The Reign of the Third Horseman – The Pollution Mural - 1970
96" X 48", tempera on panel
I can’t describe the powerful feelings I had as I painted this piece. I had never felt such a combination of rage, powerlessness, yet powerful in myself and such a sense of destiny. I’ve become very familiar with those feelings since. At the time I felt this seemed an important work, maybe not for the world but somehow for my future place in it. The deep thought process that went into it set the tone for the rest of my life. While the pollution message was clear, what wasn’t apparent for decades was the painting’s connection to 9/11 Twin Towers disaster in New York via the photographs of the aftermath. Turn the statue 90 degrees and you’re there.
In 1970, massive public demonstrations to protest environmental issues were unknown and probably unthought of. The Pollution Mural as it became known; was my first attempt to make others aware of the environmental destruction going on around them while I was still in high school. I had first hand experience. My friends and I had witnessed the destruction of the Black Creek Valley, when a commission under Mr. Ross Lord, was made responsible for ensuring that the devastation of Hurricane Hazel during 1954 was never repeated.
All of the major creeks and rivers in Toronto and the surrounding regions were surveyed. The river and creek banks considered to be vulnerable to flooding were slated to be stabilized with rock and sheathed with chainlink fencing. Some creek banks were to be “laminated” with concrete raceways.
A sewage plant was built on the side of the valley at the north end of Roding Street where it discharged partially treated sewage directly into the creek kids had swum in for decades. No one told the kids or the parents.
In the very early ‘60’s, when I was about twelve, the government forces bulldozed the mid to upper reaches of Black Creek Valley floor. It and all its wild inhabitants that couldn’t fly elsewhere are now entombed under several feet of clay. What was once the most spectacular scenery in southern Ontario, and certainly the most ecologically diverse valley, was buried, possibly forever.
Prior to the rape of the valley, it was a narrow winding wildlife corridor. Part of it was a mosquito-infested swamp that only children could walk through without sinking out of sight in the black ooze. To be sure, that aspect is not missed by many people today, but it was a wellspring of burgeoning life. The entire valley was densely populated with nearly every type of animal native to Southern Ontario at the time except for bears, cougars, elk (yes there was and still is one population of elk in Ontario) and wolves. It was also one of the last places left in Southern Ontario where such a wide variety of birds, amphibians and reptiles co-existed. The reason for the zoological density was, as mentioned, the fantastic fertility of the swamp. It was alive. Certainly it was full of mosquito larvae and their descendants, but it was also home to daphnia, glass worms, bosnia, cyclops, fairy shrimp, amphibious insects and a vast assortment of butterflies, moths and beetles. It was one of the most densely populated frog habitats in Canada and a major waystation for migrating waterfowl and songbirds. Glorious sandstone cliffs bordered the swamp, the largest of them was known locally as Deadman’s Cliff. The cliffs were mined for their fine gold coloured sand, very soft and light, to be used in local construction projects. Then they were bulldozed into grassy hills. The rest of the valley walls were clothed in a green mantle of mixed forest. Some of the forest still survives as a city park known as Downsview Dells, an ecological carbuncle that still rankles that is properly and finally regarded as an ecological disaster by the Toronto Conservation Authority.
Transforming this once magnificent biological jewel into a city park surrounded by an ugly concrete jungle of shopping malls and the most infamous housing development in Canada: the Jane-Finch Corridor; was obscene. The entire area would be better razed and converted back into the beautiful countryside it once was.
During the bulldozing, my friends and I tried to save some of the pond-life by moving as much as we could catch from the ponds to the adjacent Black Creek where it would have some chance of survival. It was a pitiful effort that almost cost my life when the pond bank I was lying on trying to catch a large fish with my hands, collapsed and I was nearly buried by the oncoming bulldozer. My brother and my best friend Lance hauled me out or I’d have been lost in the bottomless black ooze.
This bulldozer driver wasn’t stopping for anyone. We saw up close and personally exactly what happens to wildlife as civilization moves in. The landscape around us that we had played in and explored for many of our young years; was lobotomized in a few short months into a state that would have had The Lord of the Rings cackling with glee. Unfortunately, in the real world, there are too many Dark Lords and no magic rings to topple empires of progress gone horribly wrong. Progress and development are two words that are coming to mean tragedy and horror amidst environmental genocide.
