"There are touchstones in our lives to which we often return for guidance and reassurance. They bolster us for the journey ahead and remind us of where we’re going and why we came."
Greg Hindle, 2007, “Touchstones” exhibit, Gibson Centre for Community, Art and Culture.
Throughout his career as an artist, family, community and nature have become, for Greg Hindle, his touchstones, the things from which he draws his inspiration. Th eir inter-relationship feeds his creative thought and challenges him when he is faced with a blank canvas. Over the past 30 years, Hindle has made a name for himself in the art world throughout South Simcoe and Ontario with both his work, his dedication to promoting the local art community and his keen ability to teach.
His art career started right out of high school, when he was encouraged by a teacher to apply to the Ontario College of Art (OCA), something he never would have thought about doing otherwise, despite his propensity for doodling caricatures of his teachers on the insides of his notebooks to relieve boredom. His honours status as a graduate of the OCA in 1976 led him to be awarded an assistantship for a graduate year of study in Florence, Italy, where he met his wife Susan, a second year OCA student at the time. Soon after, in 1980, Hindle landed a position at the OCA as an instructor in the Foundation Studies and Drawing and Painting Departments.
Being drawn to narrative storytelling right from the start, Hindle’s interests leaned towards representational art, because, he says, “it’s a universal language that everyone understands.” He likes his drawings and paintings to tell a story. The stories he likes to tell have varied over the years, but there is one thread that runs through many of them and it has to do with his love of nature and the importance of preserving it. “I was thinking green before green was popular,” says Hindle, more by way of commenting on his own log home, which he built himself with cordwood and reclaimed railway ties near Hockley Village in the early ‘80s.
His “green” subject matter shows itself not simply in his paintings of the landscape, but what’s going on in them. With his style inspired by his fine art teachers from OCA and many of the masters, including Albright, Bosch, Breughel and Spencer, Hindle often comments on man’s careless caretaking of the planet. Although he paints in many genres, Hindle’s favourites tend to be his allegorical ones. “(The allegorical paintings are) the best forum for me to get those common human emotions that I find important - poignancy, irony and honesty - into a composition,” he explains.
These particular paintings capture the viewer’s attention with all of the colour and action that is going on. They are full of unusual characters and props, all melding together to relay their creator’s message. Thin Edge of the Wedge, for example, was inspired by a friend’s (successful) letter writing campaign to prevent a bridge from being built across a particularly pristine area of the French River in northern Ontario. Th e scene shows a red steel wedge-like bridge being constructed onto an as-yet untouched natural area. “I saw the wedge as a dagger, pointed at the forest, whose only protection had been the river,” explains Hindle. “The dagger/wedge became a bridge, hurriedly constructed by a hoard of busy workers doing their utmost to destroy everything natural and stripping the blood red ground bare.”
A painting Hindle is currently working on, Ship of Fools, brings the viewer to a chaotic scene inside a huge ship (which represents planet earth), where the passengers are too busy eating the ship and falling all over each other in the process, to notice that the ship is sinking. A sign perched precariously on the wall in a corner gives the artist’s telling message, “The Writing.” (as in: “is on the wall”) Although some of the messages can be ominous, Hindle is not without a sense of humour. “I treat life with a little ‘c’est la vie’,” he says with a smile.
Should Have Portaged for example, depicts Hindle’s idea of a “typical city tourist” noticing a little too late that his perhaps hasty departure to enjoy nature’s gifts on a river has led him and the other occupants of the boat (a tuned out teenager, wearing headphones and some early explorers) to a perilous fate with a waterfall. While working and raising their family of four children (all of whom have an artistic bent) in Hockley, both Greg and Susan Hindle made time to support the local arts community. Greg served as vice president of the New Tecumseth and Area Arts Council from 1997 to 1999 and was a founding member of the steering committee for the Gibson Centre for Community, Art and Culture in Alliston and sat on the centre’s advisory board. Susan now works as the centre’s art gallery administrator.
After retiring only two years ago from the OCA Hindle has been able to spend more time in his studio - about five or six hours a day, to be exact - which he intersperses with teaching classes in drawing and painting. It’s the adult students, who show a genuine interest in learning, that appeal to his teaching side the most, probably because he can relate to how many of them feel as “beginners.” “I don’t consider myself having an inborn talent,” explains Hindle, who has taught extensively for high schools in Scarborough and other parts of Toronto and Southwestern Ontario. “It’s rather a desire, or an inborn need, to express myself visually.”
He is a true believer that if one has the passion for something, sticking with it is the first step towards mastering the craft. “To go to class shows determination. You have to struggle. The love is in the struggle,” he says. Hindle’s passion for teaching art has lead him to some beautiful, remote areas of Ontario.
Back in 2001 a student of his, the same one who struck the letter-writing campaign to stop the bridge construction, opened the Lodge at Pine Cove, a “type of eco tourist resort” in French River and asked Hindle if he would run an art program there for guests. Every summer since then, Hindle has held week-long outdoor painting classes he dubbed “LandEscapes” for small groups of guests, taking them out on the lake with paint and easels to try their hand at a new medium. The program gained accreditation by the Ontario College of Teachers in 2003.
“Every morning we go out in motor boats and drag some canoes behind us,” says Hindle, who will often paddle around to students to give advice on works in progress. The artist was so enthralled with the place he had no trouble supporting his friend’s efforts to stop the bridge construction there. “It blew me away, it’s so primal up there,” he says.
Hindle has since been asked to run a similar program at the new Red Leaves Resort on Muskoka’s Lake Rosseau. Susan has lent her artistic expertise to that program as well. Art vacations to French River and the Hudson River Valley in New York are two favourite places Hindle likes to take his art students on occasion, as part of his passion for mixing art with nature, and to develop his own work.
The “Touchstones” exhibit at the Gibson Centre was the first time Hindle’s work was displayed in a restrospective. His figures, landscapes, portraiture, buildings and allegories are painted in all mediums, “depending on what the subject asks to be painted in.” After a moment of reflection, Hindle adds teaching to his list of “touchstones.” “It’s a two-way collaboration. It gives me inspiration for my work,” he says. “It’s been a very rewarding life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Hindle teaches at the Gibson Centre for Community, Art and Culture. To see more of his work visit his web site at www.logsendstudio.com.
