Gentle father had a flair for the artistic
Despite going deaf as an infant, it ‘didn’t stop him from doing anything’
Sharon McLaughlin’s wedding day 21 years ago was full of emotion.
The father of the bride addressed the 125 assembled guests that evening, July 8, 1995, speaking sentimentally about many things, including how happy he was about his daughter’s choice of husband. McLaughlin was his only daughter and the first of his three children to get married.
Deaf since infancy, Greene delivered his speech using sign language. A professional interpreter spoke slowly and softly, rendering Greene’s words more powerful and leaving many guests in tears as they heard him “speak” for the very first time. He later told his daughter he had not meant to make people cry.
Weeks earlier, the guests had received their wedding invitations by mail, their addresses written in calligraphy. Inside, the invitations were adorned with a sketch of a vase full of flowers. Greene was both the sketcher and calligrapher.
By that time, Greene had been re- tired for almost10 years, pursuing his passion for painting landscapes. That activity continued until last year, when his failing health made it difficult for him to paint. Greene died on June 20, at age 90. “I’m sad he’ll never draw another picture,” McLaughlin said, describing her father as sensitive and gentle.
“He always communicated through his art,” said his son Bill.
The walls of his children’s homes are adorned with Greene’s art, but with too many paintings and not enough wall space, many of Greene’s framed works are stored in his children’s homes and at the Greene family’s Lake of Bays cottage. Dozens of other paintings hang elsewhere in the GTA, bought by strangers directly from Greene at various exhibitions through the years.
Greene’s artistic flexibility knew no bounds. He dabbled in stained glass, wood carvings, stone carvings and what Bill called fungus art. While at the family cottage, Greene sent his kids into the forest to detach pieces of fungus from rotted trees. He dried the fungus, then painted the face with forest settings.
Hubert Louis Greene was born in Boulogne, France, in 1926. His father had married a French woman he met while stationed in France with the Royal Canadian Artillery during the First World War. Greene was struck by whooping cough when he was not yet 2 years old, and lost his hearing as a result.
When Greene was 10, he and his family moved to Toronto and later Ottawa. He attended another boarding school for the deaf, this one in Belleville, Ont.
In the1940s, his artistic talent started getting noticed. While in high school in Ottawa, he won a city-wide high school art competition in 1944 and 1945.
In his early 20s, Greene was hired by Canada Decal in Toronto as a sketcher and commercial artist. He designed the logo for the Edmonton Eskimos football team, Bill said.
In 1985, the Star reported that he had designed the flag for the then city of Scarborough. According to Bill, his father had won a contest to design the flag.
When his sons were young, Greene painted a full-length flame on the side of their hockey helmets. Reac- tion, a bike store on Dundas St. W., Greene made a stained-glass bicycle that has hung in the store’s window since the early 1990s. The level of detail and the accuracy are amazing, Paul said.
In 1962, Greene married a woman he met at one of the many activities organized by Toronto’s tight-knit deaf community. Hubert and Marie never saw their deafness as a handicap, McLaughlin said.
“Hearing loss didn’t stop him from doing anything,” she said.
As a child, he wasn’t allowed to ride a bike for fear he would lose his balance and fall. When no one was watching, Greene would sneak away on his brother’s bike. As an adult, Greene kept active, skiing, camping and participating in various water sports. He even hunted.
At age 60, after 37 years with Canada Decal, Greene retired and started doing what he was too busy to do earlier: he painted almost every day for a couple of hours at a time.
After Greene died, his children hung about a dozen of his paintings in the funeral home’s visitation room. It felt like the family living room, McLaughlin said.
Greene leaves behind his sister, wife, daughter, two sons and six grandchildren.