There was no understanding in those days of how government legislation was being formulated to commit environmental genocide for many decades to come. Not just in our area, but around the world. The world seemed such a big place and space was needed for new industry and population growth.
Housing and commercial developments built around the valley were routinely sabotaged by gangs of local children, some as young as 10 years old, angry and indignant over the loss of wilderness and playground. In those days, no one had heard the words “environment” or “ecology” or cared about pollution. Adults thought wetlands were stinking swamps to be paved or otherwise covered up with the accoutrements of modern civilization, especially shopping malls. Most shopping malls in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, are built on what were once ‘useless’ wetlands. They are now finally coming to be understood to be the prime link in the renewal of life on this planet - one of the very keys to life on earth.
Local environmental destruction reached a new level when Clayson Avenue, another street in our neighbourhood and situated close to the Humber River, was built. Through the Humber Valley flows one of several formerly beautiful rivers that divide the Greater Toronto Area into what were diverse pockets of habitat dominated originally by vast hardwood forests. The area surrounding Clayson Avenue was by the early Sixties remnant grassland, formerly part of a farm that was first cut off from the river by a rail line then by arterial roads and finally by housing and industrial developments.
Clayson Avenue and the factories on that street “enjoy” the distinction of being the instrument of local extinction of the chimney crayfish. In the Humber grasslands were dozens of Vernal (intermittent) ponds. Vernal ponds are ponds that only exist during the early spring. When the snow melts, they fill up. As the spring wanes, they dry out and the aquatic life in them dies. Or does it?
The Humber valley ponds supported what appears to have been a unique habitat created and maintained by creatures known as Chimney Crayfish. It is possibly the largest of the crayfish species, a crayfish that grew to a “bulky” six inches long. They looked like small lobsters. In the early spring, they could be seen moving slowly around on the bottom of the ponds scavenging for food in the openings between tufts of submerged grass. The bottoms of these ponds were not flat. Instead they were punctuated by a series of what looked like miniature termite mounds similar to those massive termite towns seen in Africa or Australia. When frightened, the crayfish retreated into the mounds that also resembled huge worm casts that lawn rollers were invented to flatten. When the ponds dried up, the crayfish didn’t die with the rest of the pond’s inhabitants; they merely crawled down their chimneys and carried on life underground in the ground water. Thus, the Chimney crayfish could be the only species of a higher order to live in an above ground body of water and a below ground aquifer supposedly devoid of life and cut off from light and oxygenation.
Their ponds were also populated with fairy shrimp; a freshwater seasonal relative of Brine Shrimp often sold in comic book ads as Sea Monkeys. Fairy shrimp are longer and bulkier than brine shrimp, transparent and grow to three-quarters of an inch long. They lay their eggs on submerged grass blades and algae. When the seasonal ponds dry up, the eggs survive as tiny little time capsules waiting for the next spring melt. In the dry season, their eggs blow from pond to pond ensuring genetic diversity.
Clayson Avenue broke the cycle and ended millions of years of evolution. Since my friends and I were all tropical fish enthusiasts, we were constantly out in the local wilderness looking for sources of “live food” to feed our fish. The Clayson Avenue area ponds were known as “Fairy Shrimp Ponds” to a select few people. If everyone knew, tropical fish hobbyists in their eagerness for a “free lunch” for their fish would soon trample the ponds and ruin the habitat. It was a privilege to know where these ponds were and the jealously guarded secret was handed from very close friend to very close friend.
The secret stayed intact until bulldozers came and buried a unique environment worthy of scientific study and preservation.
The next ecological disaster in the Downsview area was back in Downsview Dells. One pond had escaped the bulldozers because it was an “ox-bow” pond just inside the margin of a heavily wooded section of the valley. Oxbow ponds are created when a river or stream straightens itself out through erosion over hundreds of years leaving behind an isolated ‘U’ shaped pond. This pond was known as “the Daphnia Pond”. It was the last example of an ox-bow pond in the Toronto area and probably a much larger area as well. It was the only accessible source of Daphnia for the entire west-end of Toronto. Daphnia, tiny reddish brown crustaceans, oval in shape and a little larger than the head of a pin, are commonly known as water fleas. Of course, they aren’t real fleas and are completely harmless. They consume algae and other detritus, thus making “dirty” water cleaner. These little animals are the most popular fresh water live food for use with tropical fish in the world but impossible to get for most hobbyists. Sophisticated hobbyists understand their importance to fish health, especially Discus, the most prized fish from the Amazon. Besides daphnia, the pond was also home to Tubifex Worms and Glass Worms (the larval stage of a species of small harmless fly). It was also the last good pond in the area for salamanders to breed in, notably the nearly six inch long spotted salamander. Then, in the mid sixties, some moron drained the pond into Black Creek, presumably to get rid of mosquitoes. All of the local wildlife species that depended on the pond were lost.
