William Garnet Hazard was born in the tiny village of Tupperville, near Wallaceburg, Ontario, May 29, 1903. The second youngest of five children, Garnet moved with his family to an 800 acre farm outside Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, when he was a year old. It was here, he developed a burning desire to draw and paint everything he saw around him.
Garnet remembers, at the age of three or four, collecting dribbles of left over house paint his father used around the farm and saving them in bottles. Hefashioned a make shift palette using the tops of shoe polish tins for containers to mix his colours. “My earliest paintings had a lot of red in them, " he recalls, “because that was the colour of our barn."
At first, Garnet’s parents discouraged their son form spending so much of his time drawing and painting. They were practical people, of Scottish and Irish descent, who felt that artistic pursuits were little more than entertaining pastimes. To their way of thinking, painting pictures was not an activity that a young man should even consider as a full time occupation.
Nevertheless, garnet’s almost obsessive interests in art persisted and at the age of eight, while he was attending West view Public School, his parents relented and paid for private painting lessons with a Miss Underhill, a Moose Jaw woman who earned her living painting flower designs on china. Today, Garnet fondly remembers his parents driving him into Moose Jaw by horse and buggy once a week and learning to paint simple landscapes with proper artist’s oil colours.
In high school, Garnet excelled in art. But he found the quality of art instruction in Moose Jaw Collegiate somewhat lacking, so he took additional lessons at the home of Yvonne Grayson, a part time teacher who introduced him to the infinite charms and creative potential of still life as a subject to paint. Miss Grayson would make simple set ups using fruit, flowers, glasses and bowls and Garnet recalls the many pleasant hours he spent with her learning how to draw and paint the objects, how to simplify his compositions and balance them in terms if colour, texture, line and form.
From an early age, Garnet lived in the fond belief that someday, somehow, he would try to earn his living as an artist. He remembers, at the age of 11 or 12, standing in front of the Robinson McBean department store in Moose Jaw and watching a professional artist working on the window, skilfully painting landscapes, and he recalls, as a youngster, seeing the work of the famous nineteenth-century artist Cornelius Krieghoff, who roamed the Canadian wilderness recording the rugged landscape and documenting life in rural communities. In this way Garnet became aware that some artists indeed lived the kind of life he wanted: a life that gave them the freedom to travel and to paint whatever subject matter appealed to them.
When he finished high school, Garnet realized that he would have to set aside his artistic ambitions for a few years to earn some money. The rural school boards in Saskatchewan were in desperate need of teachers, so Garnet enrolled at Moose Jaw Teachers College and after graduating, he spent several years teaching grades one through eight in one room schools in Canora, Humboldt and in the Mennonite communities near Swift Current.
By 1924, Garnet had saved enough money to pursue a career in art full time. He enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art, where he studied colour theory , graphic design, lettering and other commercial art related skills. The following year he enrolled at the AmericanAcademy of Art, also in Chicago, where what he describes as “a more down to earth” course of fine art studies was offered. Here the emphasis was on basic skills such a drawing and Garnet was fortunate to study under Harry Timmins and Robert Wiseman, two exceptionally accomplished illustrators. His course of studies included four half day sessions each week with these men, learning to draw from live models. Today garnet attributes much of his later success as a painter to the disciplines he learned at the AmericanAcademy.
In 1926, Garnet returned to Canada and found employment at ReginaCollege, where he worked for one year as an instructor of drawing and painting. This position led to his appointment the following year as Director of Art Education at ReginaTechnicalSchool in Regina, where he worked until the outbreak of World War II.
Despite the heavy workload of classes and administrative duties that came with this position, Garnet managed to find time for his own art. While teaching at ReginaTechnicalSchool, when he was about 25 years of age, Garnet made his first tentative experiments with watercolour, the medium that would become his primary means of artistic expression. “I remember the first time I dipped a brush in watercolour and laid down some washes on sheet of paper.” he recalls. “It created a wonderful effect and I responded to it immediately. The brilliance and transparency of the colours were marvellous and I loved the way I could make perfect gradations of gray tones and colours from the darkest dark to the lightest light with a few sweeps of a brush.”
