O'DEA o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-07-22 published
GROSS,
Margaret
Louise (née
GUYMER)
Born in London, Ontario, January 8, 1923. Margaret passed peacefully
in her sleep at West Lincoln Memorial Hospital in Grimsby on
Monday,
July 21, 2008. Beloved wife of Jack
GROSS and mother
of Linda, Mary, John (and Margaret), Catherine and Michael (and
Andrea), and grandmother of Linnaea, Leo, Megan, Jakob, Hanna,
Elizabeth and James. Margaret was predeceased by her sister Jean.
Margaret was a graduate of Western University and was elected
subprefect in her last year. Special thanks to Doctor
O'DEA and
her staff at the Family Medical Centre for their exceptional
care. The family will receive Friends at the Vineland Chapel
of the Tallman Funeral Homes, 3277 King St. on Wednesday 7-8: 30 p.m.
Funeral Service will be held in the Tallman Chapel on Thursday,
July 24th at 11 a.m. with a reception to follow. Interment at
Sanctuary Park Cemetery, Port Elgin on Saturday, July 26th at
11: 30 a.m. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations to West Lincoln
Memorial Hospital in recognition of their years of dedicated
care, would be appreciated by the family.
O... Names OD... Names ODE... Names Welcome Home
ODEA - All Categories in OGSPI
ODECKI o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-06-16 published
BLIN,
Marianna
At Extendicare Nursing Home on Friday, June 13, 2008, Marianna
BLIN in her 88th year. Beloved wife of the late Boleslaw
BLIN
(1997.) Sister-in-law of Piotr
BLIN in Australia. Cherished aunt
of Zygmunt and Krystyna in England and Heniek and Irena in Poland.
She will be sadly missed by her dear Friends Anna
WISNIEWSKI,
Mary ZARUCKI,
Mariola
KOSCUIK and and Joe
ODECKI, all of London,
and also by Mr. and Mrs.
RUSINEK and family and Zofia and Kazik
GRZYWACZ of the U.S. Predeceased by her brother Michat
JOZEF
and Wactaw. Visitors will be received on Monday from 7: 00-9:00 p.m.
in the O'Neil Funeral Home, 350 William St. The Funeral Mass
will be celebrated in Our Lady of Czestochowa Church, 419 Hill
St. on Tuesday at 10: 00 a.m. Interment Saint Peter's Cemetery.
Prayers Monday evening at 7: 30 p.m.
O... Names OD... Names ODE... Names Welcome Home
ODECKI - All Categories in OGSPI
ODEN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-04-19 published
NAUTA,
Henry "
Harry,
Hidde"
Was called home to be with the Lord after a lengthy illness on
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at the age of 80 years. Born in Surhuizum,
Friesland, Holland, on May 18, 1928. He came to Canada with his
parents Jakop and Wytscke "Louise"
(HOUWINK)
NAUTA in June 1947
Henry farmed most of his life in Raleigh Township until his passing.
He will be greatly missed by his partner and best friend of 22 years,
Gail CASHMAN.
Also sadly missed by brothers and sisters Abe and
Hilda NAUTA of Chatham, Ralph and Margaret
NAUTA, sister-in-law
Lisa, all of Merlin, sister-in-law Marie
NAUTA,
Ronnie and John
TIMMERMANS of Chatham, Joan and Gus
SONNEVELD,
John and Hermina
NAUTA
all of Blenheim, Hilda and Pete
BERGHUIS of Ingersoll, Clara and
Hank WOUDENBERG of London, Catherine and Marius
VERBEEK of Ridgetown,
and Ruth and Hunter
ODEN of Rochester Hills, Michigan. Predeceased
by his parents, sister Diana, (1989) brother-in-law Jerry
GRACIE,
(2001,) brothers Jake
NAUTA (1999) and Dick
NAUTA (2001.) Henry
will also be missed by his cousin Corrie
BLOMMERS of Chatham
and especially by all of his many nieces and nephews. Family
will receive Friends at Blenheim Community Funeral Home, 60 Stanley
Street, Blenheim on Sunday, April 20, 2008 from 2: 00-5:00 p.m.
