Double exposure
Published Saturday November 21st, 2009
Jim Stackhouse's long career split cleanly down the middle, his attention divided between the demands of commercial and fine art, although it's his graphic work the late Saint John artist is best known for. Now, two exhibitions in his hometown offer a window onto the quality and scope of his fine art practice
Spend a day in Saint John and you will likely encounter a design by the late Jim Stackhouse, whether it's the stylized "b" logo of the Harbour Bridge Authority, which won an international design award; the drawing of two young waifs he did for the Empty Stocking Fund, taking place today; or the original design for Loyalist Man, the city's iconic former mascot (although later changes to the design made him not want to be associated with it).
Less recognized than his commercial work is Stackhouse's fine art, especially his work in watercolour, his preferred medium, even though he spent an equal number of years at each. He made hundreds - if not thousands - of paintings during his long career and had several exhibitions in Saint John and one in New York.
"His life was divided between full-time graphics and full-time fine art," Jo Stackhouse, his wife of 55 years, says, adding that he always did at least a little of the other.
In 1973, after suffering a stroke at age 49, Stackhouse shifted the focus of his practice from commercial work to fine art, painting from his home on the city's west side until his death in January 2008, at times working from a bright, wood-panelled sunroom overlooking the Bay of Fundy.
Still, the stigma of commercial art as a lesser form followed him.
"It hurt him, but he knew it wasn't true. Or at least he hoped it wasn't true. So he had to fight against that."
Two current exhibitions offer ample physical evidence of his skill, showing the breadth and quality of Stackhouse's painting: A Celebration of Life and Art is on display in the City Gallery at the Saint John Arts Centre until Dec. 31 and Thirty-Five Years of Painting is up at Peter Buckland Gallery until Nov. 28.
"He wouldn't have gone," Jo says of the openings that took place earlier this month.
Gregarious and affable with friends and family, Stackhouse had a quiet side, his widow says, and shied away from publicity and self-promotion.
"He was very private, but loved people," his son Hank told the Telegraph-Journal soon after his father's death. "He was private about what he did, but absolutely loved to share it with people - not on a public scale, but a private scale. His art gallery was his house and those who knew and loved him gathered there."
Still, that doesn't mean Stackhouse wouldn't have been privately delighted to see so much of his fine art shown publicly in his hometown.
From an early age, his artistic ability was recognized and encouraged by teachers and family.
"Jim Stackhouse lived in the right place at the right time if you had the desire to become an artist and Jim did," Jo wrote in a biography for the exhibitions.
Born in Saint John in 1924, he was a contemporary of Fred Ross, Saint John's best-known living painter. As a student, he experienced what is considered the Golden Age of Saint John art, studying under some of the city's best-known painters, including Vi Gillett, Julia Crawford, Ted Campbell and Avery Shaw, at the Saint John Vocational School.
Miller Brittain lived up the street.
One of the few vocational students interested in watercolour, Stackhouse practically had Jack Humphrey to himself as an instructor. The two would go out to paint plein air, Jo says, with Humphrey working on his own paintings, offering occasional advice to Stackhouse.
"Jim was really thrilled when Jack said, 'Listen, you're on your own. I can't teach you any more.'"
Stackhouse's paintings show his strong sense of negative space, as he painted around blank parts of the page to convey sea foam and spray, clouds, snow, mist and sky.
"He thought in reverse," Jo says. "That was his big thing."
The Second World War took Stackhouse to St-Hyacinthe, Que., where he made instructional drawings for radar installations and gunnery controls for the Navy. He wasn't artistically idle during this time, creating a comic book that was distributed throughout the Navy, as well as drawing cartoons on untold seamen's duffle bags.
"Art was so much a part of him," Jo says. "Sometimes we would go to parties and he would ask if someone had an eyebrow pencil and paper and he would do portraits."
Stackhouse returned to Saint John after the war but was soon encouraged to seek work as a commercial artist in the big city.
"Don't you know anyone in Toronto?" Miller Brittain asked him.
He did, a friend from the Navy. A friend's mother financed his trip in exchange for some paintings.
He worked in commercial art during the day and taught drawing classes in the evenings. This is where he met his future wife, Josephine Castillou, one of his students.
"When I first met Jim, I could never figure out how he knew so much about such odd things," she says, including one time when he described the intricacies of a new curling iron. "Well, he'd illustrated it."
After six years in Toronto, he returned to Saint John with his bride. It was almost 50 years ago that they moved into their seaside home on Rocky Bluff Terrace, where Jo lives still. The house has a commanding view of Partridge Island to the left and, to the right, of Smuggler's Point, where American rum-runners loaded boatloads of hooch during Prohibition.
