Portrait of the artists father

Charles Barker, 1924

11 x 15 " Signed E Barker Top right

Drawn at 15 years of age

 At the age of 11, Conyers broke his arm badly whilst skipping with the girls in the playground at school and had to spend two months at home in a cast. It took two operations to repair the fracture. But spurred on by his father, self tutoring him at home, he began to study landscape paintings made by a man called Willy Drake, then a well known set painter at the theatre where his mother worked and he was prompted to assiduously copy them in watercolour.

 Often accompanying his father to the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) he developed a keen interest in art and was especially drawn to the vitality of the early works of the group of seven.

So with a fresh insight and a brand new interest, Conyers began his studies in art, enrolling at the Central Technical School, alongside Tom Roberts, York Wilson and Jean Dallaire. The place had a fine reputation for teaching the subject. Which is not surprising, with tutors like Lawrence Panton, Alfred Howell, Bernard Coghill and Peter Haworth, a fine watercolourist as mentors. Latterly Conyers schooled under the acclaimed Canadian landscape artist Frederick Henry Brigden at the old Ontario School of Art.

The earliest image of Conyers Barker ,drawn by James Milton Hanes. Signed and dated 26.

 Above: Inscr. Plate 1. September 17.1924. Sig. E Barker.

Watercolour Still life. Conyers at the Central Technical

School. He would have been 15.

 Conyers graduated in June of 1927 from art school at the age of eighteen and of course did sketches all through the summer time, watercolours entirely, as he searched in vain for work as a graphic artist. With no vacancies anywhere in Toronto, he became a commercial artist doing photographic re-touching, being paid eight dollars a week for British & Colonial Press and Batton Limited when the firm was taken over. It was here that he worked alongside a British artist called Reg Capel, who was ultra critical of Conyers unique and nonconformist style and not at all appreciative. However both he and Conyers' boss taught him to concentrate harder on his retouching work and to not overlook anything that could improve the work and that was to have a profound effect on his painting, always looking to improve what he'd done and not overlooking anything important to him.

 At 17, Conyers had won a competition to exhibit at the Art Gallery of Toronto.

Conyers Barker
An Agonquin painting trip in the 20's

  Typically, Conyers always had done and always did do his own thing, never conforming to the norm in the shadowy days of his struggling early career. Then very much painting in the manner of the Canadian Group of Seven, much as the art world demanded and not painting what others around him thought or told him he should paint. He was to develop a unique style that extracted only the essentials. The shapes and colours from the landscapes he favoured. But as a result, he sold barely enough to live on and often went hungry.

 Despite the crippling disabilities he suffered daily as a result of contracting polio as an infant and suffering constant bullying at school, Conyers worked assiduously throughout his life, especially up in the Northern Ontario woods, wetlands and forests of Algonquin Park. Following in the footsteps of his boyhood hero and earliest artistic influence, the great Tom Tomson. 

His leg iron wouldn't stop him and to Conyers, the shorter leg was just a hindrance.

Always the free spirit, he would drive into the wilds alone, often for days at a time with the help of a trusty block of spruce wood lashed to the accelerator of his old Ford car and learning to brake, sometimes the hard way, with the other foot. This was a classic Conyers invention, compensating for the shortness of his polio stricken leg.

 The artwork he produced flowed and his independence shone as he always did and it would to the end.

 Yet Conyers' principal ambition, particularly during his middle years, was to become the finest abstract artist in Canada but this too was not to materialise. Primarily this has to be put down to the development of his new distinctive style of realism which overtook him with a passion. It is this unique quality in his painting that brought him at last some long deserved commercial success and a little public recognition but that was late in a career as an individualist.

 By the fall of 1928, Conyers was working hard at his job and painting all weekend, but by now going out with other artists such as Richard Walter Major whose criticism of his work he did accept.

It was now that Conyers started painting seriously in oils for the first time.

  On his return to Toronto he teamed up with four other graphic artists he'd got to know whilst at Batton's, as they had suggested he did some freelance graphic work and use part of their studio and office space situated on the corner of College and Bay street in Toronto.

One of Conyers first jobs was to design a chocolate bar wrapper, then making illustrations for the Salvation Army children’s papers and that got him into the Sunday School papers for the United Church - Horizon Press in the 1930`s.

