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Dodging, head tilted, eye cocked, slipping, shuffling, dancing, impatient to be at his work, my father made his way to the current site. As he went, his eyes darted over potential pictures everywhere about him, "...antennae working like crazy", as Allen described it. "Only connect" was his favourite motto, and everywhere, as he looked, he saw associations. Having given up hope of ever travelling, he searched for foreign-ness everywhere. Working at Frank Hillock's lumberyard, in the heart of the old Chinatown, which was torn down in the sixties to make way for the new city hall, he noted: "It felt like a Japanese Shinto temple with its massive round uprights and heavy square cross beams." As an admirer of Venetian and Florentine approaches to architecture, while he was sketching Loretto Abbey, which was being replaced by a newspaper building, he could easily imagine being in Italy or Rome.

 

There often was something of a carnival element to these noonhours, when the people whom my father was capturing in his sketches gathered around him to observe his work. Responding to his interest in their surroundings, they became engaged in his work as they watched him reproducing theirs. He did protect himself by insuring that he could work with his back to a wall or tucked in a niche, anywhere people couldn't distract him by looking over his shoulder. Nevertheless, he couldn't resist reaching out, teaching, learning, sharing observations, joking with the same wry wit his teacher, Arthur Lismer had used at O.C.A..

 

Often though, he went alone, working down deserted back allies. And there would have been a magic then too, in seeing this strange, slight, wiry man leaning against a column, drawing and drawing. With his pictures, he could become the custodian of his memories. It was as if somehow, by sketching, he could stave off the ruination of the lovely. Among these pictures there is one where the figure of a shabby but mocking knife grinder rests against his apparatus, staring at a deserted street of ornamented row houses. The scene appears more like a set, really, and I have wondered if this solitary grinder, Everyman, observant but detached, someone who in his life hones and renews, might not have represented my father, the journeyman artist.

 

Meanwhile, at the same time as this street theatre took place, he was intent on capturing the armouries, the old city hall [illust - one of Ken's Toronto Drawings] where his grandfather once had worked, synagogues and churches, and rows of decaying, ornate houses, which were now being devoured by looming, impersonal concrete structures. These drawings are full of movement and strength. Always, nature and human life swirl through them, claiming the buildings for their own. Pigeons circle above towers, pollarded willows (as gnarled as his arthritic hands were becoming) screen a decaying house, a feathery sumac struggles up the side of a building from a crack in the pavement. In my father's Toronto, buildings were in proportion with trees (and people) and trees were an essential complement to architecture. And there were also clouds, vapourous or billowing. There is the insistent vitality, which was so lacking in the buildings which were supplanting his city. Ragged urchins and dogs run yapping down the streets; a wind rushes through the pictures, swirling banners and awnings and catching at clothes.
 It was at this time, while he was searching out architecture to draw, that he began his caricature sketches of the city's people. Swift sketching served as a warm-up for his more serious work, and he knew that he wanted a repertory of figures that he could add to his pictures, but mostly he caricatured because he found gesture irresistible. He made himself hand-sized pads of cheap paper, stiffened with cardboard, partly out of the ever-present need to avoid waste and partly to suit his purpose. Pursuing an intimacy he could only achieve if his subjects were unaware of his gaze, at last he had found a way to come close to people without them even realizing he was there. Furtively sheltering his tiny notebook in his hand, and using a short, fat, soft pencil, he began a candid, rollicking Tristam Shandy-type of sketching everywhere he went. One minute he would be chaffing with the wreckers, or delving into their equipment; the next he would whip out the sketchpad. (He showed me how he rested it on the inside of his wrist and flattened the angle of his favourite pencil so that he could work unnoticed.) During morning coffee break he caught secretaries gossiping; on the train home he pencilled in an exhausted stockbroker sprawled yawning across his seat; in Grange Park (the hub of his territory) he drew tramps arguing, a portly, puff-cheeked tuba player, clusters of the down-and-out gesticulating over cards, children splashing each other at a drinking fountain. In this way, as his pencil groped for their truth as a blind man's hands read a face, he was able to achieve an extraordinary intimacy.
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