The Chalk and the Easel: The Life and Work of Stanford Perrott

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.

Stanford Perrott was a teacher, art educator, artist, friend, and mentor
to the students he taught between 1946 and 1974 at the Alberta College
of Art (ACA) in Calgary. Historian Max Foran, who has written before
about Alberta artists A.C. Leighton and Roland Gissing, here examines
the life and complex personality of a man who was a uniquely gifted
teacher.

Perrott was born to British immigrant parents in Claresholm, Alberta,
in 1917. His frail health, small stature, and artistic talent determined
that, unlike his father, he was not suited for farming. Instead, he
studied art for four years at the Provincial Institute of Technology and
Art (PITA, later the ACA). Among his instructors were A.C. Leighton,
H.G. Glyde, and Marion Nicoll, artists whose own influence on Alberta
art is legendary. Because the war precluded his accepting a scholarship
to the Royal College of Art in London, in 1940 Perrott enrolled in a
one-year teacher training course at the Provincial Normal School in
Calgary. It was the critical step that led to his lifelong career of
teaching, although he would continue to develop as an artist. On a
sabbatical from PITA in 1954–55, Perrott studied modernism and
abstraction with Will Barnet and Hans Hofman in New York and
Provincetown, but his busy teaching schedule and administrative
responsibilities ensured that his own artistic ambitions would always
come second to the needs of his students. Nevertheless, the many
illustrations in this book demonstrate his talent and regional
significance as an artist. Unfortunately, the quality of his landscape
watercolors is less convincing in reproduction than in reality, as the
retrospective exhibition that celebrated this publication so eloquently
proved.

Foran concludes that Perrott’s humanism, empathy, and brilliance as a
teacher was “an instrumental force in moving a generation of artists
into the modern era.” Perrott died, at 84, a few months after this
book appeared; as the tributes from his legion of friends and former
students poured in, that conclusion seems justified.