Jennifer Stowell; Fashion Artist (Great Globe & Mail obit)
Hyfler/Rosner
British-trained illustrator whose work predated the fashion
industry's slavish devotion to the camera conveyed not only
the cut and material, but the mood of the clothes
MARTIN PATRIQUIN
Special to The Globe and Mail
MONTREAL -- Jennifer Stowell made her living and reputation
drawing big, colourful pictures of women wearing exquisite
clothes. Her fashion illustrations lined the walls of Holt
Renfrew and Ogilvy's, as well as the pages of The Globe and
Mail and the Montreal Gazette. She drew for a litany of
Canadian fashion luminaries, such as Lida Baday, Ron Leal
and Lily Simon. Ms. Stowell conveyed not only the cut and
material but also the mood of the clothes she drew, and her
work remained relevant throughout her 70-year career -- even
as the clothes themselves suffered the whims of fashion.
Ms. Stowell was born three months premature in a snowstorm
in the French Pyrenees, while her mother Dorothy was en
route to Spain to meet her husband Richard Sturgess, a
civil-service engineer. Mr. Sturgess was at the whim of his
job, and often moved the family from place to place. As a
result, Ms. Stowell attended 14 boarding schools in 12
years. As the perpetual new kid, she rarely made friends,
and her evident talent and intellect came off as precocious
and haughty. She knew Canada, since her mother was Canadian,
and when a teacher mangled the pronunciation of "Manitoba,"
Ms. Stowell duly raised her hand and corrected her. She
remembered the subsequent strapping she received for the
rest of her life.
Young Patricia quit school at 14, concentrating instead on
her illustrations. Her first paid work appeared on the cover
of the British magazine Women & Beauty in 1935, and she went
on to illustrate catalogues and fashion quarterlies until
Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
Pressed into Britain's war effort, she worked on the
production lines at Hawker Aircraft Ltd. Her job was to
apply "spirit" (a type of epoxy hardener) to the fabric
wings of Hurricane fighter planes. The toxic stuff destroyed
her sense of smell, while the war itself destroyed her home:
In 1942, she and her mother walked out of their house
moments before it was obliterated by a German bomb.
In 1946, she attended a welcome-home party for Keith
Stowell, a British prisoner of war. He came from a good
family and had a friendly way about him. She desperately
wanted to get out of Britain, and out from under her
mother's thumb. The pair married six weeks later.
They landed in Montreal in 1948, and she immediately
attracted the attention of Holt Renfrew's management. With
the war over, French couturiers were anxious to sell their
wares once again to moneyed North Americans. Ms. Stowell's
first gig was to sketch the Dior collection for the Canadian
launch.
Though the store wanted to hire her as its in-house artist,
she remained resolutely freelance. "If you work for Holts,
then they own your soul," she would later say. She also
became the first in Canada to put her name to her sketches,
something that wasn't done by commercial artists at the
time. "Screw it," she said one day in her studio, likely
after eyeing one too many of what she called "tawdry copies"
of her sketches. "I'm signing my work."
Sketching fashion is a deceptively simple art. "Elegance
meets court reporting" is how former Globe and Mail fashion
writer David Livingstone refers to it, and he's right: With
only a series of pencil strokes and flashes of colour, the
artist must convey the very context of how the clothes are
to be worn -- and do so quickly, on deadline. Ms. Stowell
flourished within these constraints, though her
perfectionism often drove her into frenzied, frustrated
drawing sessions that lasted more than 36 sleepless hours.
Her nephew Jeremy Sturgess, now a Calgary-based architect,
and her daughter Geordie, a nurse in Vancouver, remember it
as clear as day. Ms. Stowell would be standing behind a
drafting table, a Peter Jackson regular in a cigarette
holder in the corner of her mouth. With clouds of smoke
pluming around her short, well-coiffed hair, Ms. Stowell
would go at the thick coarse paper with Conté, the stubby
sticks of compressed graphite that were the staples of her
trade. Typically, a sketch would take two hours. "The bigger
the smoke cloud, the more the muse was happening," Geordie
remembers. "It was like she was smoking a hookah to bring in
the spirits."
Not long after arriving in Montreal, Ms. Stowell fell in
with Iona Monahan, then a fashion writer who would
eventually become the Montreal Gazette's fashion editor. Ms.
Monahan, known for her long fangs and short fuse, instantly
took to the swishy, brash illustrator with the thick British
accent. They had both quit school at roughly the same age
and shared a knack for spotting trends.
In the mid-1960s, Flare, Vogue, Vanity Fair and other
influential magazines began using more fashion photography,
threatening the livelihood of fashion illustrators. The
camera, with its ease and expediency, made sense to Ms.
Stowell, but she feared what it would do to the industry.
All of a sudden, the emphasis was less on the clothes and
more on the model wearing them. Nevertheless, the change
forced Ms. Stowell to diversify to newspaper feature
illustration and editorial cartoons. She also took
copper-etching classes at the Montreal's Saidye Bronfman
Centre, managing to displease the dour art doyennes there
with her predilection for vibrant colour.
In 1976, after 30 years of a mostly unhappy marriage, Ms.
Stowell left her husband for Toronto and added Mayfair,
Chatelaine and others to her client list. Along the way, she
also continued to skewer the industry she loved. In 1980,
she self-published an illustrated roman à clef that aped the
fashion industry's superficiality, complete with frazzled
lingerie models, snobby, blue-haired buyers and paunchy
salesmen -- all fighting over fabric samples.
In the early 1980s, fashion designer Lida Baday persuaded
her then boss to use Ms. Stowell's illustrations for an
upcoming launch. The show marked Ms. Stowell's resurgence,
as it reminded everyone of the inherent substance and style
of her drawings. Ms. Stowell continued to work with Ms.
Baday when the latter launched her own successful design
house. In 1996, the pair again collaborated on what was
likely some of Ms. Stowell's best work: six four-metre-high
canvases of Lida Baday designs, drawn on site over a period
of two days while poised on a stepladder crowded with
pencils and paintbrushes. "The Duchess," as her friend and
designer Ron Leal dubbed her in 1994, had yet to slow down.
Ms. Stowell moved to Vancouver in 1999 to be closer to her
daughter, Geordie, and a brother, rekindling relationships
that had been long-distance in nature for the better part of
20 years. In 2002, she illustrated Mr. Leal's last show,
composing large panels of his Pamela Roland line of women's
evening wear. ("I think I'm done," Mr. Leal recalls her
saying at the time.) In 2003, she was inducted into the
Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
Ms. Stowell continued to meet Mr. Leal for their weekly
dinners at Pastiche or Bishop's in Vancouver, and celebrated
her 87th birthday on Dec. 11 with her sister-in-law, Carole.
That evening, Geordie coaxed her mother into visiting the
house she shares with her partner, Petra VanderLey. The
couple had framed 15 pieces of Ms. Stowell's work, one of
the few times Ms. Stowell had seen her illustrations so well
presented.
"Man, I was really good," she later said to her daughter.
"That was dangerous work." She wasn't boasting; to Geordie,
it sounded as though her mother was just coming to the
realization.
The next day, she suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma.
Jennifer Marguerite Stowell
was born in Tossac, Pyrenees, France, on Dec. 11, 1919.
She died in Vancouver on
Dec. 13, 2006. She is survived
by daughter Georgina (Geordie).