Artist created bold words and lived a bold life
Greg Swain was a gold-hearted, cackling badass, glowing with insistent drive to make art that moved him — and at his own pace. He had an almost religious interest in Edmonton’s artists, teasing wryly at openings, “So what are you making, you bastard?”
When he first welcomed his niece Stacey Swain to the city, he encouraged her to be an artist with, “But you live artistically!” And so she became one. His sister Mona LaHaie stresses, “The most important thing about him is how good he was with children. Because,” she says as she tears up, “he was one of them.”
On April 20, hands behind his head in slumber, aged 61, Swain’s heart stopped. Four days later, the Eagle Rock Golf Club was a cloudburst of 300 mourners, including six former girlfriends and Swain’s parents, Victor and Gloria, with whom he’d recently started golfing regularly; a rediscovered closeness.
Later that month at the Winspear, Mayor Don Iveson offered condolences for Swain’s loss at the Mayor’s Celebration of the Arts awards.
Swain sang loudly, rode a Honda fast, railed against autocracy and played his mighty drums till dawn at City Market Apartments, which was tricky for complaining tenants since he was the building’s manager.
Tandie McLeod describes her friend as “a great Irish wolf hound of a man; a haunted castle on stilts. You would never suspect how tender he could be or how aware of the smallest details. He looked for beauty everywhere and filtered it through his darkly comic esthetic.”
With prints, paintings, sculpture and even rent-paying tile renovations, he explored the curves of the female form, had a painting in the defunct Sidetrack Cafe’s train car and did a definitive portrait of the Folk Fest. Each year, he worked Lorne Merrick’s Fat Franks booth in the fest’s beer gardens.
“His attentiveness to safety was a godsend,” Merrick recalls. “Needless to say, he was a great raconteur at the events, chatting with his many pals, joking, laughing and sometimes disappearing into the mass of the beer tent only to rematerialize with a grin, a tilt in his walk and a slur in his talk. His big size-12 boots will be impossible to fill.”
Born Gregory Michael Swain at Misericordia Hospital on Jan. 6, 1953, Swain kept lifelong friends, including Bob Sylvester and Phil Haug, whom he met when they were children. “Our house was known as the 50th Street drop-in. He was always the evil big brother,” sister LaHaie laughs. “He basically tortured me. I always wanted to hang out with him and all his friends.”
Swain leaves behind another sister, Melissa Comrie, and a brother, Lance.
With his amigos he ventured widely, heading up to North Country Fair near Driftpile, building log cabins in B.C. and attending Okanagan College in Kelowna after a stint at the University of Alberta. With Haug he dynamited 10-foot stumps on Haida Gwaii, the former Queen Charlotte Islands. “If there was an opportunity to host an event at his place and there was 100 bucks in his pocket and his rent was due tomorrow, he’d go off to the Italian Centre and buy food and beer and not worry about the rent,” says Haug.
Sylvester notes, “He always had beautiful women taking care of him, just one after another. We were all in awe.”
Sylvester was there when Swain did an infamous dive into the shallows of Lake Okanagan. “Greg comes up spitting water, and he was bitching about his neck till we took him to the hospital. He’d actually broken his neck. If someone would have slapped him on the back …”
Sylvester pauses. “I’m so mad at him for dying.”
At 28, Swain was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, cancer of the lymphocytes — another stroke of bad luck. The artist lived, sometimes hand-to-mouth, doing odd jobs, renovations and painting big commissions for friends. Though Haug notes Swain rarely had a proper job, he was always working and playing.
He lived in busy hubs like ARTShab and City Market. Paul Matwychuk observes of Swain’s famous, drop-in apartments, “… I always picture Greg in overalls, the kind railwaymen wear.
“He was a fixer, a builder, a task-tender-to-er, a get-shit-doner. He had this strong, utterly unflappable, narrow-eyed air of masculine competence I think I would have found completely intimidating if it weren’t for the gentleness and the appreciation of beauty that underlay it all. You sensed that you could learn so much from him.”
Artist Roger Garcia recalls, “Heused to knock on my door almost every day and invite me over at any time — even if I was sleeping at 3 a.m. It got to the point where I just left my door open and waited for him to say, ‘Come on over, you crazy bastard!’ ”
Swain’s exclamations of “Excellent!” “Absolutely!” and “I’m alive!” still echo. His famous tag, “Or what?!?” found scrappily at the end of his building-manager scoldings had an entire art show named after it, just one of more than 100 shows his work graced.
One of his later prints, a figure prone in furniture and a funerary procession, is titled The Departure. It echoes his fixation on Jose Guadalupe Posado and his frequent visits to Mexico for Day of the Dead. In his chosen symbols, death was never far from the soulful artist. Friends and family noted the tumult in Swain’s life, his struggles, his humanity. But Swain just laughed, “Everybody’s got a skeleton. It’s our common denominator.”