Rescued from obscurity
Discover the naturalistic, quirky work of Jack Akroyd
Concerning the inequity of oblivion with regards to artists, German writer W.G. Sebald once noted that many of the best of us have gone without a trace. Meaning, that not every serious artist gets remembered. The forgotten ones — we have no way of knowing their numbers, of course — may have produced exemplary works during their lifetimes but, for whatever reasons, those works have now disappeared into that disregarded state called oblivion.
Happily, then, for a group of dedicated visual artists living and working in British Columbia in the middle part of the last century, oblivion might not be their fate. The artists showcased in Mother Tongue Publishing’s noble rescue project — now eight books in The Unheralded Artists of B.C. series — have had the good fortune of being brought back to life, so to speak, and their works presented to the public for reassessment and, possibly, enduring acclaim.
The Life and Art of Jack Akroyd, insightfully written by Peter Busby, is number eight in the series, and it’s enlivened throughout with passages from Akroyd’s own journals and quotes from his friends and admirers. We soon get a sense of the man.
It’s a sumptuously designed book — French flaps, glossy paper — and contains a generous number of photographs of Akroyd’s pictures and drawings (Kudos to Mark Hand who did the layout).
The book’s aim, like the others in the series, is to redress the “unheralded” status of the artist. Unheralded, in the case of Akroyd, means recognition beyond the small group of friends, fellow artists, and collectors who championed his work and, in some cases, still do.
The question that is bound to arise, then, is: Why has Akroyd’s work been largely ignored?
Because his paintings are unusual and employ such a unique style.
They are idiosyncratic yet naturalistic in composition, but also possess a quirky surreal element.
His subject matter is largely industrial work and the paintings are dense with activity in the way a Bosch painting is. There’s a folk-art feel to them, as well, because of the horizontal layering he does, yet the work is polished, clean and precise. Furthermore, there’s a puzzle at the heart of each work; something to be deciphered. These are interpretative, cerebral paintings rather than visceral ones.
The book opens with an informative introduction by Paul Wolf, founder of Artists West in Ottawa, who, from 1969-1979, sold “works by avant-garde artists from Vancouver,” including those of Jack Akroyd.
Perhaps this could be a clue with reference to the lack of general interest in Akroyd’s work: his paintings were not fashionable, not considered mainstream by the art establishment of the time, and his compositions might have been seen as difficult.
Born in England in 1921, Akroyd trained as machine fitter and draftsman and served as an aircraft mechanic during the Second World War. In 1949 he realized his dream of studying art by enrolling in the Ontario College of Art and then in the ’50s relocated to British Columbia, to Nanaimo, and then to Vancouver, all the while working to support his art, most frequently as a draftsman. There were few opportunities in Vancouver to show his work. If an artist was not “famous or wellconnected,” Busby writes, “exhibition opportunities were limited.” His friends of the time without exception describe him as “reserved and private.”
In 1960, at the age of 39 and feeling he “wasn’t progressing with his work,” Akroyd travelled to Japan where the Japanese style of flattening the landscape, as well as Japanese wood block printmaking, became a strong influence. It was in Japan that he also found and lost love and images of this experience were to play out in subsequent works. As Busby writes, “Japan gave him the inspiration and the impetus to locate a distinctive artistic personality.”
Jack Akroyd died on March 5, 1996 of a heart attack while getting off a bus at the corner of Oak Street near City Hall in Vancouver. He’d been a freelance artist since 1960 but had received scant attention and less money for his efforts. And though he’d achieved some later success in Japan with several exhibitions, he lived, for most of his life, in poverty.
Referring to the limited art market in which Akroyd worked, Busby notes “that to be successful as an artist requires a keen strategic sense, the ability to network and the ability to position oneself on the crest of the cultural zeitgeist,” qualities which were absent in Jack Akroyd. Instead, he was a solitary man dedicated to his art, a lover of the outdoors, modest in nature.