So by the time I started to cast about for painterly subjects in my last term of Grade 13 Art class, I had quite a history of personal grievances against misguided, poorly executed conservation agendas in the Toronto area. But I didn’t know at the time who the offenders were. They were nameless and except for Ross, have remained so.
But in Grade Thirteen I finally had an art teacher, Mr. Tanner, who realized I had potential instead of just thinking I was the class artist with no future as such. He let me design my own art course in the last two terms of that year. Finally having free rein I did a seven foot long pastel mural of Incan statuary, a lot of stainless steel sculptures that I sold to my teachers in the second term, and then at the beginning of the third term, Mr. Tanner told the class we were to do a major work of art in what ever media we wanted and that included pottery and photography. I chose to paint and came up with a sketch that I wanted to transform into a mural. My teacher, Mr. Tanner, went and got me a sheet of black masonite™ to paint on. We set it up in the art room on two full size easels. Unfortunately, the only acrylic colour the school had was black. So most of the mural had to be painted with tempera. Since tempera needs a surface with 'tooth', as the painting dried, bits of it fell off the masonite™. I had to keep repainting it. That taught me how to layer paint.
When an artist paints, he paints what moves him. By this time, pollution was making headlines in the newspaper due to smog and oil tankers that were running aground and sinking all over the world. The Coke cans and other garbage along the Humber came back to mind and I combined everything into this huge painting. I've always called it the Pollution Mural. But since then I've painted a lot of Apocalyptic subjects and what this painting really turned out to be was the beginning of the Reign of the Third Horseman.
Eventually, the size of the painting was just too awkward for the size of the classroom. So the teacher moved me out in the hall. Since artists have no sense of time or place, it wasn't long before I was causing major traffic jams in the hall as people stopped to watch me work. From there the painting was moved to my teacher's office where I took over for the rest of the year - I finished the painting during the last class and earned a mark of 100%.
But then the teacher sort of blackmailed me. He said he'd give me the perfect mark if I donated the painting to the school. That might seem offensive but the reality was that there was no way for me to get it home and the plaster walls in our house wouldn't have supported it. So I was perfectly happy to donate the painting.
The next year, I was working for Eatons Yorkdale as a display artist. The men's window guy, Mathew Jarozynski, was a graduate of the Polish Fine Arts Academy and he asked to see a photo of this painting he'd heard so much about. I didn't have one. A plan was needed since I didn't own a camera.
I went back to the school to do find out what had become of my painting. I found it behind a huge cupboard in the Pottery studio. So I went and saw the principle and told him if it wasn't put up in short order, I was coming with a truck to take it home. He said it would be up in a week in the cafeteria. (Imagine eating your lunch with all that sludge washing towards you?) That meant I had to get shots before it was hung. It needed to be outside.
The gorgeous blonde who worked at the cosmetics counter next to the escalator became friendly with me it didn't take long to learn she owned a SLR camera. She let herself be talked into coming to my school one lunch hour to take photographs of the painting. Lucky she did. She took the shots with the panel braced on a fold-up cafeteria table on the school's front lawn. No, I never got to go out with her.
When I painted this piece, most who looked at it said I was over dramatizing the impact of pollution – especially with the gas masks. What they didn't understand was that apart from the gas masks, most of what was in the painting had already happened. The ship was the Arrow that sank that year in Chedebucto Bay off the coast of Nova Scotia causing unprecedented wildlife and environmental destruction. You can see the Pollution Monster that’s haunted us ever since escaping and the then new Canadian flag sinking in the oily sludge floating to shore. That's me sitting on a rock with a dead seagull at my feet. Detroit is in the background and the Third Horseman is in the smoke above it.
The on-going problem with tires is represented by a single scrap tire sunk in the muck. They were all over the place in those days and a lot of other garbage besides. In recent years, people have woken up and cleaned up the visible litter and deposited it in landfills where it causes problems we can’t see.
I took liberties with the Statue of Liberty. She's gasping in the smoke. Her flame has guttered and is spewing more smoke.
