Remembering Robert Linsley
Innovative artist championed the Waterloo Region art scene
KITCHENER — When arts administrator Alf Bogusky discovered Robert Linsley had moved to Kitchener to work and teach, he was awed that someone of the artist’s reputation would move to a city not necessarily known for its art.
“Robert was an exceptional artist, writer, critic and theorist,” said Bogusky, former director general of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. “He also inspired great enthusiasm from his students.”
The 64-year-old Linsley died Feb. 2, after his bicycle was struck from behind by a car in north Waterloo. The artist leaves behind his wife Yvonne Ip and three children: Maya, 15, Theo, nine and Aura, seven. The family is devastated at the lost of a warm and attentive father and the art world has lost an innovative thinker.
Bogusky met Linsley when both were working and living in Vancouver in the 1990s.
“Vancouver has a very active and important art scene, globally influential,” said Bogusky, director at the Vancouver Art Gallery at the time. “Robert was a highly regarded part of that milieu.
“He forged his own way as an independent thinker and artist.”
Bogusky said it was this independent spirit he admired most as well as the rigours of the artist’s critical thinking.
Linsley was always keen to encourage other artists in the community and those who knew him say he was not snobbish about his own work. When he arrived in Kitchener in 2002 after being offered a fine arts teaching position at the University of Waterloo, the region was just starting to awaken as a hub of artistic possibilities. Linsley set out to put the wheels in motion.
Senior curator, Crystal Mowry, said that Linsley was a regular fixture at the gallery, coming to view every new opening, often bringing his children. The gallery also held three group exhibitions including
his work and in 2011, they hosted his solo exhibit “A Geomorphic Fantasy.”
“I really respected Robert, he was so tireless,” said Mowry. “He had so much invested in art.
“He was making the region more robust for critical thinking.”
Robert had been working so hard at encouraging his students and other artists to make art important in their lives that he decided to follow his own advice, leaving his university post in 2007 to concentrate on art, unfurling a mind that whirled in increasingly interesting ways.
Linsley’s mind really caught fire after visiting the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, only open for one year at the time. The melding of art and physics provided a platform for a new way of thinking about the world.
A walk though his now cold and silent studio located in an insulated Kitchener garage reveals a man who was particularly good at multi-tasking. Drying paint pots, torn bits of paper on what was to become a collage, half painted globes — one of his numerous experiments, and partially completed canvases, it can all be interpreted as coming from the mind of a man who rarely slept. Then there was his writing.
Ip said her husband had finally completed his first manuscript, “Beyond Resemblance Abstract Art in the Age of Global Conceptualism,” published Dec. 5, 2016. The book explains how abstract art over the past five decades has the ability to offer new life experiences that are rich and full. Linsley, a voracious reader and writer, was proud of this work and had unrealized plans for a formal book launch.
Linsley was born in Winnipeg but the family moved to Vancouver, fleeing the prairie city’s brutal winters in favour of a more temperate climate.
The artist completed a master of fine arts degree from the University of British Columbia
in 1988 and a post graduate diploma in studio work from Simon Fraser University.
Linsley had solo exhibitions of his work in Germany, Spain and across Canada and his work was part of group exhibitions in New York City and Berlin. His art is included in public collections across Canada and he was a popular speaker at art symposiums.
In 2006 Linsley was featured in “Conversation with Theoretical Physicist Lee Smolin on time, art and science,” as part of a series organized by The Power Plant in Toronto.
Smolin is a theoretical physicist, founding scientist and a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute. He met the artist just after the institute opened its doors in modest digs on King Street in Kitchener. The two men had an instant rapport, though their worlds were very different.
“Robert was a brilliant conversationalist who had an insatiable curiosity, which led him to make surprising and interesting connections between diverse ideas,” said Smolin. The men were of similar mind, pursing the ultimate goal of discovering a kind of universal truth.
“He felt akin to the Perimeter Institute,” Ip said. “He felt in the same position: art is not about producing objects, it’s the process.”
Ip met Linsley when he was teaching an art class and she was the eager student in the front row. It wouldn’t be for another couple of years that they’d meet up again, and then rather unexpectedly. Linsley happened to walk into the Vancouver art store where she worked part time.
“He asked me on a date,” she recalled. “I was shaking in my boots.” What attracted her to him? “He was a genuine genius, a total genius,” she said.
But she was also struck that despite his exceptional mind Linsley was always able to communicate his thoughts “without a lot of mumbo jumbo” or jargon.
“He was able to express it in a very human way,” she said.