Funeral Service from Christian Reformed Church, Blenheim, Monday,
April 21, 2008 at 11: 00 a.m. with Rev. Frank
DEBOER officiating.
Interment in Pardoville-Union Cemetery, Raleigh Township. Friends
wishing to make a memorial donation in memory of Henry are asked
to consider either the Canadian Cancer Society or the Heart and
Stroke Foundation. Donations by debit, Visa, MasterCard, cheque
or cash, may be made by contact the Blenheim Community Funeral
Home, 519-676-9200. Online condolences and donations may be left
at, www.blenheimcommunityfuneralhome.com
O... Names OD... Names ODE... Names Welcome Home
ODEN - All Categories in OGSPI
ODETTE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-04-04 published
Sculptor made a late-career switch only to see his masterpiece
destroyed
After a successful career as a Toronto advertising executive,
he took up art at 51 and won a major installation contest. The
work was later dismantled without his knowledge
By James ADAM/ADAMS,
Page S8
Toronto -- Haydn Llewellyn
DAVIES always had a talent for art.
While serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second
World War, he won a competition to create a Victory Loan poster
for the Allied war effort. Later, returning to Canada to enroll
as a drawing and painting student in what is now the Ontario
College of Art and Design, he was named "most promising young
artist" in his graduating class of 1947.
But it was not until the early 1970s that he found his niche.
By then a handsome father of two teenaged sons, and a highly
successful and dapper executive at Toronto's McCann-Erickson
Advertising
Agency,
Mr.
DAVIES finally turned to the idiom that
made his name in Canada and beyond as a sculptor.
His wife, Eva, an accomplished painter in her own right, supported
his late-career change of gears.
"Eva and I agreed that this was not what we wanted to do," he
said in 2005. "I wanted to get back into art, so I started tapering
off [the advertising work]." As an executive with plenty of disposable
income, he "had the opportunity to travel to many of the good
and great museums of the world," and in the course of these travels,
he became increasingly interested in sculpture, especially large-scale
geometric steel works.
Although he had sculpted with clay in the late 1940s, "I always
seemed to let it get too hard or too wet or too dry. It wasn't
very satisfying." Steel, however, "was a new medium altogether."
He was 51 when he returned to school at the University of Toronto,
to see whether he could master the manipulation of steel and
wood into compelling abstract forms. He was accepted into the
third-year fine arts program, specializing in sculpture. "I got
hooked when I started welding steel."
Two years later, he was named the winner of an international
competition that drew 150 entries for a large-scale outdoor sculpture
to be installed near the entrance of Lambton Community College
of Arts and Technology in Sarnia, Ontario The piece, Homage,
was a powerful assemblage of laminated red cedar shapes, 9-by-3-by-6 metres,
intentionally reminiscent of both the Welsh cromlechs (megalithic
tombs made from circles of stones) he knew from his childhood
in Wales (he had immigrated to Canada with his parents when he
was about 9), and England's famous Stonehenge monument, which
he toured at 31.
Another inspiration came from a visit Mr.
DAVIES made in the
late 1960s to Japan, where, in the words of Canadian art history
professor Alison McQueen, he was seduced by "simplicity of Zen
Buddhist gardens, the proportions of large-scale buildings and
the curves of horizontal members of bridges and the entrance
gates to… Shinto shrines."
His success at Lambton College came as a great surprise, he said.
"I had no thought of winning, nor any idea of how I'd actually
accomplish whatever I might come up with."
It had all started with a drive to Sarnia to visit the college.
"I felt immediately that it was a marvellous piece of architecture,
all striated concrete and glass, but it was cold. I wanted to
humanize it. So the wood idea came to me easily."
Later, while travelling by train to Montreal on advertising business,
he began to sketch ideas on a drawing pad. By that evening, he'd
pretty much come up with the complete concept for Homage - "something
that's never happened to me so quickly before," he said in 2005.
