As a young teen, David Douglas used to ride his bike into the Kitchener countryside looking for images to paint.
He packed paint and water, a sketchbook, and a 35mm camera, along with a sandwich.
He looked for properties that had telephone lines, indicating the inhabitants were not Mennonite. The Mennonites would not have a pick-up truck to give him a lift back to town. If he saw something he wanted to paint, such as a tractor in a field, he would knock on the front door and ask for permission to enter the grounds.
On one of his excursions, he went into a shed with one family’s kid and found a painting of trilliums on a piece of wood.
“And in the corner, it had AJ Casson,” Douglas said.
He went home and declared he’d seen an AJ Casson. His father doubted him, but his mom asked him if he thought it was indeed the work of a famous Group of Seven painter. He did. She encouraged him to phone the Art Gallery of Ontario.
After discussing the painting with a key staff member there – who said Casson was at the AGO that very day – the woman said that based on the description, it was definitely one of Casson’s early silkscreen works. She was also very interested in the fact the teenaged Douglas was a watercolour painter.
“I went off on my tangent about my watercolour painting, and efficiency of brush, laying down washes. She said ‘this is so exciting’.” Next thing he knew, the woman gave him Casson’s home phone number, saying, “he’ll really want to talk to you. He loves kids and you’re just exactly who he wants to know exists because he’s worried about the future of watercolour in Canada.”
So, Douglas called him up, and they chatted for about 30 minutes. Douglas said “we talked about the difference between being an artist and painter, our favourite colours, painting on location and using quality materials and even about Haliburton County,” where Douglas cottaged and Casson had been to as a painter.
The two exchanged phone calls from timeto-time over a number of years. Douglas is just now (some 50 years later) talking about his connection with the artist, who died in 1992 as it’s only now dawning on him how special it was.
Douglas is just back from Halifax, Nova Scotia where his painting, My Pine Tree’s Legacy, is being shown as part of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour (CSPWC) 100th anniversary juried show. Casson is one of the founders of the CSPWC. There were more than 300 entries and 40-plus were selected.
Douglas, who has been living on Redstone for close to 20 years, and prior to that, cottaging on Gull Lake since 1956, added, “I’ve always been a painter in watercolours.” When it comes to his subject matter, Douglas says, “the strength of most of my work is – if I don’t have a story, or it hasn’t got something underneath it that’s really worth telling – I generally don’t paint it.”
He tells the tale about the painting now in Halifax, and how, at the age of eight, he saved the five-foot, half dead, pine tree from people who wanted to break it up and burn it. The tree still stands today: a 75-foot legacy (still half dead on one side).
My Pine Tree’s Legacy and the work of 40-plus others are on view at Teichert Gallery in Halifax until Oct. 2. It’s all been a bit of a full circle moment for Douglas, who said “I think AJ would be pleased that the CSPWC is 100 years young and that I had one of my watercolours chosen to be part of such a huge celebration. He was such a wonderful person to know.”
Douglas is at cre8tivewrks.ca
