Flying Colours: The Toni Onley Story

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and co-editor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

For lovers of Canadian art, landscapes by Toni Onley are almost as
familiar as those of the Group of Seven; certainly, he is one of our
most successful artists.

Born on the Isle of Man in 1928, Onley realized while in elementary
school that he wanted to be an artist, but of necessity trained and
worked at other trades while spending weekends learning to paint
watercolour landscapes in the English tradition. That early experience
painting outdoors would exert a lifelong influence on his development as
an artist. Although he has also painted in Mexico, Japan, and India,
today he is best known for his cool, minimalist landscapes of coastal
British Columbia and the high Arctic. Throughout a long and eventful
life, he was often in the right place at the right time to have met or
known or been friends with art-world luminaries like Frederick Varley,
Barnett Newman, Clement Greenberg, Alvin Balkind, Iain Baxter, and Bert
Binning, not to mention others like Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who arranged
his first trip to the Arctic on an icebreaker. During an early bohemian
period in San Miguel de Allende, his work was abstract and incorporated
collage, but after a sojourn in London, he returned to British Columbia
and a cooler palette. Eventual success also brought him notoriety, as in
the early 1980s when he threatened to burn his unsold art rather than
allow Revenue Canada to tax it like a manufacturer’s inventory. He
also learned to fly his own plane so he could paint in remote locales;
he crashed it on Cheakamus Glacier, but survived to fly again.

Onley is a talented storyteller and this biography (enhanced with
photos, 32 colour plates, a chronology, and an index), as told to
Gregory Strong, is a compelling read from start to finish. Colour and
dramatic incident have filled the life of this nature-loving,
peripatetic artist. Yet, paradoxically, his work on paper and canvas is
distilled through that rich experience to emerge as the bare essence of
landscape, muted and subtle, in ethereal hues that seduce the mind’s
eye.