If your heart is beating: Toronto Day 2 (22 April 2014)

Our hearts are of course beating … So lovely to be in the same place as Hannah for a while! This post’s title, though, came from our afternoon’s adventures, of which more anon.

Liberty Village 

We allowed ourselves a leisurely start to the day, getting up, doing some watching, checking emails etc, before heading out around 11am or so.

Toronto, like most cities, has precincts or districts and the nearest to our apartment is one of its newest, Liberty Village. You can read about it on Wikipedia, but the area borders Fort York which was established by the British in 1793. (We are staying on Fort York Blvd). Its name comes from the name of the street, Liberty, which was the first street walked by those freed from the prison (which no longer exists). It was an industrial area and so the redevelopment has been largely based on using the old factory and warehouse buildings for – retail, art studios and galleries, restaurants, and accommodation. It’s apparently not without its detractors.

It was a grey, cool day, so first stop was coffee. As our chosen place was closed we ended up at a chain, Tim Horton’s, just so we could say we’d done that. Needless to say the coffee wasn’t great but apparently their muffins and donuts are a different matter. Sue wouldn’t know. We then wandered around the area, spying out the current “in” retailers. You know, the chocolate shops, tea shops, cupcake shops. There was a decent looking Cheesemonger too. And lots of restaurants and cafes. We chose Raaw Sushi for a light lunch. Nice teriyaki salmon, and Len enjoyed his plum wine, but the miso soup was a little weak and lacking in flavour. Decent value though for the money. It was served North American style, ie salad and soup components first followed by the salmon and rice, rather than in the Japanese lunch “set” style.

We then decided to go to the Art Gallery of Ontario. It was a long walk there, but an interesting one which enabled us to walk past Hannah’s place, and Chinatown.

Art Gallery of Ontario

It’s an excellent, and deservedly well-regarded gallery. We enjoyed it a lot. Why? Let us count the ways:

• apparently we are too young to count as Seniors but the official on the door said our ages “worked” for him;
• they had a beautiful espresso bar … in venue, quality of coffee, and friendliness of service;
• their collection and the curation of it is thoughtful, encouraging engagement with the works and ideas.

We started our 3-hour visit with the current special exhibition, Francis Bacon and Henry Moore: Terror and Beauty. We didn’t get the audio tour, which may have been a good idea, but the signage was excellent.

Bacon (1909-1992) and Moore (1898-1986) both, they said, distorted the human figure to express the violent realities and anxieties of the 20th century. It was a period characterised by war trauma, a new interest in psychoanalysis, and a shifting in religious and philosophical beliefs.

There were several statements by the artists around the walls. Bacon, an atheist and nihilist, is quoted for example, “My painting is not violent; it’s life itself that is violent”. He had survived, he said, Sinn Fein, the atrocities of Hiroshima and Hitler, and spoke of “the atrocious world into which we have survived.” Not surprisingly, as those of you who have seen his paintings will know, his work can be confronting.  Bacon is quoted as saying that he found literalness boring, so he kept “disrupting” it – as is obvious in his work!

One of the powerful works on display was his 1988 reworked “Second version of Triptych 1944“. There were gentler works too, such as his portrait of his last partner (platonic), John Edwards.

Sue was intrigued to read on the timeline provided for Bacon that the only formal art training he received was of short duration and from Australian artist Roy de Maistre (though the timeline didn’t identify his nationality.)

One of the quotes displayed from Moore, the humanist, was “Everything in the world is understood through our own bodies”. Sue has always liked Moore. While the figures are distorted, they don’t seem grotesque. A particularly poignant one in the exhibition was his “Falling Warrior“. It’s a good example, we thought of his humanity.

Moore grew up in a coal-mining family, with a father who was a committed socialist. He was an official war artist and, for example, sketched reclining figures in underground shelters during bombing raids. This clearly provided him with a lot of models for reclining figure sculptures. We have one outside the National Library of Australia. He said he’d never seen “so many reclining” figures. We enjoyed seeing some of these sketches because they reflect the contortions in his sculptures..

We could go on about this beautifully-executed exhibition, but we don’t want to overstay our welcome! After a great coffee in the espresso bar, we decided the logical thing was to focus the rest of our time on Canadian art, which we don’t know well.

The first rooms we saw were from the Ken Thomson Collection of Canadian Art. Thomson was a major benefactor, and it is his quote we’ve used for the post title. The full quote relates to his philosophy for buying art. It goes like this: “If your heart is beating, you know it was made for you”. We like that!

Thomson actively collected paintings from the 1920s by the Group of Seven. Their philosophy was that Canada couldn’t  establish real nationhood without first finding its voice in art. The Thomson collection (of these and other works) was intriguingly hung: in those rooms there were no labels, except for a large one describing the theme of each room. To identify individual paintings you had to pick up the spiral bound booklet in the room and match the thumbnails there with the images on the walls. We’re not sure we like that approach, and were pleased that it wasn’t followed throughout the gallery, but it does let the works stand on their own.

Again, this is getting too long to write much more, but there was a room devoted to displaying works by both the Group of Seven and artists contemporaneous with them. The latter were hung on sections of walls painted in a darker grey colour to make them easily distinguishable. In some senses the non-Group of Seven works, some of which were by women like Emily Klee, expressed a more questioning, less romantic perhaps, view of Canada. They also tended to be more figurative whereas the Group of Seven’s work was largely landscape or nature-based.

We saw other Canadian works too, but really, you are not here, we suspect, for an art lecture, so let’s move on.

Archive and Ursa

We met Hannah as arranged – after doing another quite long walk – at a wine and tapas bar called Archive near where Hannah lives. We all had a drink of our choice and chose three tapas – a hard goat’s cheese, and a duck and a pork prosciutto. You could order the wine, mostly, in 1, 3 or 5 oz glasses making it a true wine-tasting experience. In addition to our three wines – Hannah and Sue ordering 3 oz and Len 5 oz because they didn’t do Lambrusco in the smaller sizes – Hannah ordered a 1 oz taster of a wine style called Orange that she’d been recommended, but none of us were very keen on it.

After this pre dinner drink we headed off for dinner. Hannah’s first choice was closed so we ended up at another fine dining restaurant, Ursa, which is completely gluten-free. We had a really wonderful meal. Sue’s salmon dish included small cubes of brioche made with fava flour. (We tried not to think of Silence of the Lambs.) Hannah chose an entrée for her main course because it featured crickets and meal worms. Sue tried a meal worm but Len declined the offer. We shared a gorgeous dessert with meringue, apple, gingered apple puree and purple yam yoghurt.

And the slideshow* of our day …

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* We have not included close-ups of artworks for copyright reasons.