Stackhouse's resumé is long and varied. He did illustrations for the Evening Times Globe, was the first art director at the fledgling CHSJ television station, designed covers for the now defunct Atlantic Advocate magazine, and worked with Louis J. Robichaud to create the open door symbol that could help convey the sweeping changes the province's first Acadian premier's equal opportunity initiative would entail.
His corporate clients included Connors Bros., McCain Foods and Barbour's.
While K.C. Irving was alive, Stackhouse would design an annual Christmas card that the industrialist would send to Lord Beaverbrook.
Despite his shyness, he hosted a kid's quiz program, one of the first in the country, on CHSJ. Jo helped with the show, ringing the bell to signal contestants their time was up. He also hosted radio shows in the 1960s, including Sports in a Minute and The Maritime Farmer's Barn Dance.
"In those days, you really had to do everything, just to get a salary," Jo says.
Her husband took care to project a professional image, wearing suits and ties he had bought at Jack Calp menswear shop.
When he moved from graphic art to fine art following his stroke, "he couldn't just go bohemian," Jo says, although he did trade his tie for a scarf.
Among the 40 works in the Peter Buckland Gallery show are paintings made by Stackhouse soon after his stroke.
There are dreamy watercolour landscapes, bright pastel sketches and bold, at times surreal, acrylic canvases.
There are local seascapes and rivers scenes, paintings of area buildings and beaches, and those of the once-busy port and Saint John streets.
"He painted what he knew," Andrew Kierstead, gallery assistant at Peter Buckland Gallery and a longtime friend of the Stackhouse family, says.
The passage of time has lent historical value to some of the works that depict scenes that have changed dramatically. A pastel drawing from 1974 shows old brick buildings that were levelled for Loyalist Plaza, near Market Slip. Another, also from '74, shows a north end hillside dotted with billboards and colourful wooden houses where today tiers of condominiums perch.
While the works in the Buckland show, on display until Nov. 28, are for sale, those in the arts centre exhibition are on loan from collectors.
They are part of a larger project that Francis James, a young researcher and political science student, has undertaken to catalogue as much of Stackhouse's fine art as possible.
James has a general interest in art, but his connection to Stackhouse is personal. His grandparents were great friends of Jo and Jim, and he'd go over to their place for Christmas parties or accompany his father or grandfather on visits.
"I had always wanted to do something with Jim while he was still living," James says, with an idea to focus on Stackhouse's legendary talents among friends and family as a raconteur.
That didn't happen, but when Stackhouse died, James approached Jo about doing something to honour his life and work.
They thought of doing a project that would show both his commercial and fine art, but eventually dismissed the idea.
"How can we have that discussion when we don't even have a grasp of his fine art?" James says.
Jo provided James with a list of names and phone numbers of people she knew who had bought works from her husband. James has since been tracking down collectors. So far, he has found about 200 works, mostly from the greater Saint John area, and figures it is reasonable to assume there are at least as many more out there. (Anyone who has owns a Stackhouse work can email him at fjames@gmail.com).
The storytelling component of his original project idea survives in the City Gallery exhibition. Collectors were invited to submit anecdotes relating to a particular work or just about Jim in general. The stories are posted beside the works.
"I didn't want to put constraints on it, so the stories go every which way," James says, an apt tribute to a man who "always had time to talk."
Stackhouse had a sense of fun, too.
Two of James' great-uncles were Catholic priests in the north end. One day, in the 1960s, Jim and one of the uncles swapped clothes. "So Jim put on the white collar," James says, and his uncle donned the artist's togs. "They toured around the neighbourhood, with Jim blessing people."
As James's database has grown, he has been struck by the quantity as well as the range of styles in the works, which reveal Stackhouse as an experimenter who borrowed from other styles as he developed his own. Among the images James has collected is a Renoir-esque portrait, a Cezanne-inspired landscape and a seascape with a familiar swirling sky.
"He was looking at van Gogh that day."
Jo is donating half of the proceeds from the gallery show to Hospice Greater Saint John, an organization that eases the suffering of people who are sick, dying or bereaved. It's an act of appreciation, acknowledging the support she and her family received while her husband was ill, and following his death.
While Jo has been delighted by the exhibitions and by James's project, she was especially touched by the strong public demand for a limited-edition Empty Stocking Fund pewter ornament based on her late husband's design. The limited-edition item raised money for the fund, one of the oldest newspaper-sponsored Christmas appeals in Canada.
When the doors to the Telegraph-Journal offices opened at 8:30 a.m. on Nov. 6, more than 50 people, including Jo Stackhouse, crowded the lobby to get one.
All 2,000 of the $10 ornaments sold in just two days.
"I just thought, Jim was remembered,'" Jo says, "'and he did make a difference."
Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to Salon.
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