Speaking Likeness, A

By Joseph Plaskett

In this lavishly produced hardcover volume, Plaskett has created an autobiography as colourful as his finest paintings. Plaskett begins with his early family life in New Westminster, BC, relates his encounter with abstract expressionism under Hans Hofmann, and then discusses the development of his mature style. Included are an introduction by the late George Woodcock, some 30 full-colour reproductions of Plaskett's paintings and over 90 black and white photos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronsdale Press
• Release date: Sep 16, 1999
• ISBN: 9781553803089

Joseph Plaskett

Born in 1918 in New Westminster, British Columbia, Joseph Plaskett studied with some of the most prominent Canadian painters of the time. B.C. Binning, Jack Shadbolt, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson and Jock Macdonald all encouraged the young Plaskett to pursue his talent in painting. Plaskett’s early abstract paintings were influenced by Clyfford Still at the San Francisco School of Fine Art and Hans Hofmann in New York, but he soon moved beyond what he came to see as the sterilities of High Modernism. In Paris, in the 1950s, he created a personal style that provocatively returned to the Old Masters to incorporate a sense of Western history, but which gave a contemporary look and feel to his subjects.

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Vancouver                      

PART I

The Life

Joseph Plaskett, age three

1 The Setting

Ien Paris, nearing the end of a millennium, I look back across a lifetime — eighty years — to a distant place, a town in British Columbia, New Westminster, as remote from centres of civilization as a place can reasonably be, and to a distant time, the moment when I first drew breath and saw light — July 12, 1918.

I attach a pregnant significance to the fact that I was born before the end of the First World War. It was called the Great War, but how could any of its greatness have rubbed off on me? Early recollections survive of old soldiers telling stories of their war experiences. The first cartoons I recall were Bruce Bairnsfather’s of life in the trenches. (If you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it.) As my aesthetic conscience grew I was disturbed by photos of the ghastly destruction of Rheims Cathedral and the Cloth Hall of Ypres. (A generation later, Dresden and the Gothic hearts of German cities were completely destroyed, Coventry and London having suffered terrible damage.) My childhood and early youth were passed in the shadows of these tragic conflicts. Unspeakable as were the deaths of millions, far greater was my grief for the death of so much art. I eventually came to realize that the world I welcomed had changed utterly. I was left with a nostalgia for the past — which meant Europe, history and civilization. This may be a way of saying that I very early developed a romantic imagination. Dynastic empires and monarchies (except of course, for the moment, our proud British one) had perished, and it seemed that beauty, order and art had perished too. In time I realized that civilization is always in a state of perishing. I was left mourning a world I was never to see. Against this, my immediate environment was sunny and fresh. Being alive and young won out against the futility of nostalgia.

Mary Draper Plaskett, c. 1914

The Rev. Frank Plaskett, c. 1908

My family was almost totally unmilitary and suffered no losses. True, in the Boer War my uncle Joe, after whom I was named, had been, as a veterinarian, involved in the transport of horses to South Africa. My uncle Jack’s elder son, Harry, served in the 1914 war, before going on to become, like his father, a world-famous astronomer. But my generation was too young, or as yet unborn, to qualify as cannon fodder. During the Second World War, I craftily evaded giving my life for my country, or rather, for the extermination of diabolical Nazism. At age twenty-one I was called up, during the delirium of the phony war, for a month’s active service at a hastily arranged camp in the interior of British Columbia. It was a freezing December. After exercises in bayonetting a sack which we had to imagine was a man, we were herded back to overcrowded dormitories where influenza had already broken out. I succumbed to the ‘flu, but, as a shy private, it took me a long time to declare my illness. When I did, an insensitive sergeant accused me of malingering (swinging the lead). I finally defied him and was allowed to present myself at the hospital. So hastily improvised were the facilities, I had to wait outside in a queue for an hour in sub-zero temperatures. When my temperature was finally taken it was 105° Fahrenheit and I was supposedly near death. Instead of returning home for Christmas I remained in hospital. That was the end of my military career. I was considered too delicate ever to become a soldier and suffered no condemnation from society, white feathers having vanished with the 1914 war. Year after year as an ineffectual schoolmaster in a private school I received deferments from conscription until, on the eve of the time when I would likely have had to give up playing this game, the war ended and my hypothetically endangered life was saved for posterity.

