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Be warned, world: George Watkins is taking up portrait painting.
Well, maybe “taking up” is too strong a term, since the 87-year-old has so much trouble with his eyes now that he can’t really paint the way he once could.
But he did take a course on portrait painting a couple of years ago, the first formal study he’d ever taken on painting, despite the fact he has been selling works all over the world for the past 50 years.
“He’s visited with us five or six times,” says Ray Bechard of the local Knights of Columbus, “and one of the things that caught all of our eyes were the sketches that he’s done from all over the world. He had this little pad and he has water colour sketches, the size of photographs, of everywhere he went. Most people have photographs of the places they’ve travelled. He has his own water colour portfolio.”
Speaking of portfolios, Watkins has a current exhibition at the Texaco Room in Port Credit which is a panorama of Mississauga’s past, and a retrospective of his four decades of painting here. The native of Sydney, Australia, who also had a highly successful career as an interior designer, moved to the City in 1967.
The exhibition includes numerous paintings of the harbour and the boats that moored there, one of his specialties.
His old homestead on Knareswood Dr., the nearby Shipp mansion, the summer and winter views up the Credit River, the splendour of the Toronto Golf Club painted from the 14th floor of The Fairways condominium across the road (where Watkins has had exhibitions), they are all included.
To bring things full circle, there’s even a painting that he did of that first local exhibition he had — also at the Texaco Room — in 1978 with his son in the foreground.
He also has mounted a framed clipping of a feature story of the time from The Mississauga News about that exhibition, with a photograph taken by Chief Photographer Fred Loek, who also took the photo above.
This exhibition has special interest for Fred. One painting from 1968, a view from Memorial Park looking west, shows the Don Rowing Club, where Fred has coached forever, before its expansion, while it was still sharing facilities with the Mississauga Canoe Club.
The show also includes a painting, called Infinity Sailing, which features the boat that Fred’s brother Dick, long-time photographer at The Toronto Star, used to sail.
And when Watkins gets to the painting of two boats, one of which is the Wendy B, Fred has a personal story to relate.
While they were still engaged, he and his wife Liz were at the docks one day. They climbed onto the deck of the Wendy B and wrapped themselves in its oversized ropes. Fred handed his camera to a passer-by who snapped a photo that served as a wedding announcement — with the caption “Tying the Knot.”
The personal and the pastoral coincide again in a couple of paintings of the Red Barns on Eglinton, the barns of the Earl Madill farm, the holdout property that separates the two halves of the Heritage Hills development.
In one little corner, far off on the right, the distinctive yellow slant of the Mississauga Civic Centre sneaks onto the horizon. The message is clear. The farm in the foreground fades against the symbol of our urban destiny.
Watkins may be celebrating more than 50 years of painting and more than 40 years of painting Mississauga, but he is no sentimentalist.
The visitors to the exhibition who are lucky enough to see the real-life portrait of the artist as an older man are cajoled into buying the works, while they can, by their enthusiastic author. Since the mural-like painting shown above of some of the distinctive elements of the City contains a copy of The Mississauga News, Watkins is convinced the newspaper’s publisher will want to buy it and put it in our lobby.
Opinions fly left and right. On Fred Loek: “He’s as well known as Hazel.”
On painting Mississauga’s churches: St. Peter’s (in Erindale), “is the only church in the whole of Mississauga that’s worth painting.”
Also a sculptor, Watkins offers his professional opinion on how Hazel, whom he points out is a year younger than he, should be immortalized: “Her face should be carved out of granite.” He manages to subdue a wink as he says it.
Watkins, who has a half-dozen paintings in the permanent collection at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, doesn’t seem interested, despite a reporter’s prodding, in offering any overarching career assessments. Forward is the only direction he seems to know.
He’s having his eyes checked again by the doctors and a new procedure may be able to clear them up and allow him to paint in earnest again.
Longevity runs in his family. On July 21, 2020, Watkins has a pretty good idea of what he will be doing: “waiting for my postcard from the Queen when I turn 100.”