When telling the story of the Holocaust, one effective way to overcome our sheer inability to comprehend the scope and scale of such atrocities is to zoom in on one or two stories: share one particular experience, in all its brutal specificity, and we have at least a small way into the event—the small details illuminate the larger whole.

One theatre company from the Netherlands, Hotel Modern, takes a related approach in KAMP (CAMP). The production depicts a typical day at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but instead of zooming in into a closeup, it shrinks everything down, literally, into miniature. It’s the accumulation of thousands of small details that has the impact in this case.

Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. Find something great? Email vandalist@torontoist.com.

The monster in pieces. Photo by Beth Kates.

If you’ve ever been to the Distillery District, you remember it: the faceless, 14-foot-tall Lovecraftian horror that crouched near the intersection of Gristmill Lane and Parliament Street. The steel sculpture, Koilos, by artist Michael Christian, had only been in the spot since 2009, but had already become a neighbourhood fixture. Now, it’s gone.

Reader Beth Kates, a Distillery resident, spotted Koilos being disassembled and loaded onto a flatbed truck on Monday. Despite its terrifying appearance, the sculpture had an eerie beauty that made it popular with photographers. Because it was so large, it was also inviting as a makeshift jungle gym. Damage done by climbers may have contributed to its removal.

Koilos in happier days. Photo by tonalmotion, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

During a phone call on Tuesday, Distillery District spokesperson Mathew Rosenblatt said Koilos was removed at Christian’s request.

“The artist didn’t think it was doing well in the climate,” Rosenblatt said. “As well as just the wear and tear on it over the last few years.” The work was first installed at Burning Man, an annual festival that takes place in the arid Black Rock Desert, in Nevada.

Koilos was on loan to the development companies that own the Distillery District. They had the option of buying the sculpture, but, according to Rosenblatt, they opted not to. “If we were to keep it here, it would end up being destroyed,” he said. It wasn’t immediately clear where Koilos is headed now.

There are two other works by Christian in the Distillery District, both of which will remain. Rosenblatt said the Distillery is on the hunt for something to replace Koilos, but hasn’t settled on anything yet.

UPDATE: May 16, 2013, 2:40 PM Rosenblatt now tells us that Koilos has been sold to a new private owner. It will be moved to a location somewhere in Muskoka, where the artist believes it will be spared further damage.

Trashswag founder Gavin Cameron with his “doordrobe” made from savaged doors.

A giant moustache, a solid-wood rocking chair, and a colourful checkers table are all lying abandoned on a Toronto street near you. Or at least they were at the time this article was being written.

By now they’ve quite possibly been snatched up by a local artist or designer who spotted the items on Trashswag and raced back to their studio to turn them into something more eye-catching.

Trashswag, a Toronto-based website, has garnered attention for the way it gathers crowdsourced information to alert residents to discarded items left on city sidewalks. But it isn’t attracting droves of dumpster divers or students scavenging for freebie bookshelves. Instead, it’s Toronto’s artistic community that seems to be embracing the site’s green, philanthropic vision.

The site’s founder, a web analyst named Gavin Cameron, got the idea after a summer job at a lumber company, during which he came to appreciate the aesthetic and financial value of reclaimed wood. “I started to notice there was salvageable stuff everywhere,” he says.

Using an open-source mapping platform called Ushahidi, he developed an app that allows people to share and map pictures of wood, bricks, and architectural salvage like doors and windows on Twitter, using the hashtag #Trashswag. Users can also now contribute photos on Instagram. Unlike similar online services—like Craigslist’s “free” section, or Freecycle—Trashswag doesn’t rely on people to advertise their own items. Instead, it enlists anyone with a smartphone and an eye for useful junk.

It isn’t difficult to repurpose quality materials, Cameron says. An enormous wardrobe made of old doors and lathe, which takes pride of place in his bedroom (partly because it’s too heavy to move anywhere else), involved a hand sander, a drill, and some brackets.

But it’s not all about DIY. Creative types are also using Trashswag for purely artistic endeavours. Leslieville-based fine artist Matt Durant used the site to find an old tabletop at Bathurst and Dundas streets. He turned it into a painting he now plans to sell.

Artist Matt Durant, with his painting made from a wooden tabletop.

