WHAT I SAVED

About five o'clock on the morning of January 18th, 2002, I was startled awake from such a vivid dream that I knew I needed to write something down immediately before it evanesced.  I awoke so suddenly that I inadvertently woke Ivaan. I muttered "pencil".  He actually kept a pencil and paper beside the bed because he dreaded forgetting his dreams, so he handed them to me.

Even after writing down what  I needed to, I felt far too unsettled to fall asleep again.  I felt I'd had a presentiment of his death.

Ivaan had suffered his first stroke in 2000, and two heart attacks in the early 1990s, so I was hyper-vigilant about his wellbeing. The dream from which I'd awoken that night offered no particular clues, but I still remember it with astonishing clarity.  I dreamed we were at the Davenport Road home of our friends Danny and Madeleine, and there were quite a number of other guests there as well.  In my dream, there was a glass transom above the archway between their living room and dining room, and beside the archway was a ladder.  I climbed the ladder and wrote on the glass with my finger:

I turn and study faces in the places you have been
To see if any traces of you yet remain therein.
You left on me your fingerprint, imprimatur and sign.
I wonder if you touched their life as much as you touched mine.

This is when I was startled awake, and knew I had to write it down. I also noted the date and time, and the title You-Logy came to me, although I hadn't written a title on the transom in my dream.

When we eventually woke up, I told Ivaan about the dream and read him what I had written.  We were both so unnerved that he asked me to rewrite it in a special book I kept for important notes.

Rereading it now, I still feel there was something prophetic about it. Ivaan's second stroke occurred later that year, in the early hours of the morning. Again, I was startled awake, in that same room, in that same bed, by the realization that Ivaan was in distress, and things were never the same again.

WHAT HE SAVED

Through decembers blustery cold
and sleet and dead of night
when blasts and torrents scratch
and bite and tear
The vision of a viking in navy suede
and black riders boots
is bearded and smokes hard
upon his pipe
Perchance to ward off the evil gusts.

By the light and warm
and hum of an electric fire
The mighty Norseman sheds his animal skins
and puffs away in wrinkled red and blue
A placid smile upon his Russian countenance

Who has seen the suns
possessive rays upon the  bearded one?
Their friendly fingers wrestling at his hair
What of the summers Russian?
Does he shed his denim
and sleep in a black t-shirt in the sun
Oblivious to the outstretched arms of Helios
Till it, too, creeps away unseen?

And does he don his winters leather
and draw in his eyebrows
To meet the onslaught
of decembers blustery cold -
A viking in his prime?

- I wrote this about Ivaan when I was 17.  I only wrote one copy, in fountain pen on a sheet of airmail paper, and then I forgot all about it. 
Forty years later, a couple of years after his death,  I was leafing through one of his journals, and a thin white sheet of folded airmail paper fell out. I've always been surprised, reading his early journals, to find references to myself and my family.  Incidents that I'd long forgotten are mentioned, including a reference to Ivaan's first meeting with my father, in 1969. I suppose I must have given Ivaan my only copy of this poem, and I am impressed and touched that he kept it safe for the rest of his life.

MY GOLD EARRINGS

Nearly 30 years ago, Ivaan made me a pair of gold earrings.  I'd expressed a wish to have gold earrings about the size of a quarter, but not flat.  I wanted them to have an indentation in the centre, as if someone had pressed their thumb into them.  I've never had pierced ears, so they would have to be clip-on earrings.  Ivaan made the discs in wax, pronounced them "too boring" so he added his signature squiggle on one side of the discs before casting them. Once he had cast them in gold, he still felt they needed something extra, so he took a tiny ball-peen hammer and hammered them all over.  It was a brilliant decision, because the hammer finish meant they caught the light from every angle.  He put an omega clip at the back, which acts like a snowshoe, so they didn't put any pressure on my earlobes.

Those became my signature earrings, and I wore them every day since.  Until last week.  I'd gone out for dinner with friends, and during the evening I reached up to touch my earlobe and one earring was gone.  We searched the restaurant in vain.  I felt bereft.  Next day, I went to see my friend Esmaeil, showed him my orphan earring and the mould,  and told him my tale of woe.  I then stayed home for a whole week.  Going outside without my earrings felt like it must feel to go out without teeth.  Today I went to Esmaeil again....and once again I have two earrings.

The funniest part is that 30 years of wearing the same earrings has dulled the hammer finish on my original earring.  The hammer finish on the new one is still crisp and bright.  So if you see me rubbing one earlobe, it won't be for luck.  I've got nearly 30 years of erosion to catch up on.

