dArt International Magazine

by Roy Bernardi and Jennifer Leskiw

When you enter the home of art collector Herb Tookey, you are overwhelmed and dazzled by what you see. From floor to ceiling in almost every room of this charming abode is a collection of art works, sculpture and textiles, currently some 200 pieces. Herb, with the help of his wife Paula, meticulously curated the placement of each piece. You see and feel the relationship of one work to another and can only admire the energetic vision of this collector. 

Herb Tookey is an entrepreneur and obviously, a passionate lover of art.  He was once a former partner of the Cameron House, an establishment in downtown Toronto known for being an intimate, bohemian bar with ceiling murals and nightly performances. This funky place is where many creative minds and personalities hang out. Artists, writers, performers and musicians all sharing creative thoughts and ideas.

Herb’s first recollection of acquiring an art piece was a portrait of himself painted by his Godmother and given to him when has was quite young. He feels that gift led him to a lifelong journey of collecting with a curiosity and interest that has grown and intensified over the years. Collecting has been in his blood since birth.

What is your favourite art work in your collection? 
My collection is like a large family. It’s like being asked which one of my children I like the best. I can’t say as I love them all. I’ve a relationship with all of my art. In that vein of thought, I’ve created a relationship with many of the artists in my collection. I find art interesting and powerful. For instance, I’m so connected with the paintings by Rae Johnson that I can feel Rae in every one of the paintings I own by her. I think I connected with Rae the most. I do have connections with other artists in that most of my collection has been acquired directly from my interactions with the artists I have met over my lifetime. Art pleasure is an interaction with the art work.

What is the highlight for you when collecting?  Is it the search or the acquisition? 
Neither as it’s the experience of living with the art works. Collecting is extremely personal.  It’s educational because it’s an ongoing learning process with fascinating stories and anecdotes.  It’s not only the creative element in each piece but of life itself.  We human critters are hunters and gatherers looking for attention in craftsmanship and attention to meaning.

Herb has never collected art as an investment in money. It’s not the search or acquisition. For him, collecting art is a profound pleasure in the interaction with the work itself.  He feels privileged to be able to surround himself with his collection and enjoy living with it.

If you had unlimited funds which artist or artists would you like to own? 
That’s the easiest question of the lot. There were several paintings that made me weak in the knees when I first saw them at a museum exhibition years ago. The McMichael Gallery had a David Milne retrospective where there was a room of “en plein air” works that Milne painted in 1936 at Six Mile Lake near Georgian Bay, Ontario. When I looked at those paintings I felt that Milne had painted the face of God. Those paintings were of sheer air and glorious light. Another artist that touched me is Tom Thomson’s flower paintings from 1916-1917. And lastly, American artist Ralph Albert Blakelock whose intimate romanticist landscape paintings related to the atonalism movement which he developed into an idiosyncratic somber melancholic mood. Blakelock who was institutionalized in his later life was able to capture and create paintings of true personal intimacy. 

The Tookey Collection features art works by Rae Johnson, Lorne Wagman, Andy Fabo, John Scott, Robert Markle, Shary Boyle, Sybil Goldstein, Derek Caines, David Buchan, Randy Trudeau, Fiona Smyth, Tom Hodgson, Brian Burnett, Carl Ray and John MacGregor, to name a few. A short video of Tookey speaking about a Rae Johnson painting may be accessed here.

by D. Dominick Lombardi

Born in Northern Ireland in 1956, the young Rodney Dickson would one day learn first hand about violence, destruction and sacrifice. “The Troubles” (1968-98) was a very dangerous time in Northern Ireland, an indelible experience for Dickson that will often tinge his art in some palpable way. Over the past several years I have come to know him as a passionate and caring individual who is always digging deeper to find meaning through his art, often expressing those findings as acute emotion through color, or the capturing of individual souls through his stirring approaches to portraiture.

His current exhibition Rodney Dickson: Paintings at Nunu Fine Art, features those two distinctly different series. On the main, street level of the gallery are thickly painted, abstract works that attempt to defy gravity with their massive amounts of paint, as opposed to the lower level space that features numerous, overlapping, life-sized portraits of individuals that he has come to know during his times mostly in Asia, Great Britain and his home since 1997, Brooklyn, NY.

Upon first entering the gallery I was struck by the frenzy of paint applications in 17 (2023), an eight foot tall painting filled with a patchwork of colors and textures that are suggestive of rivers, rivulets, mountains and no-man’s land. Like an earth mover, Dickson pushes, scrapes, applies and piles up paint in obsessive and reactive ways churning up medium in such a frenzy that the paintings become energized and somehow personified. With this powerful physical presence and something of an implied nervous system, the residual energy in the paint twitches, ripples, and coagulates in voluminous swathes and layers that conspire for our attention. This raucousness of color and texture is balanced by the absolute boldness of technique, while the great variance in the thickness of the paint reminds us of the dynamism and focus of the artist.

Down a hallway toward the back of the gallery hang smaller, more intimate, but no less tactile paintings that present a chorus of challenging visual crescendos. If there is one common thread throughout these smaller works, it is their general tendency of vertical movement, while some have much more disrupted, scraped areas that wrangle the downward action. In one, 17 (2020), the entire surface of heavily applied oil paint has been disturbed, giving it a more dystopian, scorched earth effect. Perhaps this in one dark memory of the aftermath of an IRA bombing close to home.

Considering all the above, I do not mean to imply there is no hope here. There is, and it is clear in some of the larger works in the big room in the rear of the gallery, where the paintings tend to give the impression of something akin to weightlessness despite the thickness of the paint. In 8 (2020), the predominantly yellow composition set horizontally suggests a landscape, a combination that may remind some of Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows (1890) sans the foreboding flying silhouettes. With Dickson’s 8, it’s more about flow and how we perceive wind, how we receive visual cues and information both directly and indirectly that are right in front of us, without the addition of the minutiae that seeps in from the periphery. Dickson appears to be saying here; find a focal point depending on your immediate needs, take in the extremes and avoid the in-betweens, go back to your easels, your blank pages, your instruments or your computers and filter the flow down to something malleable and promising.

We see this awareness again in 18 (2022) where Dickson primarily pairs the color opposites of red and green, which are largely moderated by black, white and yellow, as they float atop a white ground. Some may also note here that the artist sometimes cleans his paint scraping tool on the edges of the panels, which in turn subtly defines the borders while unconsciously redirecting our attention back into the center of action. In addition to the two main combating colors, Dickson adds small dollops of white and yellow right from the business end of the paint tubes, carefully punching up certain points in the composition that tacitly draw our eye to certain points of color confrontation.

Moving down a flight of stairs to the lower level, there hangs countless mystifying representations of individuals Dickson has come to know over the years, each staring right back at us with their soulful eyes. Some portraits are buried almost entirely beneath other paintings, while a few can be seen in full view, all painted on the sheerest of fabrics. The delicacy of the material, the watered down paint, the representational subjects and the way they are installed could not be more different from the paintings on wood panel upstairs. Yet there is that same depth of meaning, the same unique sort of passion that Dickson’s work always emanates. It is a truth, an unrelenting drive to project the intensity, the fleetness and the frailty of living everyday in a world that is so rapidly changing and all too often disappointing. But the artist must find their own sort of understanding, of finding and releasing the thoughts that are the hardest to keep unspoken. This is when the magic happens and Dickson attracts and amazes us with tantalizing directness.

Rodney Dickson: Paintings. March 23 – June 1, 2024 at Nunu Fine Art, 381 Broome St, New York, NY 10013