A mysterious Calgary connection to the Big Eye paintings

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“Do you remember those sad-eyed paintings that used to be in every suburban living room when we were kids?” It’s a gently provocative conversation starter, courtesy of Chris Cran, one of Canada’s most acclaimed conceptual artists.

Yes, Chris. I do. They featured little girls with enormous big eyes, mysterious, amphibious pools. Some had achingly gelatinous tears about to drop on eerily smooth, round cheeks. Others held big-eyed cats or wandered down lonely alleys, abandoned. I think they were called Keanes, after the artist, Walter Keane, who commercialized art so shamelessly that Andy Warhol was in awe of him. Or maybe they were called Big Eyes? I just know that I suddenly want one, more than one, and I’ll hang them on the wall of my basement bathroom where no one can judge them (or me), but I will know they are there and that they make me happy.

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Cran then dishes out a tantalizing Calgary connection. “Tim Burton has made a movie about the story behind them—turns out the wife, Margaret, was the actual painter while Walter took all the credit—and I heard that a woman from here re-created all the paintings for the film.” Cran, who grew up in a house full of beautiful, English watercolours and art books, remembers the Big Eyes as being “famously bad and ubiquitous. They were a version of black-velvet paintings: cute, but just not to me. As an artist, I’m interested in the cultural phenomenon.”

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I’m also hooked, and not just by the challenge of tracking down the mysterious Calgarian who worked on Big Eyes, which opened on Christmas Day and stars Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz. Could Burton be tapping into a larger phenomenon, an emerging backlash against the Pottery Barn-ization of art, led by a big-eyed child and a black-velvet Elvis?

This is, after all, the most exuberant visual time of year, as the conventional good taste that normally constrains us takes a holiday over the 12 Days of Christmas. That old trope “I don’t know what art is, but I know what I like,” is never truer than when we’re gorging ourselves on bright lights, mismatched ornaments, inflatable snow globes, lit-up Victorian villages and mechanical Santas. Holiday decorations are impractical (yes, let’s put a six-foot Spruce inside the house), highly commercialized and the ultimate manifestation of bad art. But they make us feel good. And that’s why we love surrounding ourselves with them. Isn’t it glorious to be able to embrace how much they don’t match the sofa?

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When you’re putting all those tacky, lovely, precious decorations away in the basement and dragging the tree to the curb, think about the possibility of replacing them with art that doesn’t pass the critical sniff test but simply makes you as happy as that stocking hung by the chimney with care.

If you’re lucky, hidden behind the furnace, you might find a rolled-up lithograph of a big-eyed child from the 1960s. Thanks to the spotlight of Burton’s film, original Keanes are back in vogue and fetching as much as $8,500 on eBay. Is it just nostalgia driving their comeback, or could we be entering a post-kitsch era, in which Big Eyes can be displayed without irony?

“It’s a fine line between what’s good and bad. I’ve experienced it with almost everything I’ve ever done,” Burton told a New York audience at a recent event celebrating his new film. “I’ve always hated labelling. When people try to categorize or label things, it’s a weird form of a put down. It’s a way of minimalizing you. Everybody has a different way of seeing and it’s amazing how society wants to put everything in its place. I find something disturbing about that.”

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I am obsessed with finding an original Keane. Margaret Keane lives in Napa Valley, Calif., and is still painting at 87, but I’m not willing to settle for one of the mass-produced prints available on her gallery website, keane-eyes.com. I finally track down Lisa Godwin, described by Big Eyes’ production designer Rick Heinrichs as “our own Margaret Keane.” The reclusive graduate of the Alberta College of Art & Design’s sculpture program is in Burnaby, B.C., working 14-hour days building props for an unnamed period film shot outside Calgary (it must be Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Revenant) and what she describes as a “fun little television series due to air in March.” She is circumspect and private, which, along with her skill and work ethic, accounts for her impressive resumé.

Her credits include the television shows Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, Supernatural and Heartland (her proud mother, Jacqueline Maxwell, remembers how much she loved doing the horse makeup), as well as the indie Calgary short Skeleton Girl, and the big-budget Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

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Her challenge on Big Eyes, which chronicles the arc of Margaret’s career and features 300 paintings and hundreds of sketches, was to supplement reproductions of the original work with “works in progress.” Every day, she was sent a list of paintings and drawings and she methodically worked through them. Margaret liked to sketch things out in charcoal, which mixed rapidly with the oil paint that she used almost exclusively.

Some of Lisa Godwin’s pieces of art.

“The most important thing to nail down was, of course, the eyes: the size, shape and proportion to the face,” Godwin says. “Just as Disney has a certain geometry, so did Margaret. The eyes were also very important to the director.” You can definitely see Margaret’s influence in Burton’s exquisite animated film The Corpse Bride from 2005; in the late 1990s he commissioned her to do a portrait of his then-fiancée Lisa Marie and their dog Poppy.

The first time Godwin met Burton on the Vancouver set, she was working on a painting, based on one Margaret had done of her daughter, Jane. Godwin’s version had to look more like the actor Delaney Raye. “He walked in, looked at it, ran his hand through his crazy hair, and said ‘Yup . . . yup, yup!’ Shook my hand and walked out!”

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That painting, because of its palette and classical approach, was one of her favourites, but she says she learned long ago to put all of her skills and intensity into the work, but not to become attached. “I never keep any of the things I have made, except for a couple of miscasts.” You can see her following the professional example set by Brian Cooley, one of her ACAD instructors. “He taught me the hard-boiled reality of art, as well as how to maintain a high standard within one’s work, while often working within a more collaborative mode on projects as a team.”