This though too was short lived as his illustrations were so dramatic that one of the editors, a Miss Swinerton told Conyers that she didn't have any more work for him... and the reason? He'd over powered the stories with his illustrations!

Some notoriety but not yet fame.

Conyers Barker was elected to the CSPWC

 In November 1931, Conyers Barker was elected to the distinguished Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour.

 Sponsored by Lawrence Arthur Colley Panton O.S.A., R.C.A. (1894-1954), his old tutor, Conyers submitted a large painting of an old abandoned mill on the Rouge River with the interior and the scenery in disarray, (Long lost) along with another 3 or 4 smaller works to the committee, comprising of F.H. Brigdon, A.J.Casson, Arthur Lismer and Tom Maclean. (Thomas Wesley. McLean 1881-1951 CSPWC MSA)

Arthur Lismer OC

(1885 – 1969)

Alfred Joseph Casson, (A.J.) Casson

OC.RCA OSA CSPWC CGP

(1898 – 1992)

Frederick Henry Brigden

RCA OSA CSGA CSPWC (1871-1956)

Tom W Maclean CSPWC MSA

  Sometime during 1935, Conyers met a girl named Rosanna White and had a year long romance, but then met Margaret Mudge who he later married on June 17th 1937. Honeymooning briefly in the Muskoka lakes, Conyers did the obvious and went off sketching and painting again. They returned to Toronto and borrowed a car from her father and set off to Virgil in Niagara on the Lake to stay with friends.

 It was at this time that Conyers first read a book by Reginald Howard Wilenski, an English painter, art historian and art critic known for his book the Modern Movement in Art (1927).This was to have a profound effect upon both Conyers and his painting.

Newly introduced to artists like Cezanne, Gris, van Gogh and Matisse in this way, Conyers at last realised that the cocoon of art he was trapped in, governed entirely by an inescapable appreciation of the Group of Seven, was entirely wrong. He should and could be individual.

In Conyers own words, "That was a turning point in my whole work concept."

 Concentrating mainly on oil paintings during this time, he was producing stronger, quite realistic images, but found them burdensome and too traditional. On one occasion when painting an old elm tree and dissatisfied with the traditional rendition, he scraped it out, but the image didn't disappear from the artists board, so he created an abstract in its place. Something unique had happened.

There was a change coming in other ways too.

 Dominated by her mother and somewhat difficult to handle, Conyers told me that his wife Margaret visited the downtown studio one day from their apartment and decided to have a bath, delivering a chilling ultimatum.

"If we don’t go to the country and live, I will go out in the street just like this, naked"  she said.  So Conyers lost not only the war to stay in Toronto, but lost that battle too.

 Collecting as many paintings together as he could, he held a dollar apiece sale and raised $115.00. That's about seventeen hundred dollars by today's standards and back then, that was quite a nest egg. 

 So Conyers and Margaret moved up to Kings city near Schomberg and occupied a house that her sister and husband had rented from the Jarvis family on the Jarvis estate, called Jarver creek, where they lived for about a year.

Sadly the marriage was not to last more than 2 years and much, much later, it was finally dissolved.

Jarvacres, Jarvis Estate, King City, 1939, by Ernest Conyers Barker
Oil on panel

 The fact his marriage broke up was a very traumatic time for Conyers. He was struggling with feelings that he was no good as an artist and no good as a man either. He told me he just drifted along and didn't do any interesting work at all and did no painting whatsoever.

  Two years on and seeking relief from the unhappy marriage he'd had with Margaret, Conyers created his 'Nirvana' paintings, describing his approach in an interview with the Globe and Mail in 1975 thus:

"I cut the sky out entirely and extracted only the essentials shapes and colours from the landscape.

I was trying to be quiet and peaceful, but I wasn't free."

Cemetery, Port Dalhousie, Ontario.

Oil on board -signed lower right; dated “July 1939” and signed and inscribed “The cemetery by the Canal at Port Dalhousie"

E C Barker

 Conyers moved back to Toronto to his parents home, only getting an occasional job in an engraving house, drawing various objects for a catalogue, so he made a meagre living trying to work as an artist or designer, until one day he was offered a job doing woodcraft operating a jigsaw, making packing components for freight boxes to house ammunition and shells for shipping to the war in Europe.