He says: “I work a lot with resalvaged wood. With the tabletop, you could see a lot of layers in the wood, and sanding it in a particular way revealed a plethora of colours.”

“It made me think about what stories it could tell. That’s part of the passion for me: the human intervention, the dents, people doing different things with it.”

Ryerson University design student Harry Dieu, along with his classmates, used Trashswag to source pallets and tree stumps, similar to that in the picture below, for their graduation show.

Ryerson student Harry Dieu sitting on a tree stump in front of his final year design show plan.

“Previous shows have been very wasteful,” he says. “Last year we’d created a wall of paper that just ended up in the garbage. We felt bad about that and wanted to come up with a solution where materials were salvaged or could be [recycled].”

Many of the materials for the show were found near the Ryerson campus; others were lent to the university by Evergreen Brickworks. After the show, some of the pallet boards were given to Habitat for Humanity to use in the construction of affordable housing.

Despite Trashswag’s appeal, it isn’t a money-making scheme—yet—even though Cameron says he’s received supportive emails from as far away as Australia and France.

“I don’t know what form monetization would take. There are a few different options,” he says. “At the moment, it’s not a priority. The site’s implicitly anti-consumerism and anti-corporate, so it would be very difficult to put on an annoying banner ad.”

“Right now, I’m concerned with the role of the community. It’s difficult to get people to contribute to the map as well as take things from it,” he admits.

As for where to find the best swag, he suggests the west end (and particularly Roncesvalles). He also recommends keeping an eye out for renovations on 100-year-old houses.

“It’s about being responsible with waste, but having a bit of fun,” he says. I’ve made connections with people and would like to grow a community of people who work together on projects.”

Kids of Kaleidoscope.

Arts education is vital for individuals and communities, but it isn’t always a funding priority. Enter Kaleidoscope, an after-school program that launched in January 2012 under the auspices of Scarborough Arts. Its mission: to connect kids in Scarborough’s priority neighbourhoods to music and art, using five years’ worth of funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

“The goal is to connect communities to artistic experiences,” says program coordinator Tamla Matthews-Morgan. “And those communities tend to be school communities.”

At each elementary school Kaleidoscope is involved with (there are five, so far—all in Scarborough), the organization brings in about five different artists over the course of five weeks. The artists work with students in grades 4 to 6, many of whom may not otherwise have access to art education. Each school group collaborates on a final piece of multimedia artwork.

Tamla Matthews-Morgan and students.

Matthews-Morgan, a professional dancer, who also holds a bachelor’s degree in education, is responsible for hiring the artists. One of them is photographer Kat Rizza, whose relationship with Kaleidoscope began three years ago, when she was brought on to assist with a related project (Creative Mosaics) as a research assistant. Her role was to find out, from members of the surrounding community, which kinds of arts programs were in demand. Eventually, she transitioned into her current role as a Kaleidoscope artist-educator.

“I’ve seen all angles of this project,” Rizza explains. “I’ve seen it from its infancy, planning how it would be run, to seeing the artists actually facilitating the workshops with the kids.”

Both Rizza and Matthews-Morgan get their share of hands-on arts instruction with the students, so they see the transformative impact of the program firsthand. Matthews-Morgan recalls one boy who initially appeared serious and withdrawn, but eventually proved to be a superstar dancer. The boy’s class crowned him “Dance King,” and his teacher was stunned.

“He [became] a completely different child,” says Matthews-Morgan. “Now, maybe he was that child all along, but he didn’t have the opportunity to get out and shake a leg and have the class cheer him on. Those are what we call ‘Kaleidoscope moments.’”

“I love watching the kids be extremely creative,” says Rizza. “I just love the way they will take a small amount of instruction and completely just run with it and come up with things that you don’t really expect them to. They always impress me.”

Photos by Kat Rizza.

Queenie Chow and Maria Khan work on their mural.

The course, called Step by Step, is one of many programs run by Mural Routes, a mural-art nonprofit. Participants met on Saturday mornings during February and April to learn everything about how to make a mural, from the initial design stage, to the layering of colours, to brush-stroke techniques.

