MAX MAYNARD - A DAUGHTER'S VIEW
When my sister and I brought teenage friends home for dinner, we knew they'd soon confront our father's signature question: "What is beauty?" His intense gaze would leave them fumbling for words. Our father, Max Maynard, had been searching all his life for beauty, especially in the natural world. It all began on Vancouver Island, where his friends were Emily Carr and Jack Shadbolt, and came full circle there some 50 years later. The rebel son of Plymouth Brethren missionaries, Max Maynard began to paint as a child in Victoria--and was deprived of his paintbox for a year when his parents caught him with it on a Sunday. He discovered Carr and the Group of Seven as a young man and built a reputation as a charismatic speaker on modern art while exhibiting his own work. But he made his living as a teacher-first at Lampson Street School, then at the University of Manitoba, finally at the University of New Hampshire, where he would illustrate his lectures on Dante and Blake with effortless chalk drawings that mesmerized students. Along the way he married my mother, Fredelle Maynard, raised two daughters and relegated the work he loved best-his landscape art-to an after-hours pursuit. He did not embrace it full-time until old age, when the loss of his marriage and his teaching career prompted a return to Victoria and the landscape that inspired him like no other. His last years were in many ways the happiest, with frequent exhibitions and a refinement of his style. As advancing arthritis made it difficult for him to hold a brush, he distilled each piece to its essentials. Blake, whose poetry my father loved, wrote of seeing "the world in a grain of sand." Max Maynard saw the world in a telephone pole slicing the sky, a tree stump in his path or, when he was too frail to go sketching, institutional furniture in an old-age home. This show captures every phase in his evolving vision.
Rona Maynard January 2004