NORMAN YATES - Homage
1 of 15
"Norman Yates working at the easel in his studio"
Norman Yates working at the easel in his studio, July 2004. Photo by Jim Salt.
2 of 15
"View of Yates exhibition"
View of Yates exhibition, "Landspace: Cogito," Fran Willis Gallery, Victoria, May 2004; multi-panel "Landspace #168:" "Motus" on right. Photo by Jim Salt.
3 of 15
"Norman Yates exhibition at Fran Willis Gallery"
Norman Yates exhibition at Fran Willis Gallery, Victoria, 2000. Image courtesy Fran Willis Gallery, Victoria.
4 of 15
"Norman Yates exhibition at Fran Willis Gallery"
Norman Yates exhibition at Fran Willis Gallery, Victoria, 2000. Image courtesy Fran Willis Gallery, Victoria.
5 of 15
Photo by Jim Salt.
"Norman Yates working at the easel in his studio"
Norman Yates working at the easel in his studio, July 2004.
6 of 15
"Norman Yates working at the easel in his studio"
Norman Yates working at the easel in his studio, July 2004. Photo by Jim Salt.
7 of 15
"Norman Yates working at the easel in his studio"
Norman Yates working at the easel in his studio, July 2004. Photo by Jim Salt.
8 of 15
"Landspace #16"
Norman Yates, "Landspace #16," 1975, acrylic on canvas, 115 x 275 cm. Image courtesy Jim Salt.
9 of 15
"Landspace 175, Cogito"
Norman Yates, "Landspace 175, Cogito," 2003, acrylic on canvas, 43" x 76". Image courtesy Fran Willis Gallery, Victoria.
10 of 15
"Landspace 178, Cogito"
Norman Yates, "Landspace 178, Cogito," 2004, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 72". Image courtesy Fran Willis Gallery, Victoria.
11 of 15
"Landspace 177, Cogito"
Norman Yates, "Landspace 177, Cogito," 2004, acrylic on canvas, 42" x 78". Image courtesy Fran Willis Gallery, Victoria.
12 of 15
"Night (the Gate)"
Norman Yates, "Night (the Gate)," 1950, lithograph, 33.6 x 25.7 cm. Image courtesy Jim Salt.
13 of 15
"Allegoria #5"
Norman Yates, "Allegoria #5," 1961, pencil, 39 x 53 cm. Image courtesy Jim Salt.
14 of 15
"Girl Drying Her Hair"
Norman Yates, "Girl Drying Her Hair," 1948, pencil, 44 x 55 cm. Image courtesy Jim Salt.
15 of 15
"Nude Seated"
Norman Yates, "Nude Seated," 1960, pen/ink and conté on paper, 29 x 38 cm. Image courtesy Jim Salt.
NORMAN YATES: Homage
By Brian Brennan
A twist on the old saw describes a reality for many painters in Canada: Those who can, do, and those who can also teach. They teach because they cannot live by painting alone. For Norman Yates, 81, that’s been a reality ever since he graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1951. After travelling around Europe to study and paint — cycling from country to country with his English-born wife Whynona on a bicycle built for two — this Calgary-born, Regina-raised painter, who doesn’t recall ever seeing a painting as a child, settled in Toronto to make his living as an artist and teacher.
He lived in a garret — yes, he actually called it a garret — with Whynona, a weaver who brought in most of the family’s modest income by working first behind the counter and then in the office at Simpson Sears. “Our ambition was to own our own bathroom,” he says. He ran what he grandly named the Laurentian School of Art out of an attic studio, overlooking a subway station at the intersection of Sherbourne and Bloor. “Without Whynona’s assistance and hard work, none of it would have been possible because it really was a starvation wage.”
His paintings, at first realistic and later symbolic, were inspired by the landscapes of his prairie childhood. While Yates didn’t have an opportunity to view art as a child, he had plenty of opportunity to make art, first sketching with crayons and pencils in the five-cent newsprint scribblers bought for him by his parents, and later doing cartoons for his high school newspaper at Regina’s Scott Collegiate Institute. He recalled sitting and sketching in fields on the outskirts of Regina as a child, and being “overwhelmed by the beauty of it all.” Four years of service as a radar technician in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War brought him the veterans’ rehabilitation financing that he needed to cover his tuition and some of his living expenses while studying commercial art and then fine arts at the Ontario College of Art.
After working in Toronto for three years, Yates began applying for teaching positions across the country and received an invitation to take a temporary one-year position with the University of Alberta’s education faculty. Norman and Whynona set out for Edmonton in 1954 in a small English-made motorcar (“a Triumph Mayflower — a pint-sized sub-compact”), and made it there safely despite running into “a sea of mud” along the unpaved Highway 16 northwest of Saskatoon. When the year was up, he joined the U of A’s art faculty, which had been established by the English-born painter Henry George Glyde in 1946 and was evolving into a nationally respected art school.
