I was once told by Florence Wyle that I knew more about her life then she did. ...after 47 years I would say that is true. No one has done for me during my lifetime what Miss Wyle has done for me.

    It was not just a friendship but a bond that has never broken. I may have not done what I wanted or fulfilled what I promised but I have kept my eye on what I really want to accomplish. This story as brief as it is the story I will put online for you to enjoy.

The list of her works are never ending. Each year someone comes up with something else I have missed. This is understandable for she never had a complete list of her works.

    I am close to it now but will only offer those that stand out the most important to cover her talent as a painter and writer of poetry as well as being a sculptor.

    Train-wise she had all of her training in Chicago Art Institute under the same professors as Miss Loring but with one mark of difference she became the first student to become an assistant.

    After her couple of years in the MacDougal alley studio in New York City she moved to Toronto Ontario to take up sharing her studio and life with Miss F.N.Loring.

    From a very humble studio at Hunter's Inn to the Old Mission House on Glenrose Avenue, Toronto. This big cold studio took some changes to make it livable and as late as the 1940's got enlarged to house all of the works these two artists did during their lives.

    From the first visit to the last in the Nursing home in Newmarket in 1968 I would find any excuse to cross the road and find refuge in her protective charm. Here the many teas and talks went on over the years. When I went to the U.S.A. to work and study the bond became ever dear.

    I accepted her choice of my taking photos of her works to send to her relatives in Florida and Waverly Illinois. This book gave me access to her studio as she pulled each work out for me to photograph. I did not charge her as a professional but as a gift from me. So it is no wonder the list she gave me of her most important works is small in comparison.

    The Retrospective Exhibition held in the Art Gallery of Ontario was a great success but it did not touch the surface of what she really is and was as an artist. Even now I will not try to give all her works in this brief survey. Her troubles were the same as all the other artists of her time. When you have commissions you eat. The struggle was not always an easy one. Life went on just the same and her love of life never changed. She once told me, "I love all animals and sometimes even the human."

    The stories of what they looked like and what they did are indicative of what artists get named and blamed. I learned about other Woman artist that worked the some span of time. They too had a hard time getting commissions.

    The "Edith Cavell War memorial" at the Toronto General hospital is a fine relief done in bronze about a nurse who sacrificed her life during the war. The joy in her getting that commision. Her little panels at Niagara Falls Ontario are small but impressive. The "Farm Panels" for the McNabb Library for the Guelph College is a fine work too. Byron Byng School in Montreal has a deer panel done in plaster through efforts of Annie Savage. The Dominion Drama Festival Trophies were carved works in sumac and pine presented to winners for Drama. The bank of Montreal at the corner of Bay and King, (now demolished) had some of her work for the ten Provinces, plus relief's in the interior "dawn and dusk".

    I watched her work on a piece called "Sea and shore" after a poem. It is in marble and it shone in the light as it streamed in the window of her studio. Her smaller works or "pot boilers" as she called them are a long list of works. Her portraits of Varley, A.Y. Jackson, Charles Goldhammer must be mentioned and Elizabeth Wyn Wood. There are two works, one in the National Gallery and the other in the Art Gallery of Ontario done in marble. They are fine works seldom shown to the public. The list just goes on and on but few of her works brought in the needed funds to get her work cast in bronze. Her "Mother and Child" for the Mothercraft Association and the statue in front of the Home are representative of her work on public view. All the rest of them are in private collections. I am presently working on her dictionary with over 145 works in all so far.

    Toward the end of her life I would go to the hospital or the Nursing Home in Newmarket to take her some "jellies" meet with her friend Miss Loring, have a coffee or ice-cream and then come home.

    Watching those two beautiful people meet and talk about life was a memory etched forever of the greatest love I have seen between two artists. They just loved life and everything it stood for while they lived.

    If you want to know her you just have to look at her work and see how careful she was with getting what she wanted from her subject. She did a bas relief of my wife and it just glows with the right light.

    To be allowed access to her studio was a great privileged for me and I want to share it with you even though it is a short biography. I knew it has the "too..too's" being too long, too unknown and too expensive. Here is your chance to share with me this wonderful relationship I got to share.

    I hope that the preservation of her records will get saved so that artists can know about her as a person and not just a person who worked herself to death or until her death. She even did some small works while in the nursing home which I kept.

    So here it is after all these years an opportunity to see for yourself who this person of whom I talk about did and thought. There is so much to gain.