A League is Born

October 10, 2018

In 2017 my brother Ross and I curated an art show called "1917 - Canada Comes of Age" which visited five cities in Ontario and Quebec. The purpose of the exhibition was to reflect on a year that would see enormous challenges and changes for the young nation, then fifty. The First World War naturally dominated the show, but 1917 was also the year the NHL was born, and so I wanted to paint a piece that portrayed the dawn of the new league.

The Toronto Blueshirts (or Arenas, depending on the source) were Hogtown's professional representatives in the five-team league, and they played their games at the old Mutual Street Arena.
One of the things I like about history painting is the ability to animate old stories and events for which there may be almost no visual record. Such was the case with the Toronto Blueshirts and their inaugural home. There's a paltry photographic record of the arena itself. And the slow exposure times of contemporary cameras ensured that virtually no pictures exist of game action that wasn't outdoors in bright light.

My concept for the painting was an over-the-shoulder view of the players heading down the tunnel towards the ice surface. The ice itself would be the brightest thing in the picture, like dawn breaking on the horizon (or if you like particularly stretched metaphors, it could be the players heading out the birth canal into the cold bright world ahead. The title, after all, is "A League is Born").

Team photos from that era, to reference what the jerseys and gear looked like, were relatively easy to find.

For the building itself, I sourced old pictures from various trade shows and political events that were routinely held there.

But the true gem in my research was the picture of the skating club dressed in Wizard of Oz attire for a show.

This gave me a sense of the corridors of the place: the painted bricks, the lonely wooden chair, the dim lighting, and the cardboard laid out under the feet of the skaters. In the days before rubber mats, I imagined this was how the tunnels were made safe for skate blades, and so I included loose pieces of cardboard underfoot for my team. The lonely wooden chair puts in an appearance too, dimly lit by an overhead bulb.

The helmetless players with their flat wood sticks and tube skates, heading onto a rink hazed with cigarette smoke tell us that clearly, this is NOT modern hockey.

And that's the point.

We no longer have the ability to capture such scenes with our cameras. And so it is my hope, that for years to come, "A League is Born" will do its small part to flush out the visual record of a bygone era.