At the U of A, Yates had a chance to teach everything from art history to design. The student body was small, as was the art faculty, and the general feeling was one of trying to make something grow. Yates was pleased to be working at an institution receptive to new ideas. Whynona worked there as well, teaching in the arts and crafts division at the students’ union building. Together, and with others, the couple tried to create in Edmonton a climate receptive to the visual arts.
Yates worked at the University of Alberta until he retired in 1989, and he exhibited his work regularly during that time, in solo shows and group exhibitions at such centres as the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, and the Allied Arts Centre in Calgary. His work also appeared in shows in the United States, England and Germany. In April 1965, he held a solo exhibition of 15 paintings, oils and acrylics, of female nudes and fantasy animals at the Allied Arts Centre. The Calgary Herald art critic, David Thompson, praised him for his use of colour: “The tendency towards the purely decorative is offset by the subtle shading that exists in the tones and the very poetical nature of the subjects.”
During the 1970s, Yates became active as an arts advocate. He established the Alberta branch of the Canadian Society for Education Through Art, chaired the Alberta Art Foundation, and served on the Western Canada Art Council. For his efforts, he was awarded the City of Edmonton’s Creative and Performing Arts Award in the Visual Arts in 1972. “I did these things primarily to improve the state of the artist,” he said afterwards. “It sounds idealistic, but if the artist doesn’t do it, who will?”
Yates also became a social activist during the 1970s, fighting to stop developers from bulldozing older homes in his neighbourhood, the historic Garneau district adjoining the U of A campus. He recorded the demolitions in a video entitled Goodbye Trees, Goodbye Green, and eventually decided that his battle to “maintain an island of reason amid this development” was futile. Abandoning the city in 1972, he and Whynona bought a quarter section (“natural boreal mixed forest, with wild fruit and wildlife”) near Tomahawk, 96 kilometres west of Edmonton, and that precipitated a turning point in his development as an artist. “I had a real breakthrough there. I had been working — so to speak — ‘through the window,’ painting what was in front of me. And one day I realized there was as much space behind me as in front.”
Yates’s realization that the horizon around him was endless, not cut off by the edge of a canvas, led him toward creating a series of panoramic abstract and semi-abstract paintings that he called “landspaces.” A landscape was a prospect of scenery seen from one point of view. A “landspace” created a feeling of continuous and unbounded extension in every direction, with an abiding sense that the painting would never stop. Using nature, weather, light and space as his elemental raw materials, Yates found himself following in the footsteps of the great English romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, whose visionary interpretations of landscape eventually became less about subject matter and more about space, change, movement and colour.
The “land studio,” as the couple dubbed their acreage, also opened up new artistic possibilities for Whynona, with the trees and grasses suggesting designs for her wool sculptures, while the barks, dye plants and fungi provided the colours.
They lived on the acreage until they retired from the U of A in 1989, after which they moved to Oak Bay in Victoria. Yates continued to interpret the natural environment in his paintings, and continued to draw his inspiration from the experience of walking out into the actual landscape and absorbing the changing colours and light “like a big sponge.” The coastal environment provided him with new sources and possibilities. “When I was in Alberta, it was all space and stillness and light because of the big skies,” he says. “When I moved to the coast it became more colour and movement because of the sea, but the space is the continuing force throughout.”
Whynona died suddenly of a rare form of cancer in 1998. Norman dealt with his grief by immersing himself in his work. “That was what saved me because losing her left me so helpless,” he says. “The only thing that made sense was to go back into the studio.” He has now created close to 200 landspaces, and continues to display his work regularly.
Yates’s peers have recognized his contribution by granting him the 2003 CARFAC [Canadian Artists Representation/le Front des Artistes Canadiens] life achievement award, and Victoria’s Fran Willis Gallery is holding a retrospective exhibition, November 4 to 27, that will celebrate 50 years of his work as a painter.
Elsewhere, Norman Yates’s work may be found in the National Gallery of Canada, the Edmonton Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and on the north wall of the U of A education building, which features a giant, 20- by 42-metre mural entitled North by West that took him three years to design and install. His other artistic legacies in Edmonton include his logos for the U of A’s Studio Theatre and his designs for the city’s official flag and U of A chancellor’s gown.
While retired from teaching, Yates still leads workshops in different parts of British Columbia, and continues to paint every day. “You never retire from that.”
Brian Brennan is the author, most recently, of Boondoggles, Bonanzas, and Other Alberta Stories, published by Fifth House Ltd. His profiles of Western Canada’s distinguished senior artists appear regularly in Galleries West.