Manny Hahn was extremely difficult. He and I just didn’t get along, but it wasn’t me especially. Though maybe it was — I remember at one of his parties I refused to sit on his lap, and that was that. Crossed off his list forever!” Hahn had stormy encounters with others of the faculty. “Manny was just impossible to deal with. He was in his late sixties and really in his dotage. He retired (Frances’s expression was “terminated”) in 1951, the year I graduated. He had had life tenure, but he was simply too difficult.”
But when is a man all of a piece? Experience teaches us to extend to talent a certain consideration, to accept vagaries of conduct, to see their better sides. Frances herself saw his genius as a sculptor, his imagination; his superior skills that lent her own a breadth she might not have gained. She saw him as once a very good-looking man, though height-challenged, the once-handsome physique now lost to obesity. “I don’t think he’d seen his feet for quite a while.” His head was round, the nose short, and his temper shorter. “He made his own wine,” said Frances, “and had a little jug in his office. In the morning he’d come storming into the studio in a very bad humour. A few moments later he’d come out of his office with little round patches of colour on his cheeks, and he’d be quite jovial.”
While Frances recognized that, technically, he taught her a tremendous amount, she would nevertheless hide from him a piece she valued and wanted to develop. “When I was working on something, he would invariably come and tear it all apart and start it all over again. And then, of course, after he did that, the work wasn’t mine, was it? And that taught me a very important lesson.”
It was a lesson she forgot only once. In later years, Frances was to conduct night-school sculpture classes. Like virtually every artist who was ever born, Frances was constantly concerned about finances. To live creatively, she sculpted; to put bread on the table and pay the rent, she instructed in half a dozen different night-school carving courses in southern Ontario.
During one evening class, a student was having difficulty achieving a certain effect on a clay bust. Frances suggested what might rectify the problem, but the student couldn’t seem to grasp the idea. Impatiently the student threw down her tools.
“Well, show me!” she said.
Frances, forgetting for that moment the lesson learned at the hands of Emanuel Hahn, took an instrument and made a slight cut down the side of the bust, then worked for a moment on the planes of the head. “There,” she said, happy to have shown the student a valuable sculptural technique.
The student burst into tears. “You’ve ruined my whole day’s work!” she cried.
“And she was right,” said Frances. “I mean, even if it’s bad, the student has something no one else has. Even if it’s second class, it is uniquely theirs and the instructor has no right to go into that person’s mind and, you know, sort of shift things around. I never did it again.”
Emanuel Hahn had married Elizabeth Wyn Wood (1903–66) in 1926 when he was forty-five and she was twenty-three and one of his students at OCA. Frances met her in the late forties; Wyn Wood was still as lovely then as she was in the beautiful marble portrait Hahn created of her in the year they were married. “She said she married Emanuel thinking it would help her career, but I don’t think it did very much.
“I think she was a little suspicious of Emanuel — he was a bit of a womanizer.” Frances would sometimes assist Hahn with one of his castings, working with him in his Adelaide Street studio. He and Wyn Wood had adjoining studios. Both were art instructors, he at the Ontario College of Art, she at Toronto’s Central Technical School. “Yes, a little suspicious of him. When he was teaching, she would appear around the corner of the studio at the College of Art to see what he was doing. All of a sudden we’d see her look around the corner of the doorway.”
The summer after graduation, Frances met Doreen Uren at Tannamakoon, the summer camp where Frances had a part-time job as a counsellor, a post she’d held for the past three years. Doreen had red hair and freckles — the sweet soft-featured, easy-going girl-next-door, whose arms and hands bore the vicious burn scars of a boating accident some years before. But there was determination beneath that sweet exterior; an unrelenting single-mindedness that kept her exercising her arms and hands to retain her piano skills. “Doreen was in her late teens, a superb pianist, and later, an accompanist for the famous singer Lois Marshall.
“Doreen had a funny sense of humour. Well, maybe not so funny. One time at camp she put somebody’s bed up in a tree. A lot of people might not think that was funny. I guess it would depend on whose bed it was.
“I had seen Doreen before, but didn’t really know her. She was aware that Barbara Howard and I, recently graduated from OCA, were looking for a place in Toronto, and she told us about the possibility of a studio in Mona Bates’s house at 519 Jarvis Street.”
Mona Bates had been a piano prodigy, giving her first public recital at the age of seven. As a concert pianist she had toured Europe in the early twenties, finally settling in Toronto in 1925 and opening a studio in the Jarvis Street house, an old Massey mansion, where she taught for forty years. Doreen Uren was one of her special students. Through the young girl’s recommendation, Frances and Barbara moved into a small ground-floor studio at the Jarvis Street address in the summer of 1951.
The years 1951–53 were hard, both financially and psychologically. There was the initial euphoria after four years at OCA and the excitement of stepping out into the world of art. This was quickly followed by the harsh realities of no job, no money, and no prospects. “I had finished studying at OCA,” said Frances, “so there were no more cheques from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. No one was beating a path to my door, and I had no income other than a few dollars in my pocket that I’d put aside from my counselling at summer camp, and any bit of private sculpture tutoring I could scrape together, and a few dollars working part-time for Dr. Williams, the vet.” At one point, in the spirit of quid pro quo, Frances painted the entire third floor of the Jarvis Street house in lieu of rent. OCA, too, offered the opportunity to make an extra dollar or two, but sadly just the opportunity. “I taught a night class there for Jacobean Jones, the sculpture instructor who had replaced Emanuel Hahn. It was just for that first winter after I left the school. Jacobean hired me as her assistant. It was never officially recognized, so I never got paid. I was told later that she was notorious for doing that sort of thing.”
Frances couldn’t understand how she and Barbara Howard existed in the cramped Jarvis Street studio. “We almost murdered each other, trying at one and the same time to both live, and work, in that small place. Our work area was no bigger than the average kitchen. In fact, our work area was our kitchen. My stand, that always had a work-in-progress on it, was in front of the sink, and next to me was the gas stove. Behind me were Barbara’s workbench, Barbara’s easel, and Barbara. She was usually working on a large canvas, often four-by-six feet or bigger. If I were working on a small piece — and even a small sculpture takes up a surprising amount of space — we would literally be working back to back.” One of Barbara’s works that was hung over Frances’s bed actually fell on her one night.
“One of your heavier works,” said Frances, rubbing her head.
“Mmm,” said Barbara.
“Heavy with significance, a weighty subject,” said Frances.
“Mmm,” said Barbara again, examining the corner of the canvas that had struck Frances’s head, then replacing the painting above Frances’s bed.
“I think she was more concerned over the condition of the canvas,” said Frances. “But, really, the Jarvis Street studio was just an impossible situation, a crazy idea. But you don’t know until you try
