Sculptor David Partridge; Globe and Mail obit
Hyfler/Rosner
You can see his art here:
http://www.globalserve.net/~dnaillie/CV.htm
DAVID PARTRIDGE, PAINTER AND SCULPTOR 1919-2006
With a 'virtuosity of hammering,' his hard-edged, tactile
and sculptural Naillies transformed nails and wood into art
forms that are both evocative and spiritual, writes SANDRA
MARTIN
12/16/2006 Globe and Mail
What came first, the nail or the hammer? That is the
question people ponder about artist David Partridge.
Although he began his artistic career as a painter and a
printmaker, he is best known for his Naillies. To create
them, he would begin with a piece of plywood, although he
was known to use doors, beams and other surfaces, which he
sometimes covered in buffed or abraded aluminum. Then he
would hammer in nails of all sorts (aluminum, copper and
steel) and lengths, beginning with the shortest to create a
"relief sculpture." According to his fancy, he polished or
trimmed the hammered nail heads, wrapped the Naillie in duct
tape to give the surface more texture and lacquered or
painted portions of the finished work.
The Naillies were quite spectacular, said artist Tony
Urquhart, who was mentored by Mr. Partridge in the 1950s.
Although a very different type of artist, Mr. Urquhart also
creates sculptural collages or "boxes" out of wood, nails
and many other things. "They were things that had never been
done before and they were made at a very high level." And
they also reflected many of the artistic and social concerns
of the time.
Besides the visual, tactile and auditory sensations of the
works, Mr. Urquhart was really impressed by "the virtuosity
of his hammering." By that, he meant Mr. Partridge's
workmanship in getting the nails in straight and figuring
out how deep to hammer them. "I couldn't do that," he said.
"If you X-rayed one of my boxes. I would be embarrassed
because the nails go in at different angles and now I
pre-drill them. But with the Naillies, one nail out of line
and . . ."
Mr. Partridge was an intensely creative person who seemed to
make art instinctively and organically rather than
consciously and deliberately. His daughter, Kate, says his
life was a series of creative cycles interspersed with down
or resting phases until something dramatic happened in his
life or his environment, and that would spark another
creative synergy.
He is curiously not well known, said artist Ron Bloore, who
had known Mr. Partridge as an artist and a friend since the
late 1950s. "That guy had a real collection of weird wild
nails." The works, especially the later ones, sometimes got
to be quasi-religious or spiritual, he said, because they
explored "a visionary experience."
David Gerry Partridge was the youngest child of Albert Gerry
and Edith (née Harpham) Partridge. His favourite toy as a
child was a hammer, which he used to drag around with him
and hit things -- although not always from a creative
impulse. One of his grandfathers was a roofer, and the other
was an undertaker, so that's where he may have inherited his
affinity for hammering nails, his wife suggested this week.
His other great love was flying, a passion that can be dated
to seeing his first airplane in the 1920s on a family visit
to Florida.
His father was a senior executive with Goodyear Tire, and so
David, his mother and his older sisters, Elspeth and Emily,
moved across the Atlantic in 1928 when Mr. Partridge was
transferred to England. During the seven years that his
father served as president of the British firm, David went
to Mostyn House School in Cheshire, then Radley College in
Oxfordshire. When they moved to Canada in 1935 so that
Albert Partridge could head the Canadian operations of
Goodyear, David was sent to Trinity College School in Port
Hope.
That's where he met Edward Cayley, who always called him
Birdy and considered him his closest friend for the next 76
years. "We were opposites. He was stubborn and impatient,
but for some reason we got on," said Mr. Cayley, noting that
his friend had a great sense of humour. "He was always
restless, and that's where the creativity came in."
After TCS, Mr. Partridge went to Trinity College at the
University of Toronto, concentrating on English, history and
geology, and graduated in 1941. He immediately enlisted in
the RCAF, where he scored so highly on his training courses
that he was made a flight instructor and spent the war, much
to his chagrin, on this side of the Atlantic.
On June 14, 1943, he married Helen Rosemary Annesley (always
known as Tibs), who was serving as a WREN. The couple had
known each other slightly at university until their final
year, when his mother spotted Ms. Annesley at a reception
for visiting parents and told her son that he should "marry
that girl."
The year after they had both graduated, they began seeing
each other socially, and became even closer when both of
them were posted to Ottawa, she with the Royal Canadian Navy
and he with the air force. By then, his mother was dead and
it was her mother who was issuing the directives that Mr.
Partridge should "marry that girl."
