    “Perhaps this was when the seed of my writing this book was planted.
 Tostevin observed, “It hasn’t been easy. Details from journals, archives, interviews, correspondence, conversations with Kim or acquaintances, haven’t always coincided. Her comments confirmed what I had suspected. She expected her life story to be written how she imagined it. But I was committed to writing as accurate a biography as I could. Much of Kim’s early life has been extended into her later years, with her rendition faithful to her script. People such as her father and mother, her art teachers, her ex-husbands, have become characters in a narrative that serves the needs of a present consciousness.” Well put.

     For an art critic and cultural historian such as myself, the personal back story, the story behind the paintings, films and books, so to speak, has been a marvelous means of fixing this quiet artist firmly in a proper context and frame of reference, one which is again bolstered by the inherent closeness and mutual respect between biographer and her subject. Knowing certain details of what formed the architecture of her character has been invaluable for a deeper appreciation of her subtle works of art. While Ondaatje’s kind of subjects and themes, and the accurate depictions of the recognizable world around us are often called photorealism or pictorial realism, I find it more accurate and rewarding to perceive them as magic realism.

    Either way, the artist’s persistent commitment to capturing the essence of appearances and the mysteries below the surface is laudable in an age still avidly absorbed by both the abstract and the conceptual. As for their visual references or aesthetic genealogy, while some viewers may tend to identify a resonance with the Canadian realists Colville or Pratt, or the Americans Wyeth or Hopper, I tend to veer toward her affinity with other more magic realists such as Fransoli, Guglielmi or Helder.Her paintings are similarly crisp and tidy, presented in bold outlines, with forms defined by soft but stark lights and gentle but profound shadows. Indeed, austere houses and churches, as well as the austerity of industrial landscapes, recur with some regularity in her work, often ironically suggesting rigorous modernist edges merged with the subtle nostalgia of a rural sensibility. Somehow this paradox always works perfectly.

Picadilly Series, 1974

Factory, 1973

Factory, 1974

And paradox, another unspoken subject and theme so skillfully explored by Ondaatje, is always also at the heart of her biography, as Tostevin emphasized so clearly: “I decided to write this biography for the simple reason that Kim Ondaatje is like no other person I’ve known. When I first began my research, she reminded me of a character fashioned in the Romantic genre, her view of the world influenced by Transcendentalism, her life an embodiment of their creed. Except most romantics crave isolation, whereas Kim has always relied on an extended community, and created events that bring people to her.” At one point, the artist herself clarified the ironies of competing life and lifestyle interests this way: “My life, my art and my garden have all been the result of chance happenings. Sometimes I think the gods who look after me must be exhausted.”

     The artist Edward Hopper once opined that he could imagine growing old painting only the way light hits a white wall. Ondaatje has lived her life artfully indeed and has managed to grow old in just this same delicate manner of meditative wonderment, ending up making her extensive garden the same kind of living painting that Claude Monet was also so adept at planting and growing. For Ondaatje, as for that great Impressionist, making a painting, or a photograph, or a film, or a book, or a garden, were all synonymous expressions of being alive and aware. Given the almost vertiginous diversity for self-expression available to contemporary visual artists in this day and age, I never tire of pointing out that far from being a million different subjects and themes for them to explore, or a million different formats for them to utilize in the execution of their works, there are in fact only four of each. Always have been, always will be.

    So then, subjects and themes: self, society, nature, spirituality. Formats and delivery systems: portrait, still life, landscape, abstract. All the other aesthetic style vehicles can be distilled down to these two basic formal groupings, no matter how divergent or drastically experimental they might become. As an art critic who is also a historian, I’ve always given a wide, wide latitude to the manner in which visual artists choose to share their optical unconscious with us, and I accept and revel in even the most drastic conceptual experiments using everyday objects or even no visual material at all. However, I also applaud and always like to recognize the achievement of artists who remain in the orbit of the ultra-realist tradition, for whom a reality redux is at the heart of their aesthetic agenda.

     Kim Ondaatje is just such an artist, a painter who had chosen not to pick up a video camera, assemble any debris into installation stage sets, or engage in any obscure performance-based gestures. Instead, she was technically adept enough, and historically aware enough, to fully embrace Courbet’s early pre-modernist admonition: to engage with visible forms and eschew the seduction of any idealized realms. And Lola Tostevin’s biography of her life is the perfect answer to the perhaps tongue in cheek question posed by that interrogative title. Who is Kim Ondaatje? She is a woman, a mother, a wife, an author, an artist: one who just happened to be a Canadian painter during an exciting evolutionary time in art history. She has left all of us her actual life itself, all 94 years of it, as shared so loving by Lola Tostevin, as perhaps her greatest canvas of all. It is one she painted with vim, vigor and verve, the same way she lived it: authentically drenched in artistic passion from start to finish.

Hearn Plant, 1974