“This has been a really encouraging group,” said Tara Dorey, program coordinator, her jeans splattered with paint and a blue smudge on her nose. “This group that’s here today, they are the consistent group that has comes out every Saturday. They’ve all been a really positive contribution to the class. It’s been really exciting to see such a variety of people get along so well and use their strengths to help people out.”

At the final class, participants worked in pairs on miniature murals, many of which were on themes related to the environment. Queenie Chow, a high-school teacher, painted wispy clouds on the mural she was making with her partner, Maria Khan, a 19-year old OCAD student. Their painting consisted of a rainbow-coloured sky, representing the transition of seasons from winter (dark purple) to fall (yellow and red).

“There are a lot of hands-on opportunities here,” Chow said of the program. “[Instructors] Rob and Tara have been great at teaching us techniques and building on top of them week by week. What really surprises me is how mural art affects a community.”

The murals the students made in this final class are being used as inspiration for a painting that the Mural Routes team will be putting on the interior of the rainbow tunnel, located near Lawrence Avenue and the Don Valley Parkway. Many of the students wanted to incorporate rainbow colours into their design.

Shannon Foster worked on her creation with Emily Harrison, who will soon be an OCAD freshman. Their mural contained a menagerie of urban animals in a wilderness setting.

“I went and scoped the area myself, and there’s a lot of wildlife down there and a lot of beautiful trees, so I thought it would be really cool if we incorporated that while keeping almost a surrealist feel,” said Foster as she painted part of the sky deep red. “That’s why we’re using the bright colours, to pull out the natural things from around it. Plus, I liked using the rainbow colours from the actual tunnel, so it keeps in sync with it.”

The mural course was about more than just how to make art. It also taught participants about how public art can enrich a community. “I’m planning on being an art therapist,” Foster said. “So I’m planning on having art in my future a lot, and I like the idea of working in a community. I think that would be really good for me, if I keep doing this and keep up the mural-making tradition.”

Hosna Sahak—who, at 14 years old, was the youngest person in the room—was grateful for the chances the course had given her. She plans on being an engineer, but says she would love to be involved with community murals on a volunteer basis.

Mural Routes will be starting on the interior of the rainbow tunnel soon and hopes to have it completed by July. The contributions of the Step by Step students will be integral to its design.

“I want these pieces to be there,” said Dorey. “They put so much work into it and a lot of these participants have never been in any kind of art show in a professional setting, so it would be huge.”

Photo by Chris Riddell/Torontoist.

Dolls by Viktor&Rolf will be on display at the ROM as part of Luminato 2013. Photo by Peter Stigter.

2012 was Jorn Weisbrodt’s coming out as a major player in Canada’s artistic community. It was his inaugural year as the artistic director of Luminato, the annual “festival of ideas and creativity.” He was the face of the event, but most of the programming decisions had been made well before he took over. The 2013 edition, as Luminato CEO Janice Price pointed out at today’s lineup announcement at the Sony Centre, is the first festival created 100 per cent under Weisbrodt’s supervision.

As far as changes go, first off, plain old “Luminato” is now “Luminato Festival.” The signature blue background on the publicity materials has been swapped out for a palette of pastel rectangles. Weisbrodt called the new colours “childlike,” which he says represents the way good art should make one feel—like a child experiencing a new sight, thought, or feeling for the first time. Whereas he compared last year’s festival to a storm crash-landing in downtown Toronto, the 2013 festival, which runs from June 14 to June 23, is more like a playground, with its heavier elements offset by more lighthearted projects.

Some of this year’s programming had already been announced, like The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, a biographical theatrical production directed by Bob Wilson (who is returning to Luminato after presenting Einstein on the Beach last year) starring Willem Dafoe and Abramovic, the renowned performance artist, herself. Also previously announced were the Atom Egoyan–directed Chinese opera Feng Yi Ting, Mark Morris’s acclaimed dance show L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, and Joni: A Portrait in Song, a tribute concert in honour of Joni Mitchell’s 70th birthday, featuring Glen Hansard, Rufus Wainwright, and Chaka Khan.

But today we heard more details about other elements of this year’s Luminato Festival.