My Gold Earrings (c) Estate of Ivaan Kotulsky

THE ENIGMA RING

I'd heard about Jimson Bowler's ring years before I ever saw it.   It's an Ivaan piece made probably in the mid 1970s, and it is so complex, it's impossible to figure out how he made it.  It has at least two, perhaps three, colours of gold in it, and I think it has a core of silver underneath.  It's one of those pieces that probably ought to be in a museum, but I'm glad it's out there in the world, being seen and being appreciated every day.

Jimson wasn't the original owner of the Enigma Ring.  He's a native artist from the Peterborough area, and he recalls that about 20 years ago, he traded a piece of his own art for this ring, which was for sale in a shop in Peterborough.  He saw Ivaan's name inside the ring, tracked Ivaan down to his store on Queen Street West, and asked him how he made it.  Predictably, Ivaan replied that 40 years of practice had gone into the making of the ring, and that's all he would say about it.

But it was clearly made as a commission for someone, and whoever that was, they eventually lost track of it and that's how Jimson eventually came to own it.

Jimson and a friend came to visit last week.  I asked him if I could give the ring a quick cleaning and take a few close-up photos of it.  So here's Jimson's Enigma ring.  When Ivaan used to say that the cost of being an artist was that the amount of money an artist receives for a piece of their work can never repay the time and effort they invested in it, he may have had this ring in mind.  Because the one thing I know for certain is that this was a lot of work.

QUEEN OF THE NILE

Two things distinguish Ivaan's metal art from all the other jewellery in the world.  The first is how difficult Ivaan's work is to photograph. No jewellery is easy to photograph; it's shiny and it's rarely two-dimensional. Ivaan's jewellery is notoriously hard to photograph.  It's very three-dimensional, never symmetrical. Its detail is often quite layered: fine beading juxtaposed against tangled vines, shiny surfaces highlighting matte or dark-toned interstices. Focusing on one feature means ignoring another.

The second thing that separates Ivaan's work from others' is the amount of effort involved in making it. Now and again, I'll be asked to make a standard piece of jewellery for someone.  I'm always surprised how quickly I'm able to finish it.  Ivaan's work, by comparison, takes ten times as long to complete. There are so many surfaces to consider, and each one of those surfaces has the potential for disaster.  Whenever I'm working on an Ivaan piece and I spot a flaw, I let my impulsive side take over and I immediately cut the piece apart, so I won't be tempted to try and correct the flaw.  Time and experience have taught me that I could spend hours trying to repair a piece but it will never be up to Ivaan's standard.  So I scrap it and start over.

Making a simple piece of jewellery can be very pleasant, but I am keenly aware that it's only engaging the lazy side of my brain.  If I want to flex my jewellery-making muscles, making a vintage piece by Ivaan is a surefire way to challenge myself.  A few weeks ago, a wonderful couple stopped by.  They had admired Ivaan's work previously, wanted to have a special ring made, and had been looking as far away as Australia for a design that they both loved.  

In perusing samples of Ivaan's work, I noticed they were particularly attracted to the 1979-80 era.  This was the time frame in which Ivaan made a collection of Egyptian-themed jewellery for the Art Gallery of Ontario's first King Tutankhamun exhibition.  It happens to be a body of work of which I am incredibly fond, but the pieces in that collection are very complex, despite seeming simple at first glance.

They decided on a ring that I call the slant-top, and wanted to incorporate a collection of gems that had special significance to them. I just finished their Egyptian slant-top ring this afternoon.  It's yellow gold, with an emerald and nine diamonds.  It makes me think of a comet streaking across the sky, over a lush green island.

I call it Queen of the Nile.  Cleopatra would be so jealous.

Queen of the Nile (c) 1979 Atelier Ivaan

MY 100TH POST: A TALE OF TWO KITCHENS

I didn't know I was going to be writing my 100th post today, but a funny thing just happened.  It's like one of those telescoping dreams I sometimes have, where one scene leads to another and they always make perfect sense at the time.  I had actually planned to write a post about a vivid dream I had, which I remembered in minute detail.  But now I'm going to write this Sheherezade-like series of events, and hey, it just turns out it's my 100th post.  In honour of Ivaan, who could not bear a story that wasn't succinct, I will try to keep it short and snappy.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

It all started with my friend Mary Ann, who owns a house that is magnificent. The first time I was ever at her place, I never actually saw the kitchen because the whole house was filled with people, but on a subsequent visit I did, and although I am rarely short of words, I was pretty well struck dumb.  First, it was about the size of my entire place.  Second, it was a simple lapis lazuli blue and white colour scheme.  It just had a feeling of calm permanence about it.  It was perfect. And indeed, when I asked, she told me it was just like this when she and David had bought the house over 10 years previously.

