The Life

I was 23 years old in 1971 when I left Montreal and Sir George Williams University. I returned to my birthplace in Calgary, Alberta. I had been away for four years studying and practicing fine art. I was a recognized artist in the press and on St. Catherine Street and in the gallery districts of Sherbrook Avenue and in the old city. I resisted, staying in Montreal until after the nine months of the War Measures Act had ended and the troops were withdrawn from the city. I left that beautiful place because I felt I could not be an Anglophonic artist amongst a Francophonic people with national desires. I felt certain that I would be welcomed in Calgary by friends, family, and the art community and patronized as a returning art hero. I was mistaken.

Although I had received yearly grants and scholarships to attend school and sold serveral prints a month for three years; I also had student loans to repay. I had to find work and went to work for the railroad as my father, uncle, and grandfather before me had done. The railroad couldn't hire me on as a train or engine crewman, as I wished, because transportation regulations wouldn't allow crewmen who require correctional lenses at the time of their hiring. I was offered a job in the freight yards as a checker. I walked alone at night in the yards with a lantern and clipboard writing down the serial numbers of cars to be used against the waybills and computer lists. I received several quick promotions. By the end of my first year with the railroad, I was promoted to a car controller on the second trick and yard master of all the yards between Calgary and Red Dear, north; and Calgary and Field, British Columbia, west. My territory included the yards of the famous resort towns of Banff and Lake Louise.

I longed to be riding the trains through the mountains, foothills and prairies but all I had before me was a press board analog punch card tree file frame which contained color coded keypunch cards representing cars in the yards of my territory. It was like playing toy trains. I was the super conductor. I didn't exist for the men of the road and the office as myself. I was a ghost of my father. They called me Doug and gave me the respect he deserved. My father had died in a train wreck three years before and there was a bronze plague on the control tower beside the door of the road crew office commemorating him.

I wanted to become an artist but I had to test the lure of the road against my desire for an artistic life. I had to pay off my education debt. Second trick was from 16 hundred until 24 hundred (4 p.m. until midnight). I would sleep from about 1 am until 9 in the morning, get up and do silkscreen prints until about 3 in the afternoon.

One day a week I was invited to John and Kay Snow's home to print lithographs of my own design and have lunch with them. They were the parents of my artistic intellect developed over bread and cheese, fruit and tea, and in the ink and grits of the lithography studio.

I had Monday and Tuesday off. George Stepanenko and I would get together, cruise and party for an evening. Without George and the Snows I would have gone insane in that provincial city.

On Saturday and Sunday I was the only representative of Customer Service but; Saturday and especially Sunday, are not busy days for most businesses. There was a bit of time to do sketchbook drawings and ASCII computer images with my punch card machine. The line printer (proof press) with card reader, and ticker tape punch was the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. I dialed up distant telex machines and sent ASCII pictures to distant offices with ticker tapes generated on the line printer. I did a few conceptual car tracing pieces using the teletype machine and a connection to the mainframe computer in Montreal. I did a few broadband satellite fax transmissions of nudes. Fax was very new and no one knew what it was good for because everything required an original hand signed pen or indelible pencil signature. Everything on fax was a facsimile. The satellite broadband radio telephone fax machine was a toy. The satellite phone was my connection to the super executives of Montreal and Vancouver. None of the computer works, that I know of, survived.

I was being groomed for the operations department and my next promotion was to be the role of Train Yard Coordinator. The Coordinator's office was like the control tower of an airport with a 360 view of the huge freight yard. The Train Yard Controller's desk was semicircular tipped up thing with a little flat surface for writing and papers. He had 6 telephone lines, three radio bands, and a couple of rare, t. v. computer monitors glowing green on black imbedded in the sloping desk. Road and yard crews stood behind him. Every year the existing train yard coordinator on my trick spend a few weeks in psychiatric care. He was a good keyboard player and said that he played music as therapy. When he became frustrated he would become violent and beat the road, yard, car and track crews who hovered behind him taking orders and offering suggestions while the telephones rang and the the two way radios blared at him. Such outbreaks where followed by the arrival of an ambulance which took him to the psychiatric ward of the General Hospital. Two weeks later he'd be back. Not many men did as well as he did keeping things going smoothly but one day he would wipe out totally and I would be promoted into his horrible desk.

The railroad granted me a year's leave of absence to return to university for a bit of post graduate work. After the year was over I resigned my post in Car Control and went to Vancouver to make prints.

The Art

My prospects with the railroad were good but I decided to quit full time wage work and become an artist. By 1974 I had decided to work part time for subsistence and dedicate my life to art.

The work should "speak" for itself so there is little to write about it.

The sketch pads of "Transitions 1" are most interesting for me. They clearly show the progress I was making and the pitfalls I encountered.

Printmaking is a difficult set of techniques to learn. It takes many years to become a master lithographer capable of making large editions of nearly identical prints without power. I was starting on a long journey towards mastery of obsolete stone litho. Silk screen isn't as difficult as lithography. You can see a marked technical improvement in the prints from 1971 to 1974.

Transitions 1 is in chronological order but, the chronologies of the prints and the drawings overlap, both begin in 1971 and end in 1974.

Sizes of the original pieces are not obvious because all the reproductions, regardless of the real size of the original, are 540 pixels on the longest side.

Sketch Book 1: 31 cm x 23 cm

Sketch Book 2: 23 cm x 15 cm

Sketch Book 3: 30 cm x 22 cm

Sketch Book 4: 23 cm x 30 cm

Sketch Book 5: 23 cm x 30 cm

Pricing is difficult. All that remains of most of the editions is an artist's proof. The drawings of the sketch books are one of a kind. If you are interested write me at barrysmylie@rogers.com we can work something out.