For one thing, Luminato has a new partner in the New York Times, which will pair several of its journalists, like John Rockwell and Jon Pareles, with artists, like Atom Egoyan and Bob Wilson, for on-stage interviews. Also, the festival’s usual literary schedule is being revamped into a Literary Picnic in Trinity Bellwoods Park—a “book reading meets music festival” kind of thing. Toronto book lovers and aspiring writers can arrive with a blanket and food (or get something from the food trucks nearby) and a basket of used books, and can even sign up for one-on-one talks with several authors. Some writers attending will be Stacey May Fowles, Camilla Gibb, Daniel Karasik, Heather Birrell, Vincent Lam, Sheila Heti, Jessica Westhead, Lisa Moore, and Michael Winter. Weather permitting, this could be the highlight of the whole festival.

Another unexpected twist coming in 2013 is the food program. Luminato is transforming its 1000 Tastes of Toronto (arguably the 2012 festival’s most popular event) into Future Tastes of Toronto: At the Kids’ Table. Instead of Toronto restaurants showcasing their own food, 25 chefs will partner with students from grades four to six to create dishes they will sell for $5 each during the festival’s opening weekend.

Likewise, more “play” is coming to Luminato’s visual programming, including Dolls by Viktor&Rolf, at the Royal Ontario Museum, which will line a catwalk with porcelain dolls wearing miniature versions of outfits by designers Viktor&Rolf. Also bound to be entertaining is Stockpile, which will happen at Brookfield Place. A piece of performance art born out of Weisbrodt’s desire to lock a bunch of Canadian artists in a room together until they all agreed on an idea, the installation is described as “a life-sized rendering of the arcade-style claw machine game,” where the prizes will be objects donated by Torontonians, and the artists will act as the claw.

A different kind of “play” will unfold once the sun sets and Luminato’s beefed-up after-hours programming takes over. A highlight will be legendary Canadian puppeteer Ronnie Burkett’s The Daisy Theatre. Burkett has created an ensemble of 35 marionettes for nightly performances that will consist of improvisation, music, monologues, and new short plays by Daniel MacIvor, Brad Fraser, Anusree Roy, Chris Craddock, and Amy Lee Lavoie. The show will be staged at the Berkeley Street Theatre, along with Jason Collett’s The Courtyard Revue series, which will present a nightly surprise “wedding band” to accompany a lively dance party. (This is inspired by his successful Basement Revue at the Dakota Tavern.) Also part of Luminato’s late-night programming will be Kid Koala’s Space Cadet, a concert experienced through headphones and custom scents. And look out for British-German art collective Gob Squad and their guerrilla filmmaking project, Super Night Shot.

For Luminato 2013′s complete lineup, visit the festival’s website.

Revealing the Early Renaissance
Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas Street West)
March 16 to June 16
$25 adult admission (includes admission to the rest of the gallery)

As black smoke billowed from the Sistine Chapel on Tuesday, indicating that the conclave of cardinals had yet to choose a successor to Pope Benedict XVI, a little bit of the Vatican was unveiled at the Art Gallery of Ontario. A new exhibit, called “Revealing the Early Renaissance: Stories and Secrets in Florentine Art,” features work from the very beginning of the Renaissance, in 14th-century Florence. It opens to the public on Saturday.

The art featured in the exhibit—which includes altar pieces, panel paintings, sculptures, and illuminated manuscripts—was produced in a city that had recently become a trade hub. Suddenly populated by a wealthy merchant class, Florence was also wrestling with newfound anxiety. Its people created a great deal of extraordinary devotional art as a result.

The exhibit, over ten years in the making, was the product of a vast network of negotiations and generous lending agreements with other institutions. The Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, partnered with the AGO in order to bring it all to Toronto. (Many of the pieces that are now at the AGO recently appeared in the Getty’s exhibition, “Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance,” which ran until February 10.)

One of the highlights of the exhibit is the work of an anonymous artist known only as The Master of the Codex of Saint George, who created both panel paintings and illuminated manuscripts that are considered to have been over a century ahead of their time. The crown jewel of the exhibit may very well be the Codex of Saint George itself, an exquisite manuscript from the Vatican library that is appearing in North America for the very first time. In fact, the book only arrived at the AGO Tuesday morning, much to the joy and great relief of the curators.