After the war, the Partridges moved to St. Catharines, Ont.,
where he taught art first at Appleby College and then at
Ridley College. Their two children -- Katharine (always
called Kate), a psychologist, and John, a reporter at The
Globe and Mail -- were born there in 1945 and 1947. This was
the period in which he was finding himself as a water
colourist and a printmaker.
He won a British Council scholarship to study at the Slade
School at the University of London, so the whole family
lived in Hampstead for the academic year 1950-51. Afterward,
Mr. Partridge enthused about working with artists Tom
Monnington and Edward Ardizzone, the "wonderful introduction
into etching and engraving" he received from John
Buckland-Wright, and the stimulation of being in contact
with Graham Sutherland and John Piper, among other Slade
professors.
After returning to Canada, he taught high school art at St.
Catharines Collegiate and Vocational Institute, co-founded
the St. Catharines Art Association and the St. Catharines
Public Library Art Gallery (and was its first curator) and
taught summer school at Queen's, the same place he had
himself studied a decade earlier.
The Partridges, who were both anglophiles, lived in Sussex
with their children from 1956 to 1958 and for a longer stint
beginning in 1960. All the while, he was showing in group
and solo exhibitions in Canada and abroad. In February and
March of 1958, he was studying etching and engraving with
William Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris when he had a creative
breakthrough.
"I was fascinated by the irregular surfaces of deep-etched
copper and zinc plates, irrespective of their purpose in
printing. They became low-relief sculptures, which seemed to
my ex-pilot's eyes like aerial views of topography," is the
way he described the process later. One Saturday, he was
gallery-hopping and came across an exhibition by Hungarian
sculptor Zoltan Kemeny that he described as "bas-reliefs
using all manner of metal bits and pieces, welded into an
even more exciting aerial vision than the etched plates had
provided."
The eureka moment came in Ottawa (where the family was then
living) the following winter when he came across a piece of
plywood left over from a renovation. "Nails were at hand and
a hammer! I descended to the basement and made my first nail
sculpture." The Naillies, as Mr. Partridge called them, were
born. Wood, the most basic building material, became a
platform for work that undulated with rhythm, light and
texture. Hard-edged, tactile and sculptural, Naillies
transcended their utilitarian origins and transformed nails
and wood into something evocative and spiritual. Naillies
seemed too skinny a word for a new art form, so at a dinner
party with Alan Jarvis of the National Gallery and his wife,
Mrs. Partridge came up with the term "configurations."
He had his first solo exhibition of paintings, drawings and
configurations at the Robertson Galleries in Ottawa in
October of 1960, the same year he gave up full-time teaching
and moved his family back to England. They stayed until
1974. Since then, Naillies have been acquired by the
National Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Tate
Gallery, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Gallery of
New South Wales and many other institutions. He also won
commissions, such as Metropolis, a huge mural for the new
city hall in Toronto and the RCAF Memorial in Westminster
Cathedral in London.
After returning from England, they settled in Toronto,
spending summers at a cottage near Stony Lake, Ont., that
they bought from Mrs. Partridge's family. By 1980, Mr.
Partridge, who had some spare cash after having sold a big
Naillie, indulged his unquenchable love of flying by buying
himself a do-it-yourself kit for an ultra-light plane. He
partially constructed it at his studio on Queen Street and
then hauled it up to the cottage, where he attached floats
and set off across the lake, never having flown that kind of
plane before.
He took some great photographs, said Mrs. Partridge, by
tying a string around his big toe and attaching it to a
camera "so he could fly with both hands, which he needed to
do, and his big toe would pull on the thread and snap a
photograph." Once again, he was interested in aerial views
of the landscape, the same topographical impressions that he
created in his Naillies.
About this time, Mr. Partridge reconnected with his old
friend Ed Cayley, who had also been living abroad, by
phoning to ask: "Do you still like movies?" The two men
resumed a ritual weekly trip to the movies that had begun in
their undergraduate days at the University of Toronto. After
Mr. Partridge had a stroke a little more than three years
ago that seriously hampered his mobility, Mr. Cayley brought
lunch and a DVD to watch with his old friend at home.
David Gerry Partridge was born on Oct. 5, 1919, in Akron,
Ohio. He died of heart disease on Dec. 11, 2006, after a
stroke and a heart attack. He was 87.
He is survived by his wife, Tibs, his daughter Kate, his son
John and their spouses.
There will be a public graveside service today at 10 a.m. at
St. James-the-Less Cemetery in
Toronto.