By Amanda Happé

Travelling down Dovercourt Road near Dundas Street West in the fading sunshine of last Friday evening, a familiar shape caught Torontoist’s eye. In the middle of a front lawn stood four CN Towers. While the material was different (wood, not concrete), the context was different (residential, not civic), and the scale was certainly different (the tallest a litle more than six feet in height, not 1,815.4 feet), the form was unmistakable.
The towers were the centrepiece of a casual street-side sale by Dovercourt resident Arthur. A sculptor who works in a variety of materials—he makes intricate carvings in Tagua nuts—Arthur recreates this very familiar landmark in his west-end home.
Working as a food stylist, he developed a talent for shaping and creating three-dimensional forms, and so he began sculpting about ten years ago. When asked what inspired him to make the CN Tower, he responded effortlessly: “The CN Tower! I watched them build it. I grew up here. I was away from Toronto for seven years, working at a luxury hotel as a chef, and I sort of missed Toronto. When I got back, I started.”

The artist and his towers.

Turned on a lathe, the towers are made from reclaimed lumber. “It’s old wood; it’s found wood. It’s not new, and there’s a difference. You can tell. The grain is tighter, and it has some colour to it,” Arthur explained. Turning these towers is an ongoing but labourious passion, “It takes a lot out of you.”
His choice of subject matter is not hard to understand. For anyone who has spent time away, missing Toronto, the sight of the CN Tower is likely one of the most powerful signifiers of home. As photographer Derek Flack recently demonstrated in a photo essay on BlogTO, the city just isn’t the same without it.
Arthur creates his versions of this familiar landmark by working from photographs, memory, and from life: he can see the tower out of the windows in his home. In a city full of activity and stimulation, artists don’t have to look too far for inspiration, and sometimes it’s downright hard to miss.
Photos by Michael Chrisman/Torontoist.