Garnet was totally captivated by watercolour and within a few years he’d mastered his newfound medium. Interestingly, watercolour had fallen into disfavour with most of his contemporaries by the time Garnet discovered it. Despite a rich tradition of watercolour painting in nineteenth century Canada, when important artists such as Lucius O’Brien, F.M. Bell-Smith and Horatio Walker completed many notable works in the medium, by the early 1020’s most Canadian painters were working in oils. Of course, there were a few notable exceptions: In Toronto, Group of Seven members Frank Carmichael and A.J. Casson painted and exhibited a great many watercolours in addition to their work in oils and in western Canada, the popular landscape painter and printmaker, W. J. Phillips worked almost exclusively in watercolour throughout his career, But for the most part, the popularity of watercolour had waned and Garnet was one of a very few Canadian artists who made a serious commitment to the medium during this period.
From the earliest experiments with watercolour, Garnet was convinced that it was of no less creative consequence than oils and in many ways he considered it to be perfectly suited to his working methods. Because watercolour requires very little equipment-paper, some tubes or “pans” of colour, a few brushes and a container filled with water are all that is required-it is ideally suited to artists who enjoy working out of doors. The portability of the materials, combined with the freshness and immediacy of quick sketches that could be made “on location”. Had immense appeal to Garnet, who had been trained in the traditional manner of painting direct from nature.
At the same time, however, he found watercolour to be an exceedingly exacting and demanding medium that required him to paint quickly and with great skill. A successful watercolourist, he discovered, must possess precise drawing skills and a thorough knowledge of colour, design and compositional balance. Once the paint is mixed and brushed on the paper, the artist is committed to his choice of colour and placement, unlike oils or modern acrylic paints, watercolour cannot be scraped off the painting surface and over painting one colour on top of another usually results in a dull, muddy-looking rendering.
Yet, despite its unforgiving qualities, Garnet soon found he was devoting almost all of his creative energies to watercolour painting. Today he estimates that watercolour represents about 75 percent of his life’s work, with the balance divided roughly equally between oil paintings, original etchings and pencil sketches.
At some point during his teaching years at ReginaTechnicalSchool, Garnet cannot remember exactly when, he also developed an interest in printmaking and began to make original etchings. Etching, like watercolour, enjoyed immense popularity in Canada during the late nineteenth century, Influenced by the so called “etching revival” movement which sated in Europe in the 1860’s, many Canadian artists such as Clarence Gagnon, William Cruikshank, Thomas Mower Martin, Charles W. Jeffery’s and David Milne began to explore the creative possibilities of printmaking. Through exhibitions and professional associations such as the Toronto Art Students’ League and at the Association of Canadian Etchers, artist printmakers had established etching as a legitimate and full-fledged art form in Canada by the 1920’s.
To make an etching, an artist uses a sharp tool to draw an image on the surface of a copper plate coated with a waxy, acid-resistant ground, the tool scratches through the ground to expose the metal underneath. The plate is then placed in an acid solution which etches or “bites” the lines into the exposed surfaces of the metal. The ground is then removed and ink is rubbed into he lines of the drawing. A sheet of dampened paper is placed over the plate and both are run through a special press under sufficient pressure to force the surface of the paper into the inked lines where the ink is picked up from the grooves and adheres to the paper.
Garnet made his etchings following this traditional method, except he lacked one key piece of equipment-an etching press. To print most of his early work, he improvised a crude “press using an old clothes wringer. He simply prepared and inked his plate in the normal way, laced a sheet of paper over it and cranked the two through the wringer rollers, which exerted enough pressure to transfer his image onto the paper.
At their best, Garnet’s etchings possess a masterful understanding of the aesthetic possibilities of the bitten line. Even his earliest attempts at etching reveal remarkable confidence, sensibility and individuality of style. His considerable talents as an etcher did not go unnoticed, either. By the mid 1930’s he was invited to join the Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and over the years his etchings were frequently displayed in the Society’s annual exhibitions. One of them a splendid landscape executed ion the 1940’s entitles Sanctuary Lake was included in a major retrospective spanning 63 years of printmaking by Society members, which toured across Canada during 1981 and 1982.