AT THE AGE of seventy, Joseph Drapell can look back on many impressive accomplishments. I first became familiar with the artist in 1971 when we happened to meet across the street from the Mirvish Gallery in Toronto, and over the years I have come to admire his work more and more. Perhaps his first major accomplishment was a personal one: the re-invention of himself. After his first 25 years spent under the German and Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, Drapell was “determined to escape and develop his art in the personal freedom of the West.” Drapell’s migration to this country in 1966 was both an opportunity and a challenge. He no longer had to work “in unfreedom,” but how could he establish a new identity for himself? Drapell somewhat improbably remembers it as “not difficult at all,” in part because he found Canadians in general and his first employers in this country, an architectural firm in Halifax, very accommodating. In 1970, after a stint in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he studied painting and sculpture at the Cranbrook Academy and earned an M.F.A, Drapell settled in Toronto. Drapell’s goal was to “aim very high, learn from the most accomplished people.” His process of assimilation was much enhanced when he acquired an island on Georgian Bay in 1971. Georgian Bay became his “spiritual home.” Not unlike immigrant members of the Group of Seven –Lismer, MacDonald, Varley–Drapell was drawn to the land of the Canadian Shield. The artist observes, “I [met] the Native peoples there, I [was] struck by the wildlife, the purity of water, by the visual beauty of the granite islands, from which wind-swept pines grow. I determine[d] to find a new visual language to celebrate this Canadian Treasure.” A second accomplishment: Drapell’s intellectual development is exemplary. As a critic who spends a great deal of time in artists’ studios, I suppose I might be expected to illuminate them at times, but with Drapell, the information often flows from him to me. I remember Drapell explaining to me Sir Joshua Reynolds’ idea of “incidental beauties that have to be eliminated” while he painted over a lovely section in one canvas. Visitors to his home are always struck by the clutter of books and journals that attest to his wide reading; he’s always up-to-the-minute in that. While he may not have studied the classical aesthetics of Kant or Croce, Drapell is currently immersed in the writings of Wittgenstein and others, and he is one of the few artists I know who can argue intelligently about psychoanalytic theories of art or dispassionately about the strengths and weaknesses of Modernism. Drapell admires Nietzsche, one of his favourite philosophers, because “he saw so deeply into life.” The lesson he draws from such excellent writings is, “Yes, you can be... more demanding in what you want from art.” Of course, Drapell is familiar with the dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and on occasion his art has moved from one of those stylistic poles to the other, but he observes, “How unfortunate it would be to be stuck at one pole, Dionysian or Apollonian.” He wants to be in the middle and venture out from there. The artists he admires most–Raphael, Pollock, Louis–are always, he argues, near the middle. Third: Drapell is also a man of enormous cultivation. Some of his contemporaries, lacking it, have fared less well, artistically, over time. There’s his profound knowledge of classical music, in particular his huge collection of recordings of Bach cantatas, Beethoven quartets, and so on. Drapell not only listens to great music, but for years he has also played it. His preferred repertoire is Beethoven piano sonatas, and various works by Bach, Haydn, Brahms and Schubert. He annotates the scores as he studies them, seeking out the “innovation and the invention. It gives you sophistication that you bring with you when you go to exhibitions–or to your studio; you’re not satisfied with lesser or merely fashionable art.” Drapell certainly reads more widely in creative literature than I do. He is devoted to such great writers as Flaubert, Stendhal, Joyce, Kafka, and he brings a critical intelligence to them–for instance, he feels that Milan Kundera may be a better essayist than a novelist. This year he discovered Harold Pinter with his “severe and deep” innovation and was inspired to write three short plays. Drapell obviously has a commitment to and an involvement with many of the arts at their best, and he has the ambition that comes from such involvement–to be as good as he himself can be. Then there is Drapell’s inventiveness. When you look at the history of painting over the last half century or so, one key fact becomes apparent: many of the greatest artists have invented their own paint-handling procedures. Think of Jackson Pollock and the poured-and-spattered technique. And Helen Frankenthaler, who dissociated painterliness from the fully loaded brush with her soak-stain method. Or Jules Olitski, with his spray guns and Interference paint. Then there are the Europeans, Fautrier, Dubuffet and Tàpies, with their non-fine art materials and built-up surfaces, their hautes pâtes. To be sure, “paint-handling procedures” is almost a misnomer, because a number of those great artists wanted to erase all traces of their hand. Think of Kenneth Noland, who had his studio assistants take a floor polisher to his paintings to do just that. Or Morris Louis, whose hand doesn’t show either–art historians still aren’t sure how he painted, although when Drapell taught Historical Techniques of the Artists at York University, he did assign his students the task of trying to re-invent Louis’ method. Drapell has found his own paint-handling procedures: first his spreading device with his compression technique, and then the notched spreading device with its combing of the paint. Thereafter, his hexagonal paintings with bevelled edges. Or his powerfully built up surfaces and the many foreign substances added to the paint: nails, glitter, and even the lenses from a pair of sunglasses. An artist who has been this inventive will want and be able to renew his art again and again, as Drapell has indeed done. Inspiration! It’s always a question as to whether any specific painting speaks to the soul, and with abstract paintings that question is both more compelling and more obdurate. I find it helpful to distinguish between an empty formalism and inspired modernism. One nearly constant source of inspiration for Drapell’s art is his attachment to home grounds, as he says, “the sources of his artistic authenticity”. First of all, his family cottage in Bohemia, the scene of many idyllic pleasures in hi childhood. And then, by transference I suppose Drapell’s affection for the retreat of his island on Georgian Bay, his “spiritual home.” When financial pressures forced him to rent it out in 1974, he painted some of his most moving paintings, the Great Spirit pictures, which I interpret as both a paean of praise to the splendours of nature and a kind of meditation on things lost. (In this exhibition, the beautiful Night Lake 1987 recapitulates this compelling motif.) So much of the greatest art is based on the artist’s contemplation of how fleeting the pleasures of our life are. Rembrandt in his self-portraits! The Impressionists! And many more. There are other sources of inspiration–the death of his father-in-law in 1981, the birth of his daughter, Emma, in 1988, or the wonders of the heavens. Drapell constructs his own telescopes and remains fascinated by the cosmos. Hence the sheer scale, the radiation of an ethereal light, the strange elements along the base and side, in the glorious Religion and Ideology 2009 (too large a work for a private gallery); all these things together convey a powerful sense of the sublime. Consider Drapell’s age of seventy. The history of art is clear that more artists than we would like, even major ones, have a limited run of top-level production. For instance, critics have for years argued whether Picasso’s greatest work ended around 1919, as John Berger maintained, or at some later date, and if a later date, which one, for which medium. For every Titian or Matisse or Hofmann who had a late flowering, there are those who have burned out after only a decade or two. Yet Drapell is still painting at the height of his powers. Perhaps that is his greatest accomplishment of all.
Ken Carpenter, Ph. D.
Chair (emeritus), Dept. of Visual Arts, York University
President, Canadian section, International Association of Art Critics
Joseph Drapell