Another highlight is a room that houses 24 pages from a song book known as the Laudario of Sant’Agnese. Commissioned by a group of wealthy merchants and traders, the book was a hymnal—a collection of songs of praise. The beautifully illustrated book includes scenes from the life of Christ as well as the stories of some of the saints (including a few gruesome martyrdoms). There are even illustrations of the merchants themselves. The book was eventually split apart, because each page was invaluable in and of itself. For the AGO’s exhibit, 24 of the pages have been brought together. Recordings of songs of praise from the book, as interpreted by the choral chamber group Lionheart, are played softly in the background while visitors wander through the space. On April 6 at 2 p.m., Lionheart will perform songs from the Laudario live.

A rich and varied show, “Revealing the Early Renaissance” will appeal to a broad range of art fans, especially those of a literary bent. While each piece is stunning on its own (don’t miss the beautiful, illuminated copy of Dante’s Inferno), the rich, jewel-like pieces truly shine as a group.

CORRECTION: March 14, 2013, 2:05 AM This post originally contained a number of inaccuracies. It said, incorrectly, that works in “Revealing the Early Renaissance” date from the the 13th and 14th centuries. In fact, only 14th-century works are included. The post also mentioned “marble reliefs,” none of which appear as part of the exhibit. Also, the post originally claimed that the Codex of Saint George has never before been seen outside the Vatican library. In fact, it has, on rare occasions, traveled to other institutions. This is the first time it has come to North America.

Several photo captions contained incorrect information. Image five depicts not a “scene from the last judgement,” but St. Michael slaying a dragon. Image 15 is a picture of a vinyl reproduction of Pacino di Bonaguida’s Tree of Life, not a picture of the original work. Image 16 is not from the Laudario of Sant’Agnese; it’s from another work. The caption on image 17 misspelled Maestro Daddesco’s name.

Nascopie anchored in Pangnirtung Fiord, August 1946, from Library and Archives Canada (e010692596).

Frederick H. Varley was in a terrible mood when he boarded the R.M.S. Nascopie. In his rush to get to Montreal in time for the icebreaker’s annual trek to the eastern Arctic, Varley had accidentally broken his supply of whiskey. The artist’s mood brightened immediately, however, when he met his 27-year-old cabin mate, Terence Michael Shortt, an ornithologist at the Royal Ontario Museum. Immediately cementing a fast friendship (which would last beyond their three-month voyage to the eastern Arctic) the 58-year-old artist hailed the steward: “Two doubles for two gents, please.”

Departing Montreal on July 9, the Nascopie—a 2,500 tonne, 285.5-foot-long icebreaker built in Scotland in 1911—was to cover 12,246 miles on her summer journey in 1938, with calls at 24 ports to deliver a year’s worth of mail, supplies, and personnel destined for HBC trading posts and RCMP detachments. Along for the ride, Varley and Shortt both sketched and painted the Arctic landscape, its wildlife, and the Inuit inhabitants they encountered, while Shortt also collected bird specimens for the museum.

The 1930s had been unhappy for Varley. The English-born co-founder of the Group of Seven had established himself in Toronto as one of the country’s preeminent portraitists, then moved to Vancouver in 1926 to accept a teaching appointment. There, his marriage broke down. An art school he opened with colleagues failed in the early years of the Great Depression. Near poverty, Varley took refuge in alcohol, as he had done on and off throughout his adult life.

(Right: Frederick Varley in Vancouver, 1927, from WikiMedia Commons.)

He drifted from Vancouver to Ottawa and in between, following whatever work was on offer. “[I]ncreasingly melancholic and unsettled,” Katerina Atanassova writes in Canadian Art: The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Skylet Publishing/The Art Gallery of Ontario, 2008), Varley “was looking for a fresh start.”

For years Varley had hoped to travel north, having been inspired by the works of fellow Group of Seven alumni A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris after their own earlier Arctic journeys. Varley’s opportunity arrived on July 4, 1938, when he received an invitation from Charles Camsell, the Deputy Minister for Mines and Resources, requesting that the artist hastily join the Nascopie before its departure later that week. Camsell’s invitation came at the urging of the National Gallery of Canada’s Assistant Director Harry McCurry, who felt Varley would “be of great value in bringing the North West Territories to the attention of a wider public.”

