Attila Richard Lukacs

A son’s poignant meditation on beauty, love and loss in his mother’s garden.

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In 2021, during one of Calgary’s dramatic thunderstorms, Attila Richard Lukacs took a break from painting outdoors in his mother’s garden to write. The tender text he lettered down the right side of OCTOBER, Autumn is like the charged stillness between lightning and thunder, an echo of the psychological pause we feel between holding on and letting go. The painting itself depicts a quiet moment of repose. Reflected light from a pink flamingo casts a warm blush on the cherub as the garden ornaments nestle amidst the season’s spent foliage.

Attila had returned to Calgary earlier that year to help his family care for his mother, Helen, who was declining with dementia. In Vancouver, where he has been based since 2004, he paints every day, so he brought his travel easel – a veteran of long visits to Maui and India – as well as his paints and brushes, setting up a makeshift plein air studio in anticipation of a long stay. 

He settled next to a crab apple tree in the backyard, sitting under a lattice pergola sheltered by Engleman ivy. With blankets, pillows and a sheepskin to soften the wrought-iron chair, along with an outdoor heater and assorted beach umbrellas, he was prepared for the city’s sudden weather swings. A hanging birdfeeder and a scalloped birdbath, encircled by lush hostas and spiked Ligularia, attracted sparrows, chickadees and nuthatches. The birds became so accustomed to him that they sometimes alit on the edge of a painting as he worked. Helen, homebound by then, rested indoors in her favourite chair, gazing out at her beloved garden through a new bay window added just for her. She would wave and, sometimes, call out to Attila.

I first met Attila’s parents in 1995, when I was the curator of what is now the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary. We were showing Attila’s monumental paintings of skinheads from his erotically charged E-werk series, a touring exhibition organized by Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain. Attila’s father, Joe, a petroleum engineer from Hungary, invited me and my husband, Ron Moppett, who had curated an earlier show of Attila’s Berlin paintings at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art and Design, now the Alberta University of the Arts, to their home in northwest Calgary. 

We sat in the old-world formality of the front room, where I admired several beautiful paintings of floral arrangements. A profusion of red poppies, composed in the manner of a still life from the Dutch Golden Age, made me think of a Balthasar van der Ast memento mori. Some lilies of the valley in a glass vase were reminiscent of Edouard Manet’s late floral paintings. I asked who had painted them. Attila, I was told, as gifts.

Both flowers carry special meaning for the family. Red poppies reminded Attila’s parents of Hungary, where they grew up. Jozsi, as he was known then, was a young engineering student at the University of Sopron when Soviet tanks rumbled across the border to quell the country’s 1956 revolution. He fled with classmates to Austria. But when he learned he could bring a fiancée with him to Canada, his ultimate destination, he went back to Hungary and proposed to Itca, as Helen was then known, his pen-pal girlfriend. They eventually landed in Halifax, among some 37,500 Hungarian refugees admitted to Canada. They wed a month later, and Joe continued his engineering studies. Attila, the second of three sons, was born in Edmonton, but grew up mostly in Calgary, where the family settled in the 1960s.  

Each May, Helen would courier lilies of the valley from her garden to Attila’s studio in time for his birthday.

When Helen set to work on her garden, she planted lilies of the valley. The delicate white flowers bloom in late May, around the same time as Attila’s birthday. When he was a boy, she would place stalks of the fragrant blooms in a small vase at the centre of his birthday cake. After he graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1985, he moved to Berlin and then New York, vaulting to international acclaim. Each May, Helen would courier lilies of the valley from her garden to Attila’s studio in time for his birthday. Sometimes, he says, he prepared canvases with dark bitumen backgrounds and simple glass vases, so he could paint the flowers as soon as they arrived. But once, when the blooms had dried and yellowed before he had time to paint, she returned the painting he had sent her, asking him to brighten the flowers with some white so they were more cheerful. She loved each wave of blossoms in her garden and saddened as they began to fade. 

When I heard this story, I felt I had been inducted into Attila’s secret life: His love for his mother was reflected in these intimate paintings, gifts that had never been exhibited publicly or sold on the market. As a curator, I could see they had the same wit and painterly skill that Attila brought to his epic history paintings. In 2008, I organized a show at the Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery that paired the story of Helen’s garden, documented in photographs, with Attila’s floral paintings, which we gathered from his family and friends. I wanted others to see how Helen had modelled creativity and care as Attila grew up. 

Eight paintings that Attila completed in 2021, displayed in the exhibition In Helen’s Garden, are another treasure in the career of a remarkable painter. The inaugural show, at the Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary, opens May 27, Attila’s 61st birthday, and runs to July 1. By turns exuberant and elegiac, the paintings tenderly mark the passage of the seasons but also the spirit of a special place. Each work is unique, a poetic passage with its individual tone. Together, they become a poignant meditation on beauty, love and loss.

Six paintings are titled with the name of a month – June, August, September, October, November and December. JUNE, Delphinium Falls, picturing the gorgeous perennials that thrive in Calgary’s high-altitude air, is the most tied to the present moment. The flowers’ showy colours form one of Helen’s favourite palettes – a range of purples, lavenders, blues, pinks and whites. Attila adds a birdhouse with a multi-hued joking sign that depicts his merriment at nature’s irrepressible sexuality: “Don’t come a knockin’ / If it’s a rockin’.”

