***June 2007*** |
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Frederick Horsman Varley
January 2, 1881 - September 8, 1969
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Frederick Varley was born in 1881, in Sheffield,
England. He showed a great aptitude for drawing when he was
young so he was enrolled at the age of 11 in the Sheffield
School of Art in Yorkshire, England. In 1900 he went on to
study as a student at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts
in Antwerp, Belgium where he excelled as a student and after
graduating went to work in London as a commercial illustrator.
In 1912 he came to Canada, where he found himself working
in the same commercial studio as Tom Thomson. With Thomson
and the others he took to painting Northern Ontario landscapes,
and also began to do considerable work as a portrait painter. |
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With the onset of the First World War
Varley served as a war artist, which had a great and profound
effect on both himself and his art.When he returned to Canada
after the war, Varley approached art as a spiritual vocation.
He found parallels between art making and other creative activities,
particularly music. From the early 1920s, he used colours
unconventionally in his art, particularly in portraits believing
that they conveyed psychological states, something he had
observed in the trenches. His interest in figurative art as
well as landscape set him apart from many Canadian artists
of his time.
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| In 1926 Varley moved to Vancouver to become
Head of Drawing, Painting & Composition at the newly formed
Vancouver School of Decorative & Applied Art(now the Emily
Carr College of Art and Design), he was at this time, one
of Canada's leading portraitists and a landscape artist full
of conviction and power.It was the landscape of British Columbia
however that was to have a profound effect on his life and
art.Varley, in common with most Post-Impressionist artists,
believed in addressing the landscape directly, and he found
a rich source of inspiration at his doorstep. A keen hiker,
he sketched in the coastal mountains near Vancouver, and painted
the lush vegetation, rugged terrain and effects of cloud and
sun as subjects.
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Though Varley was an excellent teacher, the Depression had meant
a reduction in his salary at the art school and he and his colleague,
Jock Macdonald, left in protest. Varley decided to open his own
school in 1933 and he founded the B.C. College of Arts, but his
artistic success was not matched by financial success, his venture
ended in financial disaster after only two years and he claimed
bankruptcy in 1935. |
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Although British Columbia and its landscape remained an important
reference for him, Varley was never to live in the province
again nor was he again to enjoy such a sustained period of
creativity. In 1938 his marriage also collapsed and he travelled
to the Arctic in the same year.The remainder of his career
was spent in Ontario and in Montreal, with visits to the Soviet
Union in 1954 and the occasional painting trip back to British
Columbia.
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The next years were difficult for Varley, most of them spent
suffering from alcoholism in Montreal. In 1945, however, he
returned to Toronto and slowly began to work again. He died
in Toronto in 1969.
"The artist's job is to unlock fetters
and release spirit, to tear to pieces and recreate so forcefully
that…the imagination of the onlooker is awakened and
completes within himself the work of art."
- Letter from Varley to his sisters Lili and Ethel,
February 1936
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