A portrait of artist Tony Urquhart from 1989.Michael Torosian/.
Tony Urquhart grew up in a funeral parlour in Niagara Falls, Ont., and became a prolific artist, creating haunting works that evoke absence, memory and death yet always affirm the power of life and joy of looking. Mr. Urquhart, who was 87, died Jan. 26 in Peterborough, Ont., owing to complications from a fall.
Anthony Morse Urquhart was born April 9, 1934, the son of Maryon (née Morse) and Archer Urquhart. His mother’s family owned a funeral parlour, which his father helped manage, and Tony grew up in the warm embrace of his grandmother, mother and Scottish nanny, Effie, who stayed with the family long after he and his brother, David, had grown.
Before the Morse family arrived in Canada in 1821, they had been cabinet makers in upstate New York. Since cabinet makers also made coffins, in the 19th century the profession was often combined with that of mortician. Tony’s grandmother Mayme, who inherited the business at her husband’s death in 1937, was also an enthusiastic gardener. The family greatly encouraged the creative spark in young Tony, who began drawing at the age of 4 or 5. They were people known for their gentle and generous ways, and the recently bereaved were their regular visitors. (Although Morse and Son is now owned by different family, it is still in business, the oldest funeral home in Canada.)
“He had a life-enhancing childhood, full of love,” said his wife, the novelist Jane Urquhart. “Death was ever-present and it simply was not viewed in a negative way. … The presence of death also meant the presence of creativity for Tony.”
A Box of Keys from 2017.Nicholas Tinkl/© Estate of Tony Urquhart/ Courtesy of James Rottman Fine Art
As a young man, Mr. Urquhart chose to study art – but not far from home. He commuted daily from Niagara Falls to nearby Buffalo, N.Y., to study at the Albright School of Art, run by the Albright Art Gallery, before completing his degree at the University of Buffalo. He also attended summer school at Yale University.
Although he emerged from a place and a family steeped in North American history, it was the new art that caught his attention. In those years, the collector Seymour Knox was buying work by modernist artists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko for the Albright Gallery and would show them to students at the school. (Mr. Knox’s donations would reshape the institution, which reopened as the Albright Knox Gallery in 1962.)
In keeping with that enthusiasm for American abstract expressionism, Mr. Urquhart began his career as an abstractionist – and a successful one. He was already winning prizes in his early 20s including a Canada Council purchase prize, and regularly visited New York, the booming centre for abstract expressionism in those years. Several New York dealers were interested in representing him and fame beckoned, but he chose to stay home instead. He also married locally in 1958: His first wife was Madeleine Jennings, a Niagara Falls school teacher.
Along the Road, from 1975. Painted wood, porcelain, glazed ceramic, plexiglas, glass, dried flower stems,Craig Boyko/© Estate of Tony Urquhart/ Courtesy of James Rottman Fine Art
“He was a very courteous man, very kind. He was not a self-promoter,” Jane said. “He had enough self-knowledge as a very young man to know he would happier in the funeral home with Effie and his mother and grandmother. He understood where he needed to be to make art – and that was not New York City.”
Besides, if Mr. Urquhart was a proponent of modernism, his own art soon departed from the fashionable abstraction of the day, increasingly incorporating recognizable imagery. His big paintings of the 1960s sometimes featured large, globelike shapes, a reference to the nuclear threat, says art historian and former Canada Council director Joyce Zemans, who has written about his work.
“He was always marching to his own drummer,” she said. “He seems to have realized right away that he could take elements of [it] but that he couldn’t just do abstract expressionism, that he needed to introduce time and location.”
Representational content began to appear increasingly in his work and in 1965, as he rethought landscape painting, he began the experiments with three-dimensional pieces that would lead to his signature boxes.
“In 1964-65 I had stopped painting on a large scale and had begun doing three-dimensional work including some small six-sided cubes. These had gradually developed into larger but non-opening landscape derived boxes,” he wrote in 2007 as he invited galleries across the country to show the Urquhart boxes in their collections simultaneously to celebrate the work’s 40th anniversary.
“I took a month-long tour of the Continent, where I was inspired by the pilgrimage churches of Bavaria. I was impressed and astonished by the lack of differentiation between the 2-D and 3-D. Often sculpture was white (mostly stucco) while paintings erupted and climbed over walls in three dimension[s]. Above all I was moved by the altarpieces (paintings when closed, sculptures when open) and their ability thereby to deal with several emotions, colours, forms and spaces within one work of art.
“On my return to Canada, I took a small box on which I had been painting a sea-related abstract, and cut four doors into it. In the interior I then built rocks and waves effectively creating a sort of 3-D replica of the 2-D exterior. Since then I have not ceased to work in this format, attempting to refine and experiment with an endless series that has enabled me to explore both emotions and plastic solutions that I cannot achieve in other mediums.”