 Moving from there was bliss. Conyers was employed for two years as a teacher of woodcraft, design and painting at the Colonies Boys Club at the old Trinity College on Queens Street, which he thoroughly enjoyed. It was after all the art he loved.

Conyers sketching in Algonquin park.

  Bill Saxton an old artist friend, suggested to Conyers that he got a more reliable job alongside him working at the United Steel Corporation in the west of Toronto, as they were recruiting.

USC were making machinery at the time also for the war effort which was being shipped to Russia, so photographs of the products they were manufacturing had to be re-touched professionally and life turned full circle again for Conyers.

  Bill had told him that he had been attending a night class in Metaphysics in Toronto at  110, Oakwood Avenue and there was a wonderful teacher there called Doctor Harold Saint Nicholas Cartier, a talented black pianist and composer from Jamaica.   Bill said it would be good for Conyers to mix with new people.

So Conyers went with him one Sunday night and began to attended the meetings regularly, even asked to illustrate a choral piece that Dr. Cartier had written called Brittanic Heroic: Subtitled, 'Grand fantasy on the battle of Britain.'

It comprised of a picture of Britannia in the middle with a lion pouncing on a tiger. The tiger representing Hitler and the lion representing Britain. Naturally, Conyers obliged.

  Margaret Baker, who he met at one of the Metaphysical groups picnics then came into his life.

A new love with two daughters of her own, Dr Cartier was not impressed or pleased that Conyers was 'walking out' with her and that they were both missing classes, or being late for them making him stop his oratory. For reasons best known to himself, the orator started to become more and more intimidating, where it got to the point that Conyers felt he even was afraid to take a glass of water without his permission.

Conyers had finally had enough.

 One evening, he had his father drive him up to Oakwood avenue where the meeting was in full swing, unloaded the painting from the car, put it on the verandah and went inside.

When the meeting was over Conyers went up to the man and said. "Your painting's outside"

"I'm leaving your class" and left .

 Conyers told me that just maybe he might have been a little louder than usual but it seemed to work as it was like bombshell going off, with Doctor Carter, obviously embarrassed in front of his captive audience, quite taken aback and with the the room now totally silent, said and did nothing.

 The relationship with Margaret flourished and Conyers visited her apartment on Huron Street regularly, cooking dinner for her and the girls.

It was at her suggestion that Conyers applied for a more fitting job for his talent, working at Imperial Oil as a designer in the advertising and printing department. It was a job in which he was successful and he would be ultimately transferred to the safety department, making posters, letter size for all the programs that the firm had instituted.

For the first time in his life Conyers was earning a good salary and Margaret moved in with him permanently.

 At that time, Conyers lived about four doors away from his parents in an old office building which he had partially converted into a studio and living quarters. It was here that they decided to buy a property of about 8 acres, some 5 miles outside of Stayner and Margaret moved in there while Conyers stayed on in Toronto at the studio and worked at Imperial oil, commuting north at the weekend by train.

But something dark was looming.

 He had no idea why, excepting it was really all his own fault that bad feelings developed between Conyers and his father.

Starting ridiculously, as these things so often do and with no real rhyme or reason, one morning Charles came to pick up his car from the studio driveway where it was always parked. Conyers greeted his increasingly difficult father with his usual chirpy "Good morning Dad" but the old man just kept his head down and ignored him completely. Conyers took offence that he was in such a bad mood and instead of pressing on to see what the problem was, it was ignored. Conyers went to work and never spoke to him again.

The close proximity to his parent house got much too much for him and he left Toronto.

 With little money, Conyers Barker gave up a perfectly good job and moved to Stayner and Margaret. He worked his land and took any work he could. At first making a sparse living doing sign writing for shop windows and painting advertisement above the stores, even painting the sides of vans, the first being a bakers wagon. He told me, "all I had was five dollars and the materials cost me that !"

But he hated the work. In his own words it felt as though if he painted any more vans he'd die as he wrestled with the fact that he might even be schizophrenic. His behaviour was such that he tore up a lot of good work because he felt he had become mentally unbalanced.

