Art Articles & Reviews

Sid Barron died April 2006. Sid Barron was an artist, best known for his cartoons on the editorial pages of the Victoria Times and the Toronto Star which made wry comments on contemporary life. They were often punctuated by a biplane flying overhead trailing a banner that read “mild, isn’t it”. Barron was born in 1917 to an English woman who had became pregnant by a Belgian soldier billeted with her parents. After fleeing to Canada she gave birth to Sid in Toronto. The two soon moved to Victoria where Sid was adopted by her older sister. He didn’t realize his actual parentage until much later in his life. The youngster had a troubled home life and a speech impediment, and turned to drawing to compensate. Growing up on Menzies Street Barron developed a lifelong fascination with boats, making obsessive scrapbooks of photographs and drawings of shipping on this coast. At the age of 21 Barron met the precocious artist Allan Edwards who gave him his first formal art lessons (in the company of Pierre Berton among others). Soon the young artist set off armed with elementary skills as a commercial artist. Barron painted schedule cards for the Union Steamships in Vancouver and designed boxes and neon signs, eventually moving to Toronto where the prospects for magazine illustration were better. During the second World War he created original Canadian comic books and did war illustrations for the Toronto Star. The next years were a blur, with marriages and children and travel to Paris and Spain. In the late 1950’s, Victoria Times publisher Stu Keate asked Barron if he could do cartoons. He gave it a try and his sardonic look the Tweed Curtain, seagulls, and the B. C. Ferries will never be forgotten. His style was topical but not political, akin to the British cartoonist Giles and Vancouver’s Norris. In 1961 he went to Toronto and, with an introduction from Pierre Berton, was taken on by the Toronto Star as alternate to their popular Duncan Macpherson. Later, Barron mailed in his pictures from Calgary and Toronto - according to him, one suburb looked much like another. During those days a sneering ring-tailed cat cat took up residence in the corner of each drawing, leaning on his elbow and holding showcards which made comments about the curious doings of the humans. Cartooning wasn’t a lot of laughs for Barron. “There are only ten plots for a cartoon,” he later told me. “I’d sit there staring at the drawing, and tears were falling on the drawing filling up the outlines.” Creating those dense and articulate compositions sometimes took his mind “to another level”, alienating those closest to him. “Cartooning is a lonely road to go,” he mused. In 1975, over the art therapy table at the Eric Martin Institute, Barron met Jesi, a fellow artist destined to share his life. The two beachcombed together and painted, Jesi focussing on sea wrack and Sid capturing kids playing in tide pools. When the National Archives, and then the Glenbow Museum, bought huge piles of his cartoon originals, the Barrons bought a Volkswagen van and hit the road. Later they left Victoria and moved to Coombs where for ten years they held open house in their twin studios on an acre of rural property. There they contributed to the success of The Old School House arts centre but longed to be back in Victoria. “Anywhere would be better than up here in the winter,” Sid wrote to me at the time. “Green and gray. No purple shadows on the snow. Very few people.” Back in Victoria Barron became physically diminished by a lifetime of heavy smoking, but he kept up his regular walks along Cook Street to the seashore. His paintings, and Jesi’s, were for many years feature at the Gallery in Oak Bay Village. Barron’s extensive oeuvre includes finely detailed portraits of cargo vessels, stylized scenes of freighters at anchor and sunny impressionist beach scenes. Recently Barron was hospitalized at Mt. St. Mary where despite failing energy his irrepressible humour flashed out. A recent sale of his remaining original cartoons to the Archives assured his place as a delightful and incisive observer of our times. A memorial for Sid Barron will be held.............