The Girls With Stone Faces cover

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication


Paré, Arleen, author

The girls with stone faces / Arleen Paré.


Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77131-464-0 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-77131-466-4 (PDF).—

ISBN 978-1-77131-465-7 (EPUB)


I. Title.

PS8631.A7425G57 2017 C811'.6 C2017-902789-1

C2017-902790-5


Copyright © Arleen Paré, 2017


We acknowledge the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.



The author photo was taken by Ryan Rock.

The cover image is by Robert Joseph Flaherty, courtesy of the AGO,

Portrait of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle [Church Street, Toronto], 1914; bromide print (altered with blue tone), 21 × 16.2 cm, 86/116; Gift of the Estates of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, 1983

Design and layout by Marijke Friesen.


Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6


www.brickbooks.ca 

 

 

For my own dear lifelong companion, Chris Fox

 

 

And poetry can also be sculpture,  

or at least more like sculpture than it’s like conversation.

—Michael Redhill

 

 

Florence Wyle and Frances Loring met in 1906 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Florence was twenty-six; Frances nineteen. Both women were deeply in love—with clay. They became close friends immediately. That first meeting they always described as a “click” experience. For almost sixty years, they lived their day-to-day lives, sculpted their neo-classical sculpture, made their living, and built their reputations as prominent Canadian sculptors—together. For most of this time, they lived and worked in a deconsecrated church. They were pivotal in the Toronto art community and were founding members of important national art organizations. Known as “The Girls,” their friends included A. Y. Jackson, Fred Varley, Arthur Lismer, and Emma Goldman. Their sculpture is displayed in public art galleries, in parks, on buildings, and on Parliament Hill. They died in 1968 in a nursing home within three weeks of each other and one floor apart.

Table of Contents

Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
First Rooms and . . .
Heart’s Arrow
Arrested Motion: Art, Life
Frances and the Red Velvet Cape
Torso 1: The History of Art
In the National Gallery, Room A105
First Love
Frances Loved Florence
Chicago: At First Sight
The National Art Gallery: Unguarded I Would Have  Caressed Every Surface
On the Way In, Three Women in Bronze
Outside the Room in Two Dimensions
Florence’s Father
Frances’s Father
Games in the Inuit Gallery
Florence and Her Twin Brother
The Mothers
Motherhood
The Babies
Torso 2
Frances Recalling How Florence
Florence Loved Frances
First Home
Having Been Made to Abandon Their Lives
Technicalities of Neoclassical Sculpture in the Beaux Arts  Tradition
More Room
November 27, 1920, Toronto Daily Star, Arts News
This Church Is a Ghazal
Florence: Day by Day
Frances: Day by Day
Torso 3
The Group Poses Stiffly
Room with Rumours, Ruminations
Torso 4
Florence Sets Her Compass True North
No Sidesaddle Beauty
Say
Magnetic North
The Lure of Light
Her Name Was Ana Mangurin
Florence’s Compass
Matters of Taste
Rooms without Enough Room
On Relief in the Thirties
How Heavy Art 1
How Heavy Art 2
To Age in New Light
Under Glass
Identity
How Art Works
They Hated His Monsters 1
His Monsters 2
Torso 5
His Monsters 3
His Monsters 4
Two Factory Girls Carry a Rail
His Monsters 5
Loring and Wyle: Core Drilling
Last Rooms
All Things Removed
Unsure
Another Grief: Summer Afternoon at the AGO
Florence: Bracing for Cold
Industry
All Things Being Dear
Frances Grew Blind
Beloved of Fingers
I’m Still in Love
Fourteen Lines about Beauty
Guide to the Plants of Toronto
Notes and Acknowledgements
About the Author



First Rooms and . . .

Heart’s Arrow

 

 

on the ceiling   the Sistine Chapel

that tap   fingertip zap

that divine big bang iconic connection

communion

by which I mean

 

art’s arrow flies in one direction

 

you don’t change art

it changes you

Arrested Motion: Art, Life

 

 

I

as in Discobolus   the discus thrower   levering his right arm   elbow up on an intake of breath   the continuous now

 

II

as in the woman on her way to the store before dinner   caught in a downpour   her sweater now cobra’d over her hair   half pound of ground on the list in her purse   three potatoes and one tin of peas   stopped in her rush by the sudden red light   her diagonalled body halted midstep while the purse on her shoulder contrapuntals ahead

 

III

as in the lava that day in Pompeii   leaping into the town   into atriums and vestibulums   and the man   petrified now   the man about to be stilled   reaching in for a piece of fruit in the bowl   the bowl being celadon rimmed with black birds lifting in flight   and the fruit   five purple-green figs   turning to stone as the man   fingers splayed   hand

Frances and the Red Velvet Cape

 

 

Before velvet: free. Angular free. One hand

tracked only the other

through inside passages of pink granite.

None else could appeal. Before velvet,

tweed. A jacket in wool, the pattern brown-twigged,

regular, knowing the next day will bring the day after.

Worsted always snagged on nail heads and rasps,

unravelled, a line, the hem of a sleeve.

At what cost?

Before velvet she knew little

of cost.

And serge—whenever she knelt to shape clay into toes—

did not soften the press on her knees.