Dean of Canadian wildlife artists dies

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/01/2012 (5014 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Clarence Tillenius suffered an artist’s greatest loss — the amputation of his painting arm in an accident — but still went on to become the dean of Canadian wildlife painters.

Tillenius, who was the creator of several dioramas at the Manitoba Museum and has a permanent exhibit at the Pavilion Gallery in Assiniboine Park, died on Sunday. He was 98.

“He was a very fascinating person; I liked his art and what he did,” art collector John Crabb said on Tuesday. Crabb has donated 35 pieces of Tillenius’s work to the Pavilion Gallery. “I think he was outstanding in the type of work he did. His love of animals and nature shows in his work.”

Peter Heymans, the gallery’s curator, called Tillenius “an explorer and a piece of Canada.

“He lived the Canadian national anthem ‘Our true north strong and free’… He captured Canada in its wilderness in the wild.”

Heymans said they are working on plans to mount a retrospective of Tillenius’s life’s work at the gallery.

Claudette Leclerc, CEO of the Manitoba Museum, said generations of museum patrons will continue to view Tillenius’s dioramas there.

“Manitobans ask all the time what’s new here, but they expect to see the renowned wildlife dioramas,” Leclerc said. “We may move them, but we will never remove them.”

Leclerc said the museum also is the owner of Monarchs of the Canadian Wild, 200 oil paintings by Tillenius that were commissioned by Monarch Life Assurance. They are on loan to the Pavilion Gallery.

Tillenius was born in Sandridge in 1913 and grew up on a farm in the Interlake, going to high school in Teulon.

From an early age, Tillenius painted and sketched the wildlife around him. He sold one of his works for the cover of Country Guide in 1934.

Then, while working as a railway construction worker during the day and painting at night, he lost his right arm in a construction accident.

Tillenius told the Free Press in 1997, before the creation of the permanent exhibit of his work at the Pavilion Gallery, he thought his painting career was over, but a nurse encouraged him to persevere, bought him a set of coloured pencils and told him to train his left arm to paint.

It wasn’t long until he created and sold another artwork for a cover. Decades later, he still owned the originals of the last artwork he completed with his right arm and the first with his left arm.

“I keep them to remind me,” he said. “Those are two paintings I never wanted to part with because of what they mean to me.”

In the 1960s, Tillenius began painting dioramas in museums, including the bison hunt at the Manitoba Museum. As research for the painting, he hid behind a blind at Riding Mountain National Park to see what the animals looked like when they stampeded. He also did the museum’s polar bear and caribou dioramas and more at other museums. His dioramas in the Canadian Museum of Nature were dedicated as national treasures by the federal government in 2007.

Tillenius received the Order of Manitoba in 2003 and the Order of Canada in 2005.

Bill Mayberry, who began selling works by Tillenius more than 30 years ago, said the artist’s life was “totally absorbed by his passion for the wilderness, natural history and the environment.

“Clarence’s work will communicate for generations to come.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

 

In his words:

CLARENCE TILLENIUS’s family issued a statement on Tuesday that the artist wanted released after he died:

“I believe that there is in the universe an underlying rhythm, a stream of life common to all ages; that the work of an artist who could tap into that rhythm would be timeless, it would be understood in any age, since man himself is bound by, and responds to, the same rhythm as the animals.

“When that rhythm calls me to a universe other than this one; I ask each of you, who wish to remember me, to look at my paintings or my dioramas. As long as my work is appreciated by the generations that follow, my work will have tapped into that rhythm and will be timeless; even though I have now crossed that great Divide.”

 

— Clarence Tillenius