Gerald Squires
By putting his province on the canvas, Gerald Squires helped
put Newfoundland on the map
Renowned Newfoundland artist Gerald Squires always claimed to show
himself in his paintings, but it is Newfoundland - in all its rugged, enduring
majesty - that shone through in his work.
A prolific painter, sculptor, lithographer, and stained glass
artist, Squires passed away from cancer in 2015 at the age of 77.
An ardent advocate for ‘The Rock’ – as Canadians affectionately
call the country’s easternmost province - he believed that something special
was lost when Newfoundland joined Confederation in 1949.
“We are only now beginning to get our dignity back,” he told
journalist and fellow Newfoundland native Sandra Gwyn in the mid-1970s.
In an article in the Globe and Mail following his death, Newfoundland
writer Joan Sullivan credited Squires with playing a key role in restoring that
dignity.
“Always absolutely recognizable, over time his art became more
representational. The more realistically he painted landscapes, the more the
work came to represent Newfoundland itself.”
Plans for a comprehensive exhibit of his work at The Rooms
Provincial Art Gallery in St. John’s were already in the works when Squires
died. Spanning six decades of work, and titled Spirit Visible, the exhibit
features 130 pieces, ranging from 18-foot paintings to sculpture, ceramics and
drawings. With the help of Squires’ wife, Gail, the gallery was able to
negotiate loans of many pieces from private collections.
“These works were chosen to represent his versatility and
technical range, his connections with his community and above all, his
expression of spirituality through art,” notes curator Caroline Stone.
Born in 1937 in Change Islands - a tiny, remote outport
community on the northeast coast of Newfoundland - Squires’ parents were
Salvation Army officers. Nothing in his early childhood foreshadowed his
becoming an internationally-known artist.
“Art needs to be bought, therefore we need wealth,” he said
during a 1987 interview with Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador. “However, wealth
didn’t really exist in Newfoundland then - we were simply too poor.”
Finances were so challenging, in fact, that Gail Squires remembers
they gave once Squires’ father an unframed painting because they could not
afford to frame it.
“Quite pleased to get it, he happily stood it behind his stove
to serve as a grease-catcher. I saw Gerry’s mother use a few of his paintings
to prop up a bed as well.”
As a teenager in Ontario, Squires began to study art and was
increasingly fascinated by the works of great painters. He left a newspaper job
to bring his wife and two young daughters to Shoal Brook on Newfoundland’s west
coast in 1969.
“We opened a gallery and, amazingly, there were a few people
who bought art from us, back in those days of making bathtub gin and scratching
by,” recalls Gail.
The family eventually moved across the island to an abandoned
lighthouse on a stretch of land jutting two miles into the Atlantic. It was
there, in Ferryland, that daughter Esther Squires says that she and her sister
Meranda “pretty much grew up under his easel and it was our happy sense of
normal.” She now realizes it was often her mother’s pottery work that paid the
bills in those early days.
As Squires’ work, including The Boatman and The Ferryland
Downs series, gathered attention, he was invited to tour and exhibit
internationally. The Boatman is often interpreted as a protest against the
provincially-mandated closing of isolated outport communities, and his painting
Uprooted is seen as a metaphor for the Newfoundland experience.
His riveting depiction of the 14 Stations of the Cross, the
Last Supper, The Crucifixion and Resurrection - commissioned by a St. John’ s
area church - was a project that fed his life-long spiritual search. As he
often did, he chose Newfoundlanders as his models; a southern shore fisherman
helps carry the cross and his daughter Esther appears as St. Veronica, while
the path to the crucifixion is a road through Ferryland.
A tribute to his enduring influence, Squires’ life and work is
now the subject of a major retrospective book by retired academic Stan
Draglands. As well, a deeply evocative film
by Newfoundland writer Kenneth J. Harvey - I heard the Birch
Tree Whisper In the Night - captures Squires’ struggle to complete his last painting,
while discussing the artist’s quest, spirituality, mortality, and his impending
death.
That two-panel canvas sits, unfinished, in Squires’ Holyrood
studio.
“It is very dark,” says Gail Squires. ‘You can see death in it.”
A family-run gallery on Prescott Street in St. John’s continues
to preserve and promote Squires’ lasting legacy.