At the time, I didn't even have a kitchen here, though there was a room designated for that purpose.  And I was managing just fine without one, largely by virtue of accepting every invitation to dine that came my way, and extending quite a few of my own invitations to dine out.  One of my nephews calculated that on a recent visit, we had 14 consecutive meals in restaurants.

So, in short, it's because of Mary Ann and David that I became obsessed with having my own lapis lazuli and white kitchen.  It was either that or volunteer to be a scullery maid over there.  I ordered a kitchen, it was installed last week, and everything was good till I realized I still had some sanding, sweeping, priming and painting to do in there.  But I couldn't find my sanding sponges, or my dustpans, or my brooms, or any of my power tools.    They had vanished, so no work got done today, but a lot of searching occurred instead.  And while I was searching, I came across some interesting archival photos from the 1950s that Ivaan had put away for someone.  Setting those aside, I sat down to look at the remainder of the photos in the envelope.  It is very unlike me to misplace anything, but I have been looking for two particular 8 by 10 photographs since April of last year. It seemed almost unbelievable that I should be searching for my power tools and find two photographic enlargements instead.  I'd promised to give them to Barbara Frum's daughter, Linda, who had been a toddler at the time her mother interviewed the heartthrob English actor Alan Bates at Stratford in 1967.  (This would be like Linda Frum going for an afternoon picnic with Hugh Grant, or me with Gabriel Byrne, or Mary Ann having an assignation with Paul McCartney, and of the three scenarios, I think Mary Ann's is the most likely to occur.  She just has that kind of life.)

Alan Bates and Barbara Frum, Stratford, 1967, by Ivaan Kotulsky
(c) Linda Frum

Alan Bates and Barbara Frum, Stratford, 1967, by Ivaan Kotulsky
(c) Linda Frum

So, to wrap this story up, I have found the photos Ivaan took of Barbara Frum and Alan Bates in 1967 and will pass them on to Linda Frum with immense satisfaction and relief, but I still can't find my power tools.  Maybe Paul McCartney has them.  Grrrr.

CLOSING THE LOOP

In 1968, while working for Maclean Hunter Publishing,  Ivaan was sent to photograph various First Nations people for a Chatelaine article Barbara Frum was writing, entitled Canadian Indians 1968:  How Ottawa (And We) Slept.  Five years later, Maclean Hunter disbanded their in-house photographic studio. All the staff photographers' negatives and prints were discarded.  It was a disgraceful waste of valuable Canadian archival material. Ivaan, hearing about the disposal, rescued as many significant examples of his work as he could, and kept them. Instinctively, he knew that these were too important to be thrown away.

After Ivaan's death, when I was sorting through the tens of thousands of photographs he'd accumulated, I came across some enlargements and all the negatives from this Chatelaine photo shoot.  I knew they were from his Maclean Hunter days but beyond that there were few clues.  I decided to do a little detective work, and eventually located a copy of the November 1968 issue of Chatelaine, containing the article, in the Toronto Reference Library.  The article provided the names of the people Ivaan had photographed.  I decided that the photographs and negatives should be offered to them, or to their families, and I conducted an internet search to locate the individuals.

One group of photos was of a slight, pretty young woman named Elda Smith. She was a Mohawk potter who combined traditional techniques and motifs with her own distinctive artistic flair. I learned that her work was highly respected and valued and that she had been commissioned to make a piece of pottery as a gift for Queen Elizabeth II.   Although Elda was no longer alive, I was able to make contact with her son, Steve Smith, himself an acclaimed pottery artist in the Brantford area.  Steve was thrilled when I offered him the photographs and negatives, because although they had a copy of the Chatelaine article, they had few, if any, photographs of his mother.  So I packaged them up and sent them to Steve.

A few months later, I received a large box in the mail.  Here's what it contained:

I was overwhelmed.  It looks beautiful in the photograph (and you can see the other side of it reflected in the mirror behind it), but nothing compares to seeing it up close, and actually holding it.   It took a while for me to realize that there was some paperwork rolled up inside it, fastened by a leather thong. I untied it, and read this letter:

This beautiful vase is proudly displayed in Atelier Ivaan.  I look at it every day. I know Ivaan would have appreciated my efforts to "close the loop" by giving these photographs to Steve Smith, and I know he would have loved and cherished this piece of art as much as I do.  It will be with me, as will Steve's letter, for as long as I live.  Thank you, Steve, for this magnificent gift. I feel honoured to accept it, in memory of your mother, and on behalf of Ivaan.