It is in her personal work that you can see the lyrical influence of sculptor Katie Ohe, who taught her to explore art-making to its fullest and to pay attention to form and composition.

Godwin describes her art as a bit whimsical, yet somewhat dark. “I am enamoured with the more sinister aspects of fairy tales and fables, as well as much of the art that is generated for children. They are so incredibly impressionable.”

Perhaps one of the reasons Godwin was able to recreate the essence or, as Ohe would have described it, the echoes of Margaret Keane’s Big Eyes, is that these very different artists refused to be confined to a single style. “The woman could definitely paint,” Godwin says of Margaret, “but she was boxed into producing a line of work that she quickly outgrew. You can see her branch out with her more mature MDH Keane paintings, which have a Modigliani-esque quality to them.”

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Godwin acknowledges, as does Margaret, that without Walter’s showmanship and sales skills, the world would never have seen any of her paintings. “She was and is quite modest and shy. She just wanted to paint.” Likewise, Godwin doesn’t often put her own work up for sale. “It has become more of a mode of play than a money-making venture. I am very moody with my work and do not like to be locked into a particular medium.”

From her time studying at ACAD and through working on Big Eyes, Godwin’s take on the relationship between popular art and so-called fine art has shifted. “Honestly, I am just happy that art exists, in any and all forms,” she says. “I don’t have to like it and I do not have to write a dissertation on it to consider it valid. It is far more disconcerting for me to walk into a place devoid of any art than it is to be surrounded by kitsch.”

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If the price of oil weren’t cratering and threatening to take the Alberta economy down with it, I would tap into my line of credit to purchase a piece from Chris Cran’s latest exhibition, That’s an Excellent Question!, which is at the Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles until Dec. 27. I’m particularly smitten with a Beatles-inspired piece that sets my brain popping about the extreme passion of fandom, teenage crushes, band hierarchy, and mass hysteria. It certainly isn’t kitsch, but it’s not avant-garde, either. It’s just very good modern art, and I like it.

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“There’s a difference between popular good art and popular commercial art,” says Douglas Maclean, director of the Canadian Art Gallery in Canmore. “You can prop a Chris Cran in front of people, and maybe some of them don’t get it, but often, they really like it. Humour in art is a nice grab. Chris is an odd popular.”

When I ask if the West has produced its own versions of Margaret Keane, Maclean takes a step back and appraises the value and history of populist art from an informed distance. He brings up Calgary-born Dorothy Oxborough, famous for the pastel “Babes in Buckskins” that sold like hotcakes in the 1960s out of Banff Home Industries, her mother’s tourist shop. Trained at the Vancouver School of Art and the Calgary Institute of Technology and Art (now ACAD), her work was reproduced on Hallmark cards, calendars and even sugar wrappers in restaurants. “She learned her technique really well and then took it to this commercial pop level that was weird, but people bought them like stink,” Maclean says of the artist, who died in November at the age of 92.

If your parents or grandparents didn’t have an Oxborough papoose, they are likely to have received one of Roland Gissing’s ubiquitous mountains as a wedding present. “He was a brilliant artist,” Maclean says of the so-called “peoples’ painter,” highlighting the work he produced in his 20s and 30s while homesteading at Ghost River near Cochrane. But he needed to make a living and he figured out that people wanted to buy cheap oil paintings of mountains, so he knocked them off in all sizes for anywhere from $25 to $2,000.

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While Gissing, who died in 1967, has yet to enjoy a Keane-esque resurgence in popularity, Rocky Mountain paintings have become thrift-store treasures for Calgarians with otherwise discerning taste. Rita Sirignano, an abstract painter who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, has a box of them in her garage, with four making the cut to be displayed alongside her own work. “I love the earnestness of someone who looked at the mountains and wanted to paint them,” she says. “One of them is even inscribed, ‘To Stan, the best cook on the camping trip, Christmas, 1973.’”

Cran seeks out landscapes by Levine Flexhaug, affectionately known as “Flexie.” A favourite among artists, Flexhaug sold thousands of versions of what was essentially the same scene in gift stores in national parks, resorts, department stores, restaurants and bars across western Canada from the late 1930s to the early 1960s. Former Calgary Herald art critic Nancy Tousley has curated (with Peter White) a travelling exhibit of 450 of his works. A Sublime Vernacular: The Landscape Paintings of Levine Flexhaug is scheduled to open at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie in 2016, and local filmmaker Gary Burns (Radiant City, The Future is Now!) is shooting an accompanying documentary.

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It does seem like we’ve entered a new era in popular art—if not the post-kitsch glory days, then at least the exhaustion of irony. Sirignano tells me her son’s friends have started buying back the signed Robert Bateman prints that their parents dumped in Value Village, a new generation finding something resonant in the old-school naturalist’s ecological and environmental stance. “I have no problem with that,” Maclean says. “The parents might have been buying what they liked, but they bought badly and they paid too much. The children are buying them at the price that they should have been sold for originally.”

I dream about the perfect artistic mash-up: a Lisa Godwin replica of a Margaret Keane original. It would be a unique version of a ubiquitous copy that was, at its essence, a fantastic commercial fraud. It would have local roots, but would have been inspired by one of my favourite filmmakers. Can you imagine the conversations it would spark?

Sadly, that piece, like the idea that Walter Keane could be as good a painter as he was a salesman, doesn’t exist. All of the artwork Godwin created for Big Eyes was catalogued, boxed, shipped to Los Angeles, and burned. True to its kitschy roots, even its final moments were undervalued, documented on videotape instead of film.

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