Aged discoveries
Published Saturday July 4th, 2009
Eighty-five-year-old Jim VanWart couldn't have chosen a hobby further from his career path. The retired pharmacist from Edmundston, who once toiled in precision, now thrives in the abstract, seeing and capturing in photographs the beauty and elegance of discarded metals.
After making a quick introduction and exchanging brief pleasantries at Jim VanWart's red-brick home in the Edmundston suburbs, the interview proper starts at the junkyard.
The retired pharmacist is clearly at home among the meandering corridors of crushed cars and towering heaps of twisted metal. He comes here a couple times a week, his Kodak Advantix film camera in hand.
The junkyard employees who use huge machines to sort dented appliances from uncoiled mattress springs and scrap metal don't question VanWart's presence; they are used to seeing him pull up in his old, beige Toyota, and wander the property scouting for shots.
"Things change here all the time. Look at these piles," VanWart says, gesturing at the mounds of rubbish. "This is a big, big operation."
The junkyard's size means there is no end of subject matter for the 85-year-old amateur photographer, who documents the aging process of metal - the breakdown of paint, the oxidization of surfaces and the interplay between colour and texture on old cars, dumpsters and other scrap.
"You add corrugation to rust and you've really got something," he says.
"I'm constantly fascinated by what is out there and what people don't see. It is all about observation. You can walk all over and not see anything."
VanWart's "little hobby," as he calls it, has taken quite a leap of late, as 28 of his junkyard images are on display in the lobby gallery in the City of Edmundston's town hall. While the junkyard is the theme of the show, the subject matter is not readily apparent in the shots, which are mostly close-ups of rusted and peeling metal.
"I just love abstraction," VanWart says.
Corrosion is his first solo show. It opened June 25 and is on display for the rest of the summer, and VanWart is delighted by the debut.
He is also grateful to Edmundston artist Vicky Lentz, without whose curiosity and persistence the exhibition would not have happened.
"She didn't know me from a hole in the wall in February," he says.
The two met this winter after she noticed him a couple of times on the rough gravel road in front of her rural home and studio, which are tucked away in a maple grove in Saint Jacques, just outside Edmundston.
"There's not a lot of traffic, so it's very unusual to see someone you don't know," she says. "I would see this older man, driving really slow, looking around."
When she noticed him checking out items she has photographed herself, including an old, peeling delivery truck that had been abandoned in a local field, her curiosity was piqued.
"So I called him."
Lentz asked if she could see VanWart's work. He was more than pleased to share his stacks of eight-by-10-inch prints - some of his favourite shots he had processed at Staples for 99 cents each.
They aren't of the quality of the high-resolution 12-by-16-inch glossies that are in the exhibition, but they were enough to give Lentz a good sense of his skill.
"When I saw them, they just blew me away."
She was impressed by his eye, and how he captured that vision on film.
"It's just the sheer process of looking around and taking pictures," she says. "He really sees the beauty of things at a really fundamental level."
She marvels at VanWart's intuitive sense of artistic elements, such as colour, composition and balance, especially since he has no formal training.
"Everything you learn about in art school, he has in his work," she says. "He has no influences. It's just his own particular way of seeing the world."
VanWart has bought exactly one book on photography in his life, written by internationally renowned New Brunswick photographer Freeman Patterson.
"I enjoyed it and then I put it on the shelf and haven't looked at it since," he says.
There isn't a photography club in Edmundston - if there was, he would probably join, he says. In the absence of a club, he learns by doing, walking the junkyard or bombing around the backroads of Edmundston looking for inspiration.
"I go very slowly. I'm retired - I'm in no rush."
He is selective about what he shoots.
"Some afternoons I go out for two or three hours and I don't take a single shot," he says. "The picture has to suit me. I just go with the ones I really like."
Whether his subject is man-made or natural, his primary attraction is the same: "It is all colour," he says. "I have always loved orange, it is one of my favourite colours. Orange and rust and such."
