Megan Cole Reviews Emily Urquhart’s The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father and Me
Emily Urquhart. The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father and Me. House of Anansi: The Walrus Books. $22.95, 232 pp., ISBN: 9781487005313
As a kid and teenager, I spent hours standing in front of and leaning towards paintings: Emily Carr, The Group of Seven, Salvador Dali, Rembrandt, Georgia O’Keefe. My mom and sister would window shop outside the Vancouver Art Gallery, while my dad and I inched canvas by canvas, one sculpture at a time. Reading Emily Urquhart’s The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father and Me pulled me into her story, which is about watching her father, Tony Urquhart, paint alongside her brothers, and being an adult touring the galleries of New York City they’d visited on many trips before. It also reminded me of galleries my dad and I had visited and paintings I’d stood in awe of. The Age of Creativity isn’t simply a memoir, or the story of Urquhart’s father and his work; it’s an exploration of a creative life that doesn’t simply end in old age but lingers and flickers beyond the boundaries of our own bodies.
Early in The Age of Creativity, we’re brought into the Urquhart family home where a corkboard tacked with Tony’s works in progress dined with them. Art, for creators like Urquhart’s father, is more than just a career; it’s a way of being in the world. The boundary between artist and the outside world is, at times, non-existent, and because of this Urquhart was given a front-row seat into the art world through her father and her mother, author Jane Urquhart.
The moments Urquhart includes in The Age of Creativity from her own life are paired with research that points back to the question she’s exploring throughout the book: Does creativity and artistic output decline with old age or is this ageism lacking grounding in research?
Urquhart expertly integrates research about famous artists, such as Bruce McCall, who she interviews in his New York City apartment, who continued to produce work into their later years. The research and interviews are integrated to pose a counterpoint to the dated belief that suggests artists are less productive and creative as they age: “The trouble with Harvey Lehman’s study is that he favoured the output over the act. But create is a verb, an action. For older artists, who may work at a slower pace than before, this emphasis on output immediately puts them at a disadvantage.” Artists, such as Georgia O’Keefe and Monet, whose work has hung on the walls of some of the biggest galleries and included in art history classes, were still producing work despite cataracts and failing eyesight.
It would seem nearly impossible to write about great works of art, including those of her father’s such as King and Queen and Allegory, without including photographs of them. Yet, in The Age of Creativity, Urquhart does so successfully, expertly weaving her memories and reflections with her background in art history. Her descriptions of paintings such as The Shipwreck of Don Juan by Eugene Delacroix and Louise Bourgeois’ Articulated Lair are vivid, brought to life on the page with new dimension through her clear passion for the subjects and themes explored in the book.
The Age of Creativity is everything I crave in a work of nonfiction. Urquhart’s relationship with her father is a portal through which I was happy to step through and wander, guided by her skilful approach to memoir, research and art. I started the book curious about where Urquhart would take me as I meandered backwards and forwards in time and into the artistic practices of those whose work I, too, have admired. Since finishing The Age of Creativity, I’ve found myself returning to the themes and ideas she presented, questioning my own beliefs about creativity and curious to learn more.
Megan Cole is a tattooed food enthusiast with an obsessive reading habit. Megan has been published in The Puritan, Invisiblog, This Magazine, Coast Mountain Culture Magazine and more. She's currently working on her first creative nonfiction book. When Megan isn’t writing, reading or cooking, she’s working as the director of audience development for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes. She's also the host and producer of the podcast Writing the Coast.