Seeing Helen’s garden the summer following our first meeting was a revelation. She had won a citywide gardening award and it was obvious why. The facade of their split-level house features stately neo-classical details, but stepping out back is like entering a fairy tale. The garden, structured around a protected central courtyard, features a series of low brick retaining walls that support a south-facing slope closely planted with sweeps of perennials and annuals. The garage, faced with brick and sporting curtained windows and alcoves that shelter more plants, resembles a quaint country cottage. 

Helen took great joy in creating all facets of this jewel: hanging baskets, a rock garden, containers surrounding a fountain, and a cutting garden that provided flower arrangements throughout the summer. She liked plants with unusual textures, colours and scents, which she started from seed or tracked down at specialty greenhouses. I accompanied her on shopping trips, learning from her. She introduced me to exotic plants like Rhodochiton, the purple bell vine, and offered practical tips about overwintering tender plants like oleander. One of her tricks was to tuck umbrellas throughout the garden, ready for sudden hailstorms.

Helen adored garden ornaments, often staging them like small vignettes: chubby putti, pink flamingos, the Three Graces and the three monkeys – hear-no-evil, see-no-evil and speak-no evil. On tables you might find driftwood, a cluster of seashells from a trip to Hawaii, or succulents potted in a ceramic turtle that Attila made when he was young. SEPTEMBER, Morning Light on Bird Bath depicts many such objects. Attila has added a tiny Buddha, bathed in morning light, atop an upturned glass goblet, suggesting meditative peace. Leaves float in the water and a sparrow perches on the birdbath’s scalloped rim, marking the moment. The divide between the dark and bright water might conjure the separation of the celestial heavens, the vast time of vapour, mist and stars.

Throughout his career, Attila has drawn on the imagery of the garden, as well as allegorical connections and metaphysical possibilities. The Eternal Teahouse, an outdoor urinal shown in 1992 at Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany, personifies the seasons as nude males in the Greco-Roman tradition. That work is now in the collection of the Nickle Galleries. He touched on the Garden of Eden theme in several lyrical paintings that refer to Persian miniatures from the 13th to 16th centuries and India’s Mughal miniature tradition, started by founding masters like Persian artist Abd al-Samad, who moved to the subcontinent in the 16th century.  An example is Attila’s 1992 painting, Varieties of Love IV, LOVE IN LOSS, Hermit’s life (with a beast of prey), in the collection of the Art Gallery of Alberta. 

After Attila settled in Vancouver, he returned regularly to Calgary. He helped around the house and fondly recalled making apricot jam with his mother. In the years leading up to the pandemic, he directed his energy toward revitalizing the garden, as yardwork was becoming harder for Helen. He brought spectacular lily bulbs, planted hardy roses and transplanted mounds of bright annuals into her containers. One autumn after another, he dug in tulips and other spring bulbs, hoping his parents would enjoy them when the snow melted. Joe, now 89 and still living in the family home, says this spring’s garden saw a rainbow of tulips – violet, pink, red and yellow. He was looking forward to Helen’s irises.

Attila’s Vancouver studio is in a former auto mechanic’s garage, a space large enough for him to complete six 120-foot-long canvases between 2019 and 2021. They address cosmic narratives – creation, death and the afterlife, as well as good and evil – reimagined through various religious and mythological lenses. He seeded these paintings with deities and fallen angels, from Lucifer to Michael, the Archangel, pulling imagery from both art history and contemporary culture. 

When he came back to Calgary to share the caregiving load, those themes were still on his mind, although Helen’s garden cast a complex spell of its own. He continued to focus on the subject of death, but now its presence was real and imminent. Grounded in the garden he had known since childhood, he found working on the paintings evoked a glistening dreamtime that flickered between past, present and future. He was anchored in this organic, sometimes comical and energized world, yet also connected to an ethereal space of mist and memory.

AUGUST, The Venus Pool With a Blossoming of Nymphs, with its eyeball in a seashell, is a surreal concoction à la Hieronymus Bosch. Two Olympians synchronize their dives against a Chinese vermilion sky, while frolicking nymphs proliferate like algae in a tepid birdbath. It is overseen by a prehistoric Venus wearing a sea urchin bathing cap. In the foreground, the fleshy, upturned root of a decorative but noxious weed, Himalayan balsam, emerges from a glass bowl. Attila calls it the “root of all evil.” The outline of a flamingo’s body shelters his childhood bedroom. It sets the stage for his cameo, hauling an unfinished painting up a ladder to his sanctuary. Attila has always enjoyed visual asides and tropes like this painting within a painting. Each of his canvases measures 24 inches by 24 inches, so he had to be mindful of what, for him, is a small scale. His first move was dramatic: he rotated the squares by 45 degrees, creating diamonds 34 inches tall and 34 inches wide that command space in unexpected ways. Although the area of each canvas remains the same, they seem to expand, allowing a birdbath to encapsulate a persuasive narