Tom Hodgson; Catherine Dunphy obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
April 3, 2006 Monday
Catherine Dunphy, Toronto Star
People always talk about the parties. That's what they
remember about Tom Hodgson's life. They happened wherever he
lived or in whatever studio he worked - be it the Pit, as it
was called, at King and Church Sts., the house on Shaw St.,
where he built a swimming pool in the kitchen, or the
storefront on Queen St. W. opposite the mental hospital.
Cold cuts infamously served on the reclining body of a nude
woman adorning the buffet table, body-painting women's bare
breasts, art student orgies, rich and powerful art patrons
swinging on the rope from his studio ceiling.
Hodgson's sons used to drop by to meet girls because there
were always women around their dad - if not the models he
hired to pose nude for life drawing classes, then the
dewy-eyed students he taught at the Ontario College of Art
during the '70s, when mores were exploding in the name of
creativity, the muse and the worship of the artist.
You can get away with it when you're also one of Canada's
greatest painters, a founder of the audacious Painters
Eleven - the gang of abstract artists who broke the
stranglehold of the Group of Seven and revolutionized the
Canadian art world, at the same time as you're an Olympic
athlete, marathoner, dirt-bike champ and master paddler
winning dozens of national championships.
"Tom was a gifted person. Some people are just touched a
certain way, but he was very easy about it, not full of
himself," said Christopher Cutts, Hodgson's art dealer.
In 1987, when Cutts was an upstart on the art scene, a
friend arranged a meeting with the artist known as a superb
colourist, as well as for his style of action painting -
arm's-length hurling, scraping, pouring oil paints on
horizontal canvases on a table surface held in place by an
elaborate system of blocks and tackle.
"He had a natural way of dancing on the canvas. He could
make it work," Cutts said.
Hodgson's last solo show was at Cutts's gallery in 1992, the
year the artist was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. This year,
five days after Hodgson died from the disease - at 81 on
Feb. 27 - Cutts opened a major group show of abstract
painters. Hodgson's piece in the show was priced at $30,000.
Hodgson and his kid sister grew up in a 35-room house on
Centre Island that their family rented out to tenants. Their
father was an insurance broker, a convivial alcoholic who
threw parties at their home, known throughout the island as
the Hodgson House of Nonsense, according to Jane Hodgson.
"The kids all hung out at the clubhouse on the lagoon," she
recalled. "All of us paddled."
But Hodgson was just that much more intense about the sport
and much more skilled. When he was 12, it also was clear he
was also a talented artist. He began the balancing act
between art and athletics that he would maintain for
decades.
He trained hard, dodging the ice in Toronto's harbour,
winning more than 20 Canadian solo championships. With
another islander, Art Johnson, and later Bill Stephenson, he
finished eighth in the tandem at the Helsinki Olympics in
1952 and in ninth place four years later in Melbourne,
Australia.
Hodgson married Wilma Stein, an island girl, and they moved
into a house on Centre Island on a lot that extended to the
lagoon, where he built a north-facing studio on stilts.
When the property of Centre Island's residents was
expropriated in the late '50s, Hodgson moved to the city,
becoming very successful in advertising at the same time as
he was making a name for himself in the art world with
Painters Eleven.
But he walked away from advertising after assessing that he
had enough money either to buy a sports car or support
himself as an artist for two years. When his marriage ended
in 1968, his wife had to get a job to support their four
kids. "His life was more important than anybody else and
that was hard," said daughter Lise Snajdr. "He wasn't a good
father, but he was a good person in many ways."
"He was not the kind of dad who hugged or kissed you or told
you he loved you," said Tim Broadway, Hodgson's fifth child,
born to Jeannie Broadway, an artist. They never married.
Painters Eleven officially disbanded in 1959. By the 1960s
and early '70s, Hodgson was a famous artist, as well as a
popular teacher at the Ontario College of Art. A nudist, he
hosted many parties around the indoor pool at his Shaw St.
home. He never had more than three beers, but others did.
"They were orgies," said Neil Cochrane, an assistant art
director at the Toronto Star who was studying at the college
then. "That's what happens when you get naked art students,
water and drink."
Hodgson met his second wife, Cathy Good, when she was his
student. She was 19, he 46. He and Good moved to a horse
farm near Hastings, Ont., where he built a pond and paddled
until 1996, when he went over a dam on the Trent River. By
then, Alzheimer's had robbed him of the ability to talk in
full sentences or complete a painting.
Hodgson then moved into a care facility and Good to an
apartment in Warkworth. He could neither walk nor talk.
Good, who was devoted to him, visited him three times a day,
until her unexpected death last year of an embolism.
Hodgson was saluted by friends and family at the Balmy Beach
Club last month. At one point, one of his friends shouted,
"Here's to Tom," then took off all his clothes (except for
his socks) and ran around the whole assembly, past Hodgson's
trophies and his art, before sitting down and putting on his
clothes.
"Dad would have loved it," Snajdr said. "But I think he
would have preferred it have been a beautiful young woman."
Catherine Dunphy can be reached at cdunphy @ thestar.ca
GRAPHIC: Bill Dunn Photo Tom Hodgson, a founder of Painters
Eleven, was a popular teacher at the Ontario College of Art
and a nudist who hosted infamous parties.