War was happening far away. What was nearer was the church. My father was an Anglican vicar. The very fact of his profession saddled me with complexes which I carry to this day. I was acutely conscious that he wore a different kind of collar than any other father — clerically tagged a dog collar. The embarrassment I suffered because of this, however irrational, cannot be exaggerated. I was singled out and teased as preacher’s son, whether I was behaving or misbehaving. I learned to live this down, but my psyche was permanently afflicted.

Apart from such secretly deep derangements, my childhood could be described as idyllic. My father was a gentle and tolerant man. My mother seemed even gentler, but there was a toughness and resilience underneath her unaggressive exterior. If I now idealise her, it comes from a realistic knowledge of her strength. My father I began secretly resenting, embarrassed by everything he did. (What was I to call him? Daddy and Dad began to sound childish, Father too formal. I envied one family who called theirs Papa.) One such embarrassment was his appearing at the classroom door, bringing my lunch which I had forgotten. No other fathers invaded the school’s sanctuary; they were at work at the mill. It took me decades to learn to honour and love him as his parishioners did. To escape emotions I could not understand I retreated into a private isolation. I was unable to confide in my parents, though I remained dependent on them for far too long. I was dutiful and did most of what was expected of me, but they must have been mystified by what was going on inside my head. I realize now that, however close emotionally I was to my mother, I resembled my father much more. I remember it being said in the family that the Plasketts were placid by nature. We avoid confrontation. We are content to please, see no point in offending and indeed by a kind of natural simplicity, we succeed in pleasing.

I was early considered a dreamer, in retreat from reality and avoiding normal boyish contacts. I refused to be a Cub or a Scout out of an aversion to the colour khaki. This is my earliest remembered aesthetic judgement. I did not wish to be with other boys or to conform. I preferred to be lost in a book or idling my time writing and illustrating imaginary histories of kings and kingdoms that I could identify with and villainous enemies I could confront. Retreating to my bedroom I indulged my fantasies. It was weaning by imagination. It is the solitary child who becomes the artist or the poet.

I have been touched by two world wars. However much I was removed from them through my escapism, mistrust of ideology, loathing of all things military and at root an instinct for survival, they still continue a half century later to blacken my most secret thoughts. My youthful consciousness was also darkened by another malaise — what survives in memory as the Great Depression of the thirties.

The tracks of the transcontinental railways, the Canadian Pacific, the Canadian National and the Great Northern were within whistle distance of the church and the rectory. For years, as freight trains passed, we saw men on top, riding the rails, the unemployed, constantly on the move to find work. Every day the doorbell rang and my mother had to stop work and make sandwiches for a starving migrant. We might have thought of them as hoboes and tramps, but they were only helpless victims of a social order that had come to pieces. The tramps knew they could be sure of a handout from a parson’s house. Respectable parishioners were out of work not only for months but for years. My father took a cut in salary from $1800 to $1200. My uncles, most of whom had gone to the U.S.A., prospered, though I remember my Uncle Fritz losing a fortune, which he quickly made up. We were the poor relations. We didn’t suffer hunger or starvation, but nonetheless we suffered a mental deprivation. My generation inherited a poverty-stricken attitude to money, a factor that governs our psyches as powerfully as sex. I inherited two crippling inhibitions: about sex from Anglo-Saxon puritanism and about money from the spectre of poverty. For decades I was penny pinching. Like the unemployed at the vicarage doorstep, I came to be psychologically dependent on handouts.