Inspired by these altarpieces and the reliquaries he had seen in European churches, and perhaps channelling the cabinet-making skills of his ancestors, Mr. Urquhart began to fashion increasingly complex multimedia sculptures with small doors, wing-shaped panels and cagelike structures. Mounted on perfectly turned wooden pedestals, they opened to reveal painted landscapes or miniature interiors fashioned from found objects such as shells, feathers or scraps of wallpaper.
Weather, oil and collage on gessoed board, from 1999-2000.ELISABETH FERYN/.
The works grew out of observing the landscape but were skillfully crafted by the human hand, combining nature and culture in one work. Like his later paintings, elusive representations of landscapes, cages and graves, the boxes are unique and haunting in the way they suggest the preservation of memory, the inevitability of decay and yet also the possibility of fertile regeneration.
“They are intriguing and they are never fully resolved,” Ms. Zemans said. “Every time you open another door you see something else.”
Mr. Urquhart’s idiosyncratic style was utterly individual and largely outside the main directions of contemporary art.Courtesy of the Family
By the late 1960s, Mr. Urquhart’s idiosyncratic style was utterly individual and largely outside the main directions of contemporary art, with its emphasis on abstraction and then pop art, yet his work as a teacher and as an enthusiastic supporter of his fellow artists was seminal in introducing modernism into Canadian art schools and to the Canadian public. He was one of the first artists in the stable at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, where dealer Av Isaacs introduced a sleepy and conservative town to hot new art. Mr. Urquhart had his first solo show there in 1957, when he was only 23.
In 1960, he finally left Niagara Falls – and his makeshift studio in the sunroom where his grandmother did the business accounts – to become the first artist in residence at the University of Western Ontario. He soon became a key figure on London’s art scene, working alongside such artists as Greg Curnoe and Jack Chambers to promote a thriving regional centre. With Mr. Chambers and artist Kim Ondaatje, he helped establish the Canadian Artists Representation (now CARFAC), an artists’ union that worked to establish exhibition fees for their work. (After Mr. Chambers’s death, Mr. Urquhart and Ms. Ondaatje were recognized for this contribution with a Governor-General’s Award for Visual Arts in 2009.) Mr. Urquhart also acted as curator for the university’s art gallery, the McIntosh Gallery, where he organized shows for local artists, and he helped the university to establish a studio art program.
He and Madeleine, mother of his four elder children, separated in the mid-1970s and he moved from Western to the University of Waterloo in 1972.
It was at an art opening at Waterloo in 1974 that he met Jane Keele, as she was then called, someone who had also encountered death at a young age, widowed at 24. Jane had returned to the nearby University of Guelph to take a few art history courses in the difficult months after the car accident that had killed her husband, an art student named Paul Keele.
His work as a teacher and as an enthusiastic supporter of his fellow artists was seminal in introducing modernism into Canadian art schools and to the Canadian public.Nicholas Tinkl/© Estate of Tony Urquhart/ Courtesy of James Rottman Fine Art
The young widow and the kind art teacher never looked back: They were married in 1976 and their daughter, Emily, was born the following year. The Urquharts lived first in Waterloo and eventually settled in Wellesley, a village between Kitchener-Waterloo and Stratford, in a house where Mr. Urquhart built his first proper studio. His children, and ultimately his grandchildren, were always welcome there: Art was a part of daily life for Mr. Urquhart and he was drawing constantly.
“He would draw while I drove the car; he would draw at the dinner table, he drew in front of the TV. It was how he saw the world,” Jane said.
With their fine lines and poignant atmosphere, these ink drawings, representing his grandmother’s garden, a pile of rocks on the road between Stratford and London, abandoned famine cottages in Ireland, or cemeteries in France dotted with gravestones, were the simplest and most direct statement of his themes, his aesthetic and his remarkable talent.
After his retirement from teaching in 1999, the Urquharts moved to Colborne, Ont., and took over the 200-year-old house where Jane’s mother had been living until her death. Mr. Urquhart, who was named to the Order of Canada in 1994, continued to make art daily despite being diagnosed with dementia in 2017. His continued output was the subject of a study of artists and aging The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father, and Me written by his daughter, author Emily Urquhart.
In 2021, he moved to the St. Joseph’s at Fleming care home in Peterborough and spent his last year there. Raised in proximity to death, he was a creator filled with life, and spent his final months sitting at a window drawing.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Urquhart leaves his children, Allyson, Robin, Aidan and Emily; grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his son Marsh.