Toronto Book Awards 2002 short list:
Joyce Wieland: Artist on Fire
by Jane Lind
James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers
This biographical information and excerpt is posted courtesy of James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers.
Joyce Wieland: Artist on Fire
Joyce Wieland: Artist on Fire is an intimate biography of one of Canada's best-loved and most influential artists, a woman who was at the centre of a flourishing visual arts community in Toronto. Drawing on extensive interviews with Joyce and her friends, family and fellow artists, as well as over ten years of research, author Jane Lind captures Joyce's colourful personality and offbeat life in print.
Lind reveals the turmoil of Joyce Wieland's childhood and teens, chronicles the wild jazz parties and gallery openings of the fifties and sixties, and discusses Wieland's long, troubled marriage to fellow artist Michael Snow. Her richly productive career is also fully described and considered, and more than 50 of her best works are reproduced in colour. When Wieland rose to prominence in the sixties, she was the only recognized Canadian woman artist. As she continued her exploration of women's experiences in her paintings, films, and collages, the artist became a trailblazer for generations of women who followed her.
Jane Lind
Jane Lind is an editor and sculptor as well as the author of books, essays, and reviews. Among her publications are books on Mary and Christopher Pratt, John McEwen, and Gathie Falk in the Canadian Artists Series. Jane has had solo exhibitions of her sculpture, taught about art in school programs and studio situations and been the recipient of Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants.
Joyce Wieland: Artist on Fire - excerpt
"Joyce's unconventional way of doing things was not affected. She was not just adopting a bohemian style; rather, the way she lived was completely natural to her; it was who she was. On the other hand, Joyce did sometimes fool people with fantasies she turned into stories and told as though they had actually happened. Her friends sometimes differed on the truth of her yarns. One such example is her story about running away to Buffalo to join the circus, which Sylvia thought could have been true. A business card stuck in her journal reads, "in person Joyce Wieland CLYDE BROS CIRCUS The World's Greatest Panoramic Circus Spectacle." It was the kind of thing she would have had printed for a joke.
According to Sylvia, Joyce identified very strongly with Giulietta Masina in Federico Fellini's La Strada, a film she went to see repeatedly. She looked like Masina, with her blonde bangs, round face and sad, kohl-lined eyes. In La Strada, Masina plays Gelsomina, a fey, waif-like girl who works in a circus. In one scene Gelsomina sits on the sidewalk, feeling abandoned, bent over with her head resting on her knees and cradled in her arms, a scene that echoes Joyce's memory of herself as a child sitting on a curb along the street, dejected, feeling wretched and not knowing what to do. "She had that sad wanderlust, was in her own little world," Sylvia said.
In the 1950s, Toronto had a reputation for being stodgy and dull. Perhaps it was, but a number of artists set off a chain reaction of energy that changed the city. The critic and writer Robert Fulford characterized the 1950s as "the most creative years in the history of central Canada, a time of risk and high ambition."
