Farming out his vision
Onetime Food Network host Antony John trades the homestead for the gallery
In one of Antony John’s new paintings, a conical spotlight hangs over the left third of the canvas, illuminating steam as it hangs in the air on what looks like an early winter morning. The light hits a patch of snow below, in which there is an embedded impression; smooth and winding, it’s difficult to guess what may have laid there before John switched on the light, until you peek at the title of the work: “March Thaw (Dead Calf).”
“It’s my way of atoning for lives I couldn’t save,” John says over the phone from his home near Stratford, Ont. “It’s cathartic for me. I was avoiding touching those paintings, because it was too emotional for me to go there.”
John’s paintings are imbued with what he calls “the morality of farming,” not least of all because, for the better part of the one-time Food Network host’s life, he’s been a farmer. “It’s an aspect of agriculture that’s not being covered in painting,” he says. “I had to come to terms with the morality of knowing that I’m going to have these animals killed.”
It’s not just his own morality that John hopes to confront through his paintings, but also the viewer’s. At an upcoming solo exhibition at Stratford’s Agora Gallery, which will span two decades of the Wales-born artist’s work, John says he will be “transferring some of the responsibility of looking at animals in a certain way back to the consumer, or the viewer.” It’s a unique demand that could only come as legitimately as it does from the painter-turned-farmer-turned-painter.
For as long as the 55-yearold has been around animals and on farms, he’s painted, and nearly 30 years ago had a near-big break in Toronto: “I was on the cusp of getting accepted into the Drabinsky Gallery years ago,” John says, “but at the end of it, [gallerist] David Burnett said, ‘ Your stuff is good enough to hang in a gallery but you’re not doing enough of it.’ ”
That was the early 1990s, and with a farm and a new family — John met his wife of 30 years, Tina, at the University of Guelph while studying wildlife biology, and the two had three children while working on Tina’s father’s dairy farm — John, who also hosted Food Network’s The Manic Organic around that time, was simply too busy to fulfil the Toronto gallery’s suggestion.
“There was a period for 12 to 13 years where I didn’t even pick up a pencil,” John says, “And that just about broke me. I’ve had 20 years to think about what to paint now. There’s a perspective that I wouldn’t have had.”
John was also motivated to maintain his career as a farmer after an exchange with the seminal Canadian artist Alex Colville, with whom John corresponded early in his career as an artist. “I sent him some slides. He was incredibly generous and insightful,” John says of the reply he received from the late artist, whose own career retrospective showed at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2013. “He basically said if you were a racehorse, I’d bet on you, but I wouldn’t be in a hurry to give up your farming because that seems to be where your wellspring is.”
In many ways, having Colville as a sort of mentor by proxy makes sense for John: his works share a similar esthetic with the Canadian master’s, displaying the same soft edges, absent shadows and occasional sense of foreboding. John chalks this up to his use of Renaissance geometry while painting which, he also says, ties into his work as a farmer.
“That’s what I do [in the fields], I measure the earth every year,” he says. “It’s all about putting as much energy as you can put into measuring your space. There is an uncertainty that pervades my work as a painter and also as a farmer. You have to start fresh every year, every canvas.”
John’s 80-acre farm is 50% organic, and his Soiled Reputation-brand vegetables retail at stores and farmer’s markets in and around Stratford. With the kids growing up, the farm in good condition and The Manic Organic a thing of the past, he’s happy to be able to turn his focus back to art, in earnest: It’s an “artist’s Rip Van Winkle story,” he jokes. “Only I haven’t been in a cave for a hundred years.”
His latest piece, created in time for the Agora Gallery show, is called “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bull.” Like the previously mentioned snowy meditation on death, it focuses on young livestock, though John’s inspiration for this piece was altogether more sunny in its esotericism: “When the young bulls got their new horns, they’d scratch beautiful designs in the whitewash with them,” he explains in an email accompanying the image. “Always struck me as a fundamental difference between human and non-human animals. They don’t know they’re creating art. Also speaks to boredom, confinement, purpose, strength of vision in a way — if one is to believe I am the bull.
“I was briefly thinking of calling it ‘Art’s Bull,’ but that would be cheeky.”