If Varley had been treading water, cabin mate Shortt’s career was on the rise. He’d become interested in birds early in life, and dreamed of travelling the world to paint each species. When the Winnipeg-born naturalist was appointed an assistant in the zoology department of the Royal Ontario Museum in 1930, he quickly discovered his duties involved “taxidermy, sign writing, moulding and casting, carpentry, wall painting and even sweeping floors,” as he put it in his autobiography. He’d already been on several expeditions to Northern Ontario, collecting species for bird-themed exhibits, when selected to join the Nascopie on its 1938 voyage.

The artist and ornithologist were joined aboard the Nascopie by an assortment of passengers that included: Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir’s eldest son, headed for a northern post as an employee of the HBC; Dr. Keith F. Rogers as medical officer; historian and journalist Marion Grange; D.A. Nichols, a physiographer for the Geological Survey; Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran clergymen; three Inuit gratefully returning to their home after a sojourn in Quebec; and a handful of brides en route to marry men stationed in the north.

(Above left: Inuit on the foredeck of the Nascopie near Arctic Bay, September 1936, from the Library and Archives Canada [PA-102193].)

On her three-month voyage, the Nascopie steamed around Killinek (Killiniq) Island, near the northernmost tip of Labrador, across Hudson Bay to Churchill, Manitoba (Cape Dorset), then north via Davis Strait and Baffin Bay to Thule, Greenland, back south to Fort Ross on Somerset Island, and to the communities along the eastern coast of Baffin Island—Pond Inlet, River Clyde, and Pangnirtung—before terminating at Halifax in late September. Along the way, her passengers braved blizzard conditions, sleet storms, and rough seas through waters dotted with immense icebergs.

“Nobody knows. Nobody ever knows about the Arctic. It’s as uncertain as life,” the Nascopie‘s captain, Thomas Smellie, once explained when asked about typical conditions on the ship’s annual summer voyage. He added: “But the Nascopie will come back. She’s a grand boat, and she’s been up there so many times she could find her way back alone.”

(Right: Nascopie in Pangnirtung Fiord, August 1946, from the Library and Archives Canada [e010692594].)

The Nascopie‘s arrival at isolated trading posts and settlements was frequently a cause for excitement, as locals rushed to the shore to greet the vessel carrying long-awaited mail, plus provisions and supplies as diverse as anchovies, cream puffs, anthracite, rubber nipples and baby’s bottles, carriages, radio broadcasting sets, movie magazines, and Christmas and birthday gifts. The steamer’s annual visit was often the only connection these communities had with the outside world, before air travel and telecommunications became widespread.

Hudson’s Bay Company supplies landed from Nascopie, July 1936, from Library and Archives Canada (e010765717).

While the ship’s crew unloaded cargo, Shortt would hike miles from port, carrying binoculars and a rifle, exploring the surrounding terrain to find interesting species of birds to shoot and collect—once nearly drifting out to sea on a block of ice while retrieving one of his kills. (This propensity for wandering off soon came to annoy Major D.L. McKeand of the Northwest Territories branch of the Department of the Interior, who supervised the Nascopie‘s trip and worried that Shortt might get lost and put the ship behind schedule.)

Returning to the Nascopie with bagfuls of specimens, Shortt would retreat to his cabin to dissect, dry, and preserve the specimens. It did not take long for his shared quarters to descend into chaos. “My cabin mate is a bird-man,” Varley wrote to one correspondent, “hikes a great deal with a gun, dissects them in the cabin—looks at their stomachs—places in spirits the odd tape worm, recognizes sex, change in feathers—nurses his birds like one with a doll….The cabin smells like Chinatown in the chicken section, combined with oil paint. We get on excellently despite the hampered quarters.”

Nascopie in the ice of the bay outside Killinek by Paul Hettasch, from Memorial University’s Archives and Special Collections.

Varley, in turn, had his own collection of painter’s materials. “For the rest of the voyage,” Shortt recalled in his memoirs, Not As the Crow Flies (McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1975), “I put up with drying paintings, sketches propped up on my bunk, brushes soaking in the wash basin, tubes of paint on everything (including the floor), and smears of the same on most of my possessions. Varley, in turn, put up with racks of drying bird skins, sawdust, cotton batting, and stray feathers.”