Jack and Joe, 1923

I grew up in the suburb of Sapperton in the town of New Westminster, and this was a special and peculiar place to be nurtured in. Once capital of the province it had, in the previous century, been demoted when the separate colonies of Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia were merged and Victoria won out as the new capital. The pride and heritage of New Westminster was soon humbled again by the rise of the new city of Vancouver, only twelve miles away. Transcontinental railways located their termini at the sea port rather than the river port. New Westminster was by-passed. Even in the Anglican church the cathedral had been moved to Vancouver and the outraged citizenry had to be mollified by letting the older church retain the title of Pro-Cathedral. Civic pride was touchy. The city had been named by Queen Victoria herself, who settled a quarrel as to whether it be named Queentown or Queenston by choosing another name. Forever after, because the Queen had named it, the town has been referred to, at least by its citizens, as The Royal City.

Sapperton was littered with vestiges of former importance. At the doorstep, almost, of the vicarage in which I grew up was the site of the former government legislative buildings, now transformed into a federal penitentiary. Even closer was the old see house, the seat of the bishop of New Westminster. This was now a boarding house, run by a Mrs. Tyler, and it was in this boarding house that my father lived until he married my mother, who sang in the choir of his church, St. Mary the Virgin. By that time the old vicarage, where I grew up, had been built, or acquired. In childhood I looked out from it onto pastures where cows grazed and beyond them, on the right, to a complex of old ecclesiastical mansions: the already mentioned see house, St. Mary’s Mount, where the Marquis of Lome, Governor General of Canada and his wife, a daughter of Queen Victoria, had once stayed. On the other side of the field that led downhill to the church was the Archdeacon’s mansion, a Victorian Gothic pile, which by the time of my early childhood had been converted into a halfway house for Japanese immigrants and had become, by the building of numerous shacks and a Shinto temple, an entire village. Behind the old vicarage were a few acres of primeval forest and the city’s cemeteries. We children played in the bush, the cemeteries, the fields and also by the Fraser River, almost a mile wide at this point and only ten miles from its mouth. In its tributary, Brunette Creek, a fleet of fishing boats was moored. Adjacent were the Brunette lumber mills, where spectacular fires occasionally destroyed gigantic structures and singed the paint on St. Mary’s church, not too safely distant. Our childhood companions were children of fishermen, mill workers, or guards at the penitentiary, whose walls and metal fences were adjacent to Mrs. Tyler’s boarding house. These families were working class and just as likely to be Roman Catholic, Baptist or Methodist as Anglican. Traces of the British class system lingered. Anglicanism was more posh. I was, however, unaware of racism. As there were no Jews, anti-Semitism was inconceivable. In this working class suburb we were on friendly terms with Japanese neighbours, though the Chinese and Sikhs (whom we erroneously called Hindus) seemed remote and strange. But already, in the thirties, WASP bigots were at work to create a racist society. This exploded with the Second World War, when these bigots eagerly seized the property of Japanese citizens after they had been sent to remote concentration camps.

The Old Vicarage, c.1923

The wireless was just beginning, television not even dreamed of. My father had a motor car, a Model-T Ford, but hardly any of his parishioners had one. There were not even buses. It was the age of the electric tram, the trolley. Chinese with baskets suspended from a pole on the shoulder sold fish from door to door. The breadman came each day to sell bread. Food was cooked on wood-fed kitchen ranges. Refrigeration was unknown — there was a cooler in the cellar. Life was primitive by today’s standards, but comfortable.

Such was the setting of a childhood which may have been no more (or no less) fortuitous than many another. Tragedy struck, however, when my brother, older by a year, died of a ruptured appendix at the age of fourteen. I was left in the perplexity of a vacuum. So-called sibling rivalry, strong when a brother is only one year older, complicated the emotional attachment. Intellectually brighter, I had advanced into the same class as Jack, and when the move to high school came, I chose the more prestigious Duke of Connaught High School, whereas Jack, to my father’s chagrin, opted for the technical school. Death intervened before he began. His genius was in acting. We belonged, thanks to our aspiring parents, to a club. Every fortnight, we met and performed selections from Shakespeare’s plays. Jack was brilliant at these. Yet at the time of his death he was regularly visiting the fishermen on Brunette Creek and wanted to go to sea, to be a sailor. His temperament was the opposite of mine. At the time he died we were hardly buddies; I might even have been glad to be rid of a rival and pursue my independence. Yet Jack comes back to haunt me in dreams. As I age he keeps reappearing, in a benevolent