Award winning Canadian artist Ken Danby collapsed and died while on a canoe trip Sept. 23.
Danby was with his wife, Gillian, and close friends, on North Tea Lake in Algonquin Park when he was stricken.
The canoe party immediately summoned for help and attempted to assist him. Danby was taken by an air ambulance, which lowered two paramedics to the remote location, but despite that response, they were unable to save him. With the assistance of rescue teams from the Canadian Forces Base in Trenton, Danby was transported to North Bay General Hospital.
Danby, a long-time Wellington County resident, was famous for his depictions of Canadian life, and was a member of the Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada.
He was born in Sault Ste. Marie in 1940, the second son of Gertrude and Edison Danby. He always credited his brother, Marvin, four years his senior, for inspiring his interest in art.
When he was 10 years old, in grade 6, he informed his family that he wanted to become an artist, and that a guidance teacher had advised him of a school called the Ontario College of Art, where he could study. Eight years later, in 1958, he enrolled.
One of Danby’s last public appearances in Wellington County was at the Wellington County Museum and Archives on Sept. 14, when he attended the opening of an exhibit by fellow artist Barry McCarthy.
McCarthy was devastated on Monday when he learned of Danby’s death.
“I just got the bad News,” he said. “This is just so bad … I’m just so blown away … What a sad, sad tragedy.”
Danby and McCarthy had a brief opportunity to talk at the museum, and McCarthy said, “I’m grateful even more so he showed up at the opening. I got to see him before this tragedy.”
McCarthy also expressed his sympathies to Gillian Danby and her family.
Ken Danby was no stranger to controversy.
In February of this year he completed a battle against a man whom he called “one of the most famous cyber squatters in the world.”
The man had registered the domain name of famous people from Bruce Springsteen, Tom Cruise, Danby, Pamela Anderson, Mariah Carey, and others with their names, finishing with “.com.”
Some of those artists took their battle to recover their names to the courts, where they often lost. Danby took a different approach, by applying for a trademark of his name, granted in 2006, which got him “exclusive use of the name in the operation of a website.”
That allowed him to avoid arbitration and win his battle for his own name.
He was also known for tackling tough projects locally. He was one of the leaders through the 1980s opposing the building of a large county dump site near his home in old Nichol township. That battle, too, was eventually a victory for Danby and friends.
He also served on the Canada Council and board of the National Art Gallery of Canada.
Shortly after he graduated from school, the Gallery Moos in Toronto presented Danby’s first one-man show, which promptly sold out and set an example that was repeated and surpassed over many years.
Danby and that gallery presented many one-man exhibitions and Danby participated in numerous group shows internationally.
Major collectors, including private, corporate and museum collections, responded enthusiastically and the artist is today recognized internationally as one of the world’s foremost realist painters – as well as being one of Canada’s best known artists.
Danby’s work has been the subject of several popular books, including Ken Danby, published by Clarke Irwin; Danby: Images of Sport, published by MacMillan of Canada; and Ken Danby: The New Decade, published by Stoddart.
He is listed in numerous reference publications such as Who’s Who in Canada, Who’s Who in America, Dictionary of International Biography, Who’s Who in American Art, Canadian Encyclopedia, and Contemporary Artists.
Danby’s originals are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Oklahoma Art Centre, The Governor General of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, University of California Art Gallery, The City of Jerusalem, Israel and the Bradford City Art Gallery in England.
Danby was an elected member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
Among the many awards he received were the Jessie Dow Prize, the 125th anniversary commemorative Medal of Canada, and spanning 25 years of recognition, the Queen’s Silver and Golden Jubilee medals.
He was invested in both the Order of Ontario, and the Order of Canada, the province’s and country’s highest and most prestigious honours.
His Sports paintings, in particular, are well known around the world, and include Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky.
And he was often generous of their use for charity.
Last November, he re-created his famous At the Crease goaltender painting on a hockey mask to help the charity Shoot for a Cure. The one of a kind mask was then offered for sale on the internet, and Danby hoped to break Don Cherry’s record for a mask that sold for $16,000. Danby’s donation fell just short of the record, but he said he was pleased to have been able to help a good cause.
Besides his wife, Danby leaves behind sons Sean, Ryan, and Noah, as well as stepchildren Julie Read and Stephan Elmitt.
