Tony Scherman sitting in front of his own painting. (photo by Schermanpriestarts, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Longtime Toronto artist Tony Scherman has died of cancer at the age of 72.
Scherman, whose death came Feb. 28, was known for distinctive encaustic paintings that typically tackled difficult themes related to the human condition, whether death, tyranny or war, but in oblique ways that relied on the use of metaphor.
"Painting was not simply a chosen activity and facility," his obituary says. "It was his way to life and thinking."
Scherman, an artist for some five decades, had an international career that included more than 100 solo exhibitions.
"Maybe the only thing left is to search for the beautiful," he once said. "How do you know when you are looking at the beautiful? There is a pain in beauty, as there is pain in love."
Born in Toronto, Scherman grew up in Europe, where his father, Paul, was a conductor and violinist. He started experimenting with encaustic as a student at the Royal College of Art in London, at the suggestion of his tutor, and fell in love with it.
He married Margaret Priest, a British artist, and returned to Toronto in 1976, teaching at the University of Guelph and the University of Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s.
"Tony was an astonishing conversational polymath," his obituary says. "He read, listened, observed and questioned. Ideas mattered to him. There were no ordinary or indifferent days."
Canadian designer Bruce Mau, a friend, once reflected on Scherman's incredible drive.
"He doesn’t do anything half-way, which is how you have to be to produce things that affect the world," Mau said in 2007. "You can’t have it in certain parts of you and not in others, can’t turn it on and off like a tap."