"Or since."
The piece's success paved the way for more commissions, large
and small. By 1976, he was out of the ad business entirely. Further
travels got him interested in the work of Russian Constructivist
sculptors such as Vladimir Tatlin, Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo.
This, in turn, saw him produce large, geometric steel or aluminum
constructions like the thrusting Space Composition installed
in downtown Toronto's Trinity Square in 1984. A few years later,
he was preparing what he called "planar constructions" - non-figurative
mixed-media compositions of wood, cable, steel, aluminum, copper
and bronze that were meant to be affixed to walls or stand freely
on a floor.
Mr. DAVIES eventually had work in more than two dozen permanent
collections, including the National Museum of Wales, the Victoria
and Albert Museum in London and Rome's National Gallery of Modern
and Contemporary Art.
Yet as much as Homage was a breakthrough, it eventually proved
to be the source of his greatest artistic heartbreak. In June,
2005, while recovering from a severe heart attack, he learned
that Homage had been intentionally destroyed, without his prior
knowledge or permission, by Lambton College's administration.
The work, it appears, had been neglected for many years and was
deemed a safety hazard.
College officials said the sculpture, commissioned by the college
in the early 1970s for $10,000, had deteriorated so much that
its lack of stability made it dangerous, especially to the children
who liked to play around and under it.
"This is a blow to not only to me, but also to every artist and
art work in Canada," Mr.
DAVIES declared at the time.
At the time, Mr.
DAVIES was too ill to revisit the site and his
son Bryan DAVIES, a professor at Sir Sandford Fleming College
in Peterborough, Ontario, went in his stead. After inspecting
and photographing the remains, Bryan
DAVIES said whatever rot
Homage had experienced was superficial. "Where there were teeth
marks from the backhoe that took it down, you could smell cedar
standing next to it. Knocking your fist on some of the beams,
it rings solid; it beats like a drum."
Mr. DAVIES had held on to the original plans through the years
and, for a time, it seemed likely that he would rebuild it. The
cost of reconstruction was set at more than $100,000, and Toronto
arts patron Lou
ODETTE said he was willing to contribute $10,000.
One possible location for the piece would have been the outdoor
Odette Sculpture Park along the Detroit River in Windsor.
In the end, it all came to naught. In 2006, Mr.
DAVIES sued for
more than $1-million for, variously, breach of contract, violation
of moral rights and "intentional infliction of emotional distress."
Both the destruction and the suit attracted international attention,
and it's anticipated that the case will be heard this year, or
in early 2009, by the Ontario Superior Court.
Mr. DAVIES's passion for art continued right up to the day last
month when he was admitted to Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital for
treatment of a suspected aneurysm. He asked his youngest son,
Trevor, to bring him his sketch pad "so he could pursue what
he clearly saw as his calling."
His was "a mature creative mind," Prof. McQueen wrote, with reference
to a 2003 exhibition of
DAVIES maquettes at the Burlington (Ont.)
Art Centre. "In an era dominated by video and digital art, when
the meaning of visual culture is formed largely through political,
social and cultural critique, and when the cult of the young
artist seems to reign supreme,"
DAVIES unashamedly, unabashedly
and fruitfully mined "the tenets of abstraction" dating back
to the early days of the 20th century.
While Mr. DAVIES is a role model for anyone who longs to follow
their dreams and can't quite work up the nerve, he also acknowledged
having doubts about his career change. "I've looked back to those
days and sometimes thought I was mad," he said in 2005. "But
it really was the best thing I ever did."
Haydn Llewellyn
DAVIES was born November 11, 1921, in Rhymney,
Wales. He died in Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto on March 24,
2008, of complications relating to liver and lung cancer. He
was 86. He is survived by Eva, his wife of 60 years, sons Bryan
and Trevor, several grandchildren and one great-grand_son.
O... Names OD... Names ODE... Names Welcome Home
ODETTE - All Categories in OGSPI