Varley had brought oil paints but discovered, as the ship travelled north, that his paintings wouldn’t dry in the cold, humid air. The artist, therefore, had to borrow watercolours, supplies, and paper from Shortt. By the end of the voyage, Varley and Shortt were sketching and painting on every scrap of paper they could lay their hands on.

Varley offered lessons on Shortt’s progress as an artist. On the back of one painting of a bird, Varley offered the following comment: “Cease trying to be a flippin’ scientist, lad; world’s full of them. Needs artists. With a lot of hard work and a heaping measure of good luck, you might just make one.” In another instance, Varley added: “You can’t see a bird unless light hits it and light, depending on its colour and angle of attack, has to affect, modify and influence local colour of the bloody bird’s feathers. Try getting some purples, ochres, and complementaries into your shadows.” From Shortt, Varley learned to paint with a woolen sock on his hand and the paintbrush pushed through the weave of the fibres.

Painting by F.H. Varley from Edmund Carpenter’s Eskimo (University of Toronto Press, 1959).

The voyage aboard the Nascopie reinvigorated Varley. In one letter quoted in Maria Tippett’s biography of the painter, Varley declared that he’d discovered “a new world.” The immense glaciers, barren, rocky landscapes, and towering icebergs inspired him and the nearly unceasing sunlight of the Arctic summer, Peter Varley wrote in Frederick H. Varley (Key Porter Books, 1983), prompted the artist “to use colours and colour juxtapositioning he had never before dreamed of.”

“As light passing through a prism gives us the magic of spectrum colours, so can be an Arctic sky at dawn, at sun down and occasionally through the night,” Varley explained in a later CBC radio lecture quoted in Tippett’s Stormy Weather (McClelland & Stewart, 1998). “On drier days, colour became precious, ice-floes splinter light into colour, and green of all greens, the translucent glacial green of ice beneath water, the pure violet light edging hollow caves, the sea-washed surfaces of mauve with powdering of pale rose and the palest of yellow-green, put the surrounding grey water to shame and tinged it with a dull smoulder of red like an old Chinese print.”

Painting by F.H. Varley from Edmund Carpenter’s Eskimo (University of Toronto Press, 1959).

Varley also took an artistic interest in the Inuit they encountered in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. Unlike most of his fellow passengers, the artist heartily shook hands to greet any Inuit who came aboard the Nascopie, sharing tea and stories with them. He eagerly sketched their portraits, as well as studies of Inuit tools, kayaks, and sled dogs.

“He was troubled by the subtle signs of change that threatened the old way of life in the North,” Atanassova suggests of Varley in Canadian Art. Tippett, however, argues that despite his interest in the locals as subjects for his art, Varley never treated them as individuals. In describing the Inuit to one correspondent as “the little brown people…beautiful they are—refined—quiet speaking—cleanly, exquisitely dressed—a people possessing pride of well being,” Varley perpetuated a romanticized view of the Inuit people.

Painting by F.H. Varley from Edmund Carpenter’s Eskimo (University of Toronto Press, 1959).

Varley and Shortt’s days were spent working at a feverish pace, soaking in the landscape and wildlife. Nights were spent in the “bull pen,” where the rotating assortment of HBC and RCMP personnel—some disembarking to assume a northern post, others embarking for home on furlough—bunked. This was the Nascopie‘s social centre. “Here one heard tales from conversation-starved men who had been having adventures and experiences to pale any fiction,” the ornithologist later recalled, “tales of long dog-sled journeys, of hair-raising pursuits of ruffians under the six-month night, of Eskimo heroism.” He added: “Just visualize a room full of R.C.M.P. personnel, H.B.C. factors, whalers, explorers, visitors from the posts where we anchored for the night. One cannot buy that sort of entertainment. One cannot help but be broadened by such an experience.”

After departing Thule, Greenland—the northernmost point of the journey—the Nascopie steered southwesterly, through Lancaster Sound off the northern tip of Baffin Island, and into Prince Regent Inlet. Along this course, the sturdy icebreaker encountered the heaviest ice of the 1938 voyage. “It was choked with bergs and pack ice,” Shortt recalled. “Some of the bergs were half a mile long and several hundred feet high. The whole spectacle was white, sky blue, and turquoise with dark cobalt water showing through in small irregularly-shaped patches between the masses of ice. It was a magnificent sight.”

