Artist as a Young Man

I was not yet two when my mother took me to Newfoundland. This must have been 1953 or ’54. I’d check the date, but there’s nobody I can ask anymore. I was the first of four children, the first grandchild on my mother’s side. I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, which is where my father lived all his life and my mother, all her married life.

Whatever its charms, Hamilton was not Newfoundland — a fact that my homesick mother often pointed out. I’m surprised she waited as long as she did to take me back.

As a result of that first trip — and of holidays to Newfoundland that followed for the next fifteen years — I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know who David Blackwood was.

I was ten or eleven when I finally met him — not in Newfoundland but on Georgian Bay. He was not yet then what he would become: one of Canada’s most celebrated artists. He took his education at the Ontario College of Art as seriously as he took his work. There was a scholarship...