John Brown, b. Sarnia ON, July 4th, 1953, d. Toronto, ON, March 21st, 2020

Worse than cruelty is indifference. Cruelty is intentional: we can comprehend it and combat it. But you cannot fight that which is indifferent to your existence or make it care that you are suffering. I was working in the garden two days ago. Ina temperate climate, winter snow and cold are redeemed by the joy of seeing and hearing the world come back to life in spring: perennials push through the soggy ground, birds call out to mates, your cheeks feel the first flash of warmth in the sun’s rays.

But I had to stop. Because as my senses bore witness to the natural world springing back to life, my mind kept reminding me of the threat the Coronavirus was posing to our human world. And I could feel that nothing cared. Nature might be a womb that nurtures us, but it is not a mother who loves us. We are special only in our own eyes. The crocuses will blossom and the trees will bud with or without us.

Today– my birthday– the sun is the brightest it has been all year. There is a chill, yes, but the city is sunlit gold. And I cannot bear to look, because yesterday John Brown died.

Jack was my uncle, but he was really my brother and best friend and teacher in one person. He died and nature did not stop being beautiful and indifferent. It leaves me alone to mourn– and it keeps turning and being beautiful. And I cannot bear its silence. It should call out in sympathy, but it has nothing to say that can speak to our grief. Death is our tragedy, but nature’s means of renewal.

I have known Jack my whole life, but he became of supreme importance to me as a teenager. Once or twice a year I would leave the little mining town where I grew up to visit him in Toronto. The excitement would build as the bus sped down highway 69, intensify as it became the 400, wide with cars and trucks moving at southern Ontario speed, and reach a pitch as we turned onto Avenue Road for the final stretch to the bus station on Elizabeth Street. I still love Avenue Road- that is where I felt I had reached The City!

In retrospect, Toronto was much more provincial when I first visited, but it was the biggest city I had ever been to and its ranking in the league tables was irrelevant. Jack unlocked a secret world of art, punk rock, super cool clothes, new cuisines … but most of all, freedom.

Freedom from the conformity of my small town, but more importantly freedom to live as a creative subject. I am sure that the lives of he and his fellow artists had stresses and strains that I could not understand as a 13, 14, 15 year old boy, but I could understand that they did not get up for work at 5 am in the freezing winter to work at the nickle smelter like my dad. They would be going to bed at 5 am, after a day of painting, or film making, or video editing, or installation installing, and a night of German beer, music, talk, and new ideas.

I had only one thought at the time: “I have to live here!” In 1986 I moved to Toronto to start school York University. I lived with Jack and Howard Lonn in their studio on Richmond Street. Our lives were books and paintings and talk about art and culture and philosophy. Whether you are Milton or me, words cannot express how I felt that first year in Toronto. I felt as though my body had to grow larger, to become more capacious to contain the new ideas and experiences to which Jack introduced me. Life was total open-eyed childhood excitement, except that I was an adult (sort of) and could spend my nights in clubs listening to local bands that played their own songs– loudly. I felt a part of something that connected me to New York and London, but cutoff from my roots, (which is what I wanted at the time).

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Queen West then was not just a shopping destination: it was artist studios, the coolest bars, greasy spoons, and bookstores. A few blocks away was Kensington Market and its vintage clothing shops, reggae, punk, and the House of Spice, where we would get supplies for the curries on which we lived.

Jack painted and I went to school. If I could have picked my life I would have been an artist, but I lacked the talent. I was a fellow traveler in that world and not a participant. I learned from watching Jack paint and talking, incessantly talking with him, about art and art history. I learned two truths: One: that a painting should make us see something new. And two: real creativity is about inventing the rules the work obeys through the process of making it. Creativity is “working out” an idea: it is not just “expression.” If it were, everyone would be an artist. Most people are not artists precisely because they cannot give themselves over to the work, to let the idea work itself out through their eye and hand.

This process is what makes art art. Art is neither illustration, nor adornment, nor decoration; it is not story telling, edification, or moral instruction. It is the working out process through which something absolutely singular, something which expands the human sensorium in an unpredictable way, comes to be. Art educates or instructs only in a derivative sense.

Jack created a superb body of work over his more than thirty year career. He was an artist that was appreciated more by other artists than critics. I think this was because Jack’s work was very much about the process of painting and less about an obvious, politically resonant message. For me, it is a long meditation on mortality, embodiment, and what human being is at its very core. The layering-scraping process by which he fashioned his works were a metaphorical question: what can we take away from the representation of a human being and still see a human being? (Had critics more philosophical depth, they could have seen this in his work). I know it bothered him a great deal that his work was not more widely collected by the major Canadian museums.

From the standpoint of the quality of his work, he is without argument one of the giants of Canadian painting of the past forty years. I do not think there are many Toronto painters who would disagree. The critics (with the exception of the late John Bentley Mays, a long time champion of Jack’s work) disagreed. I could understand his frustration: people should pay more attention to my work too! But I would console us both with Krishna’s admonishment to Arjuna’s complaints in the Bhagavad Gita: You have the right to the work, not to the fruits: no one can predict how the work will be received, in other words, but we must perform it nonetheless.

Last year we were riding the Queen Street Car, heading to Parkdale to see a show. I remarked as we traveled west of Bathurst how much had changed since we lived together on Richmond Street. “We could wax nostalgic about every block,” he replied, resigned to the truth that things change. Why should our city of thirty years ago be today’s city?

The worst thing is not to die, but to have one’s life reduced to a set of dimly remembered facts and anecdotes. Life is the feeling, needing, self-realizing whole, not the particular things one did or experienced. And yet, I hope memory is not just nostalgia, and that honest reflection is the final completion of the whole which is a life: a last raising up of the person as this irreplaceable being that they have been, a celebration of their unrepeatable intervention into the indifferent order of things.