Nascopie, no date, from the University of Calgary.

“The ship would charge full-steam at the pack, split it, and open up a lead of perhaps fifty yards,” wrote Shortt, explaining the icebreaker’s procedure. “It then shuddered to a halt. The engines were reversed, the ship backed off, and then it lunged forward again.” On such occasions, Varley and Shortt did their best to safely stow their fragile cargo of artwork and taxidermied birds in suitcases or tucked under the covers of their bunks, to keep them from being thrown to the ground as the Nascopie rocked and rattled violently. But on the occasions when the ship struck an ice floe without warning, Varley’s paintings became peppered with feathers and Shortt’s birds got battered.

Between the movement of the ship, its shuddering engines, and the loud crack of ice-splitting, almost all activity was rendered impossible. So passengers aboard the Nascopie, Ralph and Frederica Knight reminisce in the magazine Inuktitut 91 (2002), often crowded the bow, watching over the sides as the Nascopie broke through the ice. The sharp prow frequently rode up onto the edge of the ice—”climbing up as if to stand on its stern,” Shortt remembered—then returned to even keel as the weight of the ship forced an opening in the ice. Bit by bit, the Nascopie slowly traversed ice floes 20 miles or more wide. “We all realized that the Nascopie was the mightiest ice-breaker in existence,” said Shortt, as quoted in Jeremy Brown’s article on the 1938 trip in The Beaver (Autumn 1978), “and that should we become ice-bound, which sometimes seemed imminent, no other ship in the world could come to her rescue.”

Painting by F.H. Varley from Edmund Carpenter’s Eskimo (University of Toronto Press, 1959).

In early September, after a particularly difficult push through ice, Varley and Shortt staged an exhibition of their artistic labours to lift the spirits of the ship’s crew and fellow passengers. The Nascopie‘s wood-paneled saloon was transformed into a floating gallery, with watercolour and pencil sketches of landscapes, birds and other wildlife, and Inuit inhabitants, each hung by paperclips from clotheslines stretched the length of the room. Shortt gave a brief lecture on Arctic wildlife, highlighted by samples of his bird specimens.

Upon the Nascopie‘s return, Varley’s art continued to be influenced by his Arctic journey, even as he once again became despondent over the state of his career. The artist scattered many of his sketches of northern life with seeming indifference, according to anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, who eventually assembled as many Varley sketches as could be located into a set of illustrations for his own book, Eskimo (University of Toronto Press, 1959).

Varley adapted some of his field sketches into canvas paintings, and for years subtly included elements of the northern scenery into the backgrounds of his portrait commissions and other works. But when an art show of Varley’s works was held in Ottawa shortly after his return, Peter Varley writes, few of the paintings sold. Once again, the now-elderly artist struggled against poverty as he bounced between Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto, until he finally achieved financial success in his 70s.

From the Nascopie trip Shortt brought home specimens representing an impressive range of bird species including the Yellow-billed Loon, Glaucous Gull, Thayer’s Gull, Peregrine Falcon, Long-tailed Jaeger, Lapland Longspur, Horned Lark, Snow Bunting, among dozens of others. Eventually integrated into the Royal Ontario Museum, Shortt’s collection was called, by one expert, “the finest so far brought out of the Arctic by one man in one year.” By the time of his retirement as chief display biologist in 1976, Shortt’s numerous field research expeditions had taken him around the world to paint more than 1,600 bird portraits, and to collect specimens for display in the museum.

The Nascopie sank in 1947, near Cape Dorset, when its new captain refused the assistance of a local Inuit to guide the icebreaker into the harbour. Striking a reef, the ship was stranded for several months before sinking during a storm. Peter Pitseolak, a local guide, observed the signifance of the event: “Northerners sometimes date the end of the old way of life in the North by the wreck of the Nascopie.”

Other sources consulted: Katerina Atanassova, F.H. Varley: Portraits into the Light (Dundurn Press, 2007); Edmund Carpenter in Canadian Art (Spring 1959); Denise Heaps in Canadian Literature (Autumn 2002); and articles from the Globe and Mail (July 11 & August 8, 1938 and July 8, 1939) and the Toronto Star (July 7, 8, 26 & 29, 1938).

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.