So between 1946 to 1952 Conyers now permanently living in Stayner, did no painting at all.

 Conyers also had to live with the fact that he never knew that his father was so ill, it was true he'd smoked too much during his life, but took to drinking heavily in his sickening years,quickly going down hill. At 72, he suddenly died. No one told Conyers and he never went to the funeral.

* * *

 In about 1952 however, Conyers was approached by a friend and began teaching art at evening classes in nearby Collingwood at the Collingwood District Institute of Art. The same year, he finally resumed his own painting. Telling the Globe and Mail:

"Painting is a life force you just can't contain. Creating the picture is all that matters."

He'd found himself again.

 In December 1975, Conyers got ahuge break and met the successful gallery owner Olga Korper, who put on a retrospective show of his works at Gallery O, now called the Olga Korper Gallery, then situated on Markham street in Toronto and it almost sold out, making $19,500.00.

 "Some of the paintings were from the twenties and thirties," said Ms. Korper, the gallery's owner in an interview of the day. "They had one foot in the contemporary world and one foot in traditional painting.... They were very experimental and progressive in many ways.

 In an explication that accompanied the show, Conyers Barker described an experience while painting himself:

"I felt that I was only holding the brush and that an unseen power was painting the trees for me."

  The retrospective was one of several shows over the next few years held at Gallery O and this led to many more exhibitions, including participation in group shows at Harbour front in Toronto, the Guild Gallery in Calgary and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and also solo shows in Toronto and Florida.

The Curator from the Art Gallery of Ontario then bought an abstract for the gallery, so Conyers gave the AGO a small watercolour called 'The Rouge River, east of Toronto.'

"Geometric Abstraction" Artist: E. Conyers Barker

(Canadian, 1909 - 2003)

Date: 1938 Medium: oil on board

Credit: The AGO: Purchase, 1975

 Conyers admitted that during the turmoil years, he had certainly lost ground and also felt he had lost belief in himself. That his interpretations had become old fashioned and very uninspiring in his own view.

  But there was a show to be held at this time at the National Gallery in Ottawa they were going to also show it over in Britain. So Conyers set to, busily doing work on the weekend, but, fate stepped in again and they wouldn't be accepted.

Although Conyers had been painting for over fifty years, it seemed he hadn’t found that something he'd been looking for, until Conyers and Ina went down to Barbados and he did ten paintings of the Caribbean Sea. (1977)

Here there was a real revelation:

 Conyers said that he was just gazing at the sea in Barbados and had an epiphany. There were bars of colour receding to the horizon. So instead of recreating the scene in his traditional, realistic manner, he painted it in horizontal bands.

Barbados: Watercolour. 1977

Conyers Barker

Exh MacClaren Arts Centre

Retrospective: December 2, 2017 – March 4, 2018

 Conyers felt that, that very fact seemed to release the spark that had been buried for such a long time and he came alive.

The paintings he had created in the previous fifty years were in many ways interesting to him, but this was all new. Earlier in the 1970’s he had started to paint abstracts and even tried his hand at doing some scatter work. Partly influenced by Jackson Pollock.

 Presented to HM Queen Elizabeth II by the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour in 1986, was a juried water colour painted by Conyers called, “Overlooking Cookeʼs Bay, Lake Simcoe, Ontario”, RCIN 926162. A view across snow-covered fields to building and hills beyond. A landscape made up of strips of graduated colour. Signed  lower left, which was taken into the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

 Conyers was a proud, proud man and Ina was understandably over the moon !

At last he had arrived.

Ernest Conyers Barker

West Hill 1929 ORO-

Oil on board.

Ernest Conyers Barker

'Sanctuary'
Oil on canvas board.

"The Old Docherty House 4th Concession - Nottawasaga"

Towards the Blue Mountains, September

Conyers Barker

Watercolour with pen and ink

10 1/4 x  7 1/2 " 260 x 194 mm.(approx)

Eight Pines

Watercolour

At Clear Lake initialled ECB Signed verso and titled. 87

 Conyers painted many works in the areas surrounding the Holland Marsh and Holland Landing near Bradford, Ontario.

They are fresh and quite captivating images.

Golden Autumn

Winds over the prairies 1979.