Rosalie, VanWart's wife of 51 years, is astounded at what he finds. "That he would see all those colours in a dump!" she exclaims, bustling into the comfortable sunroom off the couple's kitchen after returning from visiting a friend.
"I'm not artistic," she adds.
While she makes dinner, he tickles the ivories in the living room, playing songs by ear, as his wife asks him to set the table.
"Jimmy, you're just playing the piano and being charming," Rosalie, a firecracker nine years his junior who is a crack bridge player and consummate hostess, says.
"You told me to be charming," he counters.
"I got her on that one," he says as an aside.
Before the opening, or vernissage as it is called in the predominantly French city, he jokes about the fuss around the show.
"I'm the Susan Boyle of Edmundston, but I can't sing!" he says, a broad grin on his face.
When asked if she thinks all the fuss will go to his head, Rosalie purses her lips and shakes her head.
"No," she says. "He is too old."
While she cooks dinner, he takes out an old album of photos he took when he was a kid. Along with shots of his neighbourhood pals horsing around are black-and-white studies of his family members, including a portrait of his mother and a shadowed profile of his sister.
He took the shots with his first camera, a Kodak Baby Brownie he got when he was 12.
"I remember it well," he says.
While his mother painted in her spare time - VanWart figures any creative leanings he has come from her - his early artistic experiences were almost non-existent.
As a student at Mount Allison University, where he studied science, his roommate mentioned that the fine arts department was looking for models for life drawing.
"I went up there and I took off all of my clothes and modelled," he says. "That wasn't very serious on my part."
He went on to study pharmacy, following in the footsteps of his father, who founded VanWart Drugs in Edmundston in 1918. His family is unique in Atlantic Canada, he says. Father and son and both of their wives were pharmacists.
In their house are mementoes from the old dispensary, including old glass jars with bevelled stoppers, the medicine's name inscribed in a pretty script surrounded by gold flourishes.
While VanWart did buy an expensive 35mm camera in the early '50s, running the business and raising a family - the couple has three grown children and four grandchildren - kept him busy.
It wasn't until he retired in 1998, closing the doors to VanWart Drugs, he picked up his camera again.
"I found my focus kept shifting from barns to all sorts of things in the country. And then I found junkyards, and I never looked back."
When Lentz saw his work, she liked his landscapes and rural studies, "but they are not particular to him."
When she proposed he have a show, she helped curate a selection from the more than 3,000 shots he has taken over the last 10 years.
"It had to have some focus."
She was drawn to the "microcosms" he see in the junkyard, in peeling layers of paint, rivulets of rust and deposits of tar, and suggested that as the show's guiding principle.
Lentz is a great champion of the Edmundston arts scene and a consummate organizer - the perfect person to take on the work of arranging the show, such as paperwork, co-ordinating the matting and framing of the work, and even helping to determine the price of prints of the works in the show.
"Vicky leads, and I follow," VanWart says.
Corrosion is the first time he has offered his work for sale.
"I haven't made a dime, haven't sold a dime's worth."
The only other time his work has been displayed in any kind of public way was when his youngest daughter, who lives in Germany, enlarged two of his images to wall-size in the studio she opened in Berlin.
VanWart was amazed to see his shots reproduced on such a huge scale.
"I stood there and I looked and I thought, 'Holy cats!' I couldn't believe it." While Lentz calls VanWart's photography a ritual, "a quiet, continual practice," he simply describes it as a wonderful hobby, one that gets him out of the house year-round.
"I go out in the four seasons," he says. "In the middle of winter, when it's 20 below, I still go out."
He doesn't name any of his works, has never written an artist's statement and doesn't call his photography art.
From a career that is all about accuracy and rigorous process, his approach to photography is relaxed almost to the point of being laissez-faire.
"It is the total opposite," he says. "Pharmacy is totally precise."
"I applaud people who put a lot of effort and use all the photography equipment you can buy and put that to good use. Photography is very complex if you want it to be complex, and simple if you're like me.
"I hate to say it, but I think I am a lazy photographer."
Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to Salon.
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