Terrifying obsession: Cochrane gallery launches largest exhibit of Toller Cranston's artwork – Calgary Herald

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The epitaph of Toller Cranston’s gravestone in San Miguel, Mexico is fairly simple.

It reads “Toller Artist” and “Zero Tollerance.” There is no last name. There is no mention of his towering accomplishments on the ice, which earned him the description “the Nureyev of figure skating” in his New York Times obituary back in 2015.

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His sister, Phillippa Baran, thinks it’s an appropriate description. At his essence, her brother was an artist first and foremost.

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“That’s how he would have wanted to be known, just as an artist,” said Baran, in an interview with Postmedia from her home outside of Ottawa. “Certainly in Canada, you don’t even need the Cranston. Anybody who had anything whatsoever to do with skating, you just say ‘Toller’ and people know who you are talking about.”

Cranston died of a heart attack in 2015 after spending 23 years at his estate in San Miguel, which is known as a mecca for artists. His establishment-shaking legacy in figure skating is certainly secure. His innovative artistry made him a groundbreaking competitor in the 1970s and earned him six Canadian championships and a bronze medal at the 1976 Winter Olympics. But there is now an effort underway to give Cranston his due as a singular, visionary visual artist.

The campaign has been kickstarted with the largest exhibition of Cranston’s art, A Terrifying Obsession: Toller Cranston – the Legacy Paintings, at the Art Evolution Gallery in Cochrane. Sutherland House will release Toller Cranston: Ice, Paint, Passion (Baran’s book), in February of 2024. It features testimonials from Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Alex Trebek, among dozens of others, about her brother’s legacy. Another book overseen by Christopher Talbot, Art Evolution president and CEO — and Cranston’s friend and agent — will be released in October of 2024. Talbot will continue to promote and present the artwork at his galleries in Alberta and Australia, and online, with a portion of the proceeds going to the Toller Cranston Foundation,  which will focus on annual scholarships administered through the Canadian Olympic foundation.

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The exhibit itself has been a longtime coming. It follows a nine-year legal battle between Baran and her brothers (who are twins) over Toller Cranston’s estate, which was only recently resolved in Baran’s favour. She was reinstated as the executor of Cranston’s estate in February and was able to sell 400 of his paintings. One hundred were sold to Art Evolution, which had been representing Cranston since the early 2000s. The gallery also secured intellectual property rights that will allow the production of limited-edition artworks of 350 images. The name of the exhibition reflects Cranston’s tireless dedication to his art and perfectionism.

While Cranston’s reputation and achievements in the skating world have long been celebrated, his artwork has tended to fly under the radar in his home country, partly because he spent so much time in Mexico after his skating career. But Talbot thinks he should be regarded as one of the country’s great artists. His style was singular and his output  astonishing, with Talbot reckoning his friend created and sold more than 20,000 artworks in his life. His colourful art is also as instantly recognizable as the work of Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Andy Warhol, he says.

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“We have about 100 paintings in stock,” says Talbot. ” A lot of those will be, ideally, destined for public spaces, whether it is within corporations, within hotel foyers, or office foyers or things like that and/or if the museums ever catch onto what has happened they will go, ‘Oh yeah, Toller Cranston. I didn’t think about that.’ Our mission is to establish and preserve his legacy, bring awareness to the greatness of what this man was doing.”

A Terrifying Obsession will feature 40 of Cranston’s works, both paintings and sculptures. Art Evolution, which also represents the work of Vilem Zach, actress Jane Seymour and Charles Billich, among others, has operated major exhibitions and public art installations around the globe. At its Australian gallery, its Salvador Dali sculpture exhibition  is the largest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.

In 2013, Talbot began planning for what was meant to be a travelling exhibit of Cranston’s work that would have gone to galleries across Canada. It was to be launched in 2015. Cranston was found dead at his home in January of that year.

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“He was very difficult to deal with,” says Talbot. “He was not an easy man but I always respected the talent. He was a real artist. When I say real artist, I mean this was a guy who you could not take out of the studio. If you took him out of the studio, it was like you were taking a fish out of the water. He would start hyperventilating. Half the time you couldn’t get through a dinner with him. You’d be ordering dessert and he would say ‘I’ve got to go.’ It would be straight back to the studio. He lived and breathed his art from morning to night.”

It was a long-held passion. Cranston’s sister says he began selling his art as a teenager in Ontario, partly to help fund his figure-skating career. Among the original artworks she has is a crayon drawing he gave her when he was only six years old. It was a self-portrait of a figure-skater in a puffy green suit doing a split jump.

“He definitely wanted to be taken seriously as an artist and he would have defined artist the way I do in the book,” Baran says. “It was really every fibre of his being: Not just a painter, not just a skater,  but just artist period.”

A Terrifying Obsession: Toller Cranston – The Legacy Paintings will be on exhibit at Art Evolution Gallery, 208 1st St. W. Cochrane, until Feb. 28. Visit artevolution.com.

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