What was spooky about this is that the entire left side of the painting is a close match to a famous photograph taken after 9/11:
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At work, news of my painting and my opinion about what Eatons was doing with its garbage, especially the amount generated by the display department became widely known throughout the store. Luckily no one sold me out. But the store management took it seriously and the shipping and receiving department was given a lecture delivered by the big boss, Mr. Costo. His theme was that the world is a very big place and the amount of garbage produced by the human race would never cause any significant environmental damage.
As everyone knows now, none of that was true. Pollution is second only to over-population in terms of problems we face as passengers on planet Earth. However, no one wants to talk about over-population so it remains the elephant in the room and population controls will probably never be implemented until it’s years too late to save most species from extinction. The drop dead date when decisive results are needed, not action is 2050.
My art career right there – it was at a logical dead end but for one thing; I was terrible at French.
I was looking for my artistic “voice”. I wanted to express my indignation. I wanted my message to be heard. That Grade 13 art class gave me my first tiny opportunity.
The opportunity manifested itself as the Pollution Mural. It was my first major painting. It was meant to be a social comment on the fragility of the environment and the threat posed by human activities. The concept grew around the sinking of the oil tanker “Arrow” which sank in Chedabucto Bay in 1970 off the coast of Nova Scotia. It was carrying 16,010 tons of Bunker C crude oil and it caused unprecedented damage to the East Coast environment (that has persisted for over forty years) as it spread along the shoreline devastating the local wildlife as it went. The Arrow disaster pushed Canada into a new age, an age prefaced by two world wars and punctuated by human greed and mismanagement on a global scale. To me the Industrial Age became the Age of Destruction instead of the Age of Aquarius. But the Arrow also signaled the dawning of environmental awareness in Canada.
The frantic pace, at which natural resources were being consumed, profligate dumping of disposables, toxic and nuclear waste with total disregard for future human generations, never mind the survival of the planet began to be made public. Even so there was a lot of resistance to the idea that human activity could cause any permanent damage to the planet.
In the painting, the Arrow is sinking in the oil slick oozing from her punctured hull. The Canadian flag is sinking in the ooze; the American flag has already sunk out of sight. The Pollution monster flows out of the ship’s hold. The Statue of Liberty is gagging in the smoke; her flame has guttered to a thick smoke billowing from the torch of freedom. A pall of pollution foretells the coming doom: civilians in gas masks, Hell, represented by the cloud formed skull with the approaching Third Horseman of the Apocalypse materializing over the city shrouded in air pollution. On the beach in the foreground my form is sitting over a dead seagull, mourning the loss of environmental purity.
The gas masks were the elements most frequently commented upon with disbelief and derision. They came true in Japan in 1977 when the people of Tokyo started wearing them to prevent lung damage from the polluted air in their city. London, England could have used the masks centuries sooner as could many other cities around the world. Since then oxygen masks have been superseded by oxygen bars where patrons can pay to breathe clean air in densely polluted cities.
Before Chedabucto Bay, Canada was living in a bubble of environmental delusion. The Arrow popped the bubble for a some…
The bubble popped in slow motion as far as I was concerned. What was plain to me was not plain to my fellow students or anyone else I tried to discuss pollution issues with.
For 1970, all standard shift cars were outfitted with smog equipment intended to reduce exhaust emissions. At the time, the only issue the public was even marginally aware of was lead in fuel and later the first fuel shortages due to political unrest in the Middle East.
The combination of fuel emissions and political strife in the Middle East was a sign of trouble brewing for us in North America. When I painted the Pollution Mural, I knew the world was a small place, that the issues in the Middle East couldn’t be ignored but all of that was at the time, well beyond my concerns – I thought…
A DETAIL FROM THE POLLUTION MURAL - When I painted this I was thinking about pollution not war. But this was one of those times where the subject matter took over and what wanted to come out came out. All creative people will tell you the same thing: you often have no idea where the story is going, you just go with the flow – you sort of stand back and watch as a revelation reveals itself. As obvious as it looks in retrospect, at the time you often don’t understand what it was you just did. It took several more paintings for the pattern to begin to reveal itself and even then, it takes the real event to finally interpret what was trying to crawl out of the ether. Since this piece was painted on shiny Masonite, the paint was falling off almost as fast as I applied it in some places. I just thought the work of sanding would be too much trouble for a painting for which I had very low expectations.