When artists die, they leave gifts to us

Opinion

Ozzy Osbourne and Aganetha Dyck were very different people who made very different art — and probably have never been included in the same sentence — but I think we can agree that both were pioneers with a rebellious streak.

The former was the larger-than-life frontman of the English band Black Sabbath, which basically invented heavy metal.

The latter was a fearlessly experimental Manitoba artist who thought to put everything from football helmets to Barbie dolls in beehives to create fantastical honeycomb and wax sculptures and elevated the domestic processes of homemaking into high art, which is also extremely metal.

Both died within days of each other. Osbourne died on Monday, and I heard the news while I was doing interviews for a piece about Dyck, who died late last week.

I’ve seen Ozzy in concert three times: at a solo show with one of my best friends when we were in our teens, and then Ozzy with Black Sabbath twice in the 2010s. As for so many others, his music was formative for us. I immediately texted her: she had been dealing with some anticipatory grief over Ozzy since his final concert with Black Sabbath in his hometown of Birmingham, England earlier this month.

In between messages with her about Ozzy, I interviewed loved ones about Aganetha.

And so, it’s been a week of bearing witness to grief, but it’s also been a week about art because that’s what’s left: the art. And we’ll always have the art.

I wrote this of the Tragically Hip when Gord Downie died in 2017, but I think it’s true here, too: Black Sabbath will always be someone’s favourite band.

Dyck’s art will continue to be shown and talked about and exhibited. She will continue to loom large as an influence to all those living artists she mentored, but also all the artists to come who will discover her through her work.

The art is the tangible gift they gave us. And what a gift that is.

I’ve written many obits and memorial columns for the newspaper, and it’s always a bit strange, because in most cases, these are people I didn’t know. Some of them are celebrities; some of them are Manitobans who we have featured in Saturday’s A Life’s Story feature.

Either way, there’s an art to these pieces. It’s an enormous challenge — and responsibility — to capture a subject without actually interviewing them. It can also be an intrusion, especially if the subject is a newsworthy person whose death has only just happened.

(It can also be a complicated assignment because people are complicated, as we’ve seen with remembrances about Hulk Hogan, who also died this week.)

I never got the opportunity to meet Aganetha, but spending time with her this week, in this way, with her friends, family and people she touched with her art, was so special. That’s how we’re able to bring colour to the black-and-white biographical facts of someone’s life: with stories and anecdotes and remembrances. And how she was remembered – her laugh, her fearlessness, her openness — was moving as well.

Thinking about a band that was so part of my musical awakening — and so embedded in an important friendship — was also special.

Writing these kinds of stories inevitably makes you think about how you might be remembered, because no one gets out of this thing alive. You can’t control that, of course, but my subjects never fail to inspire me to live better in some way.

(Also, you should tell people what they mean to you and what you appreciate about them, and you should do so often.)

Sometimes people ask me if these are bummer assignments because we’re writing about people who have died.

But we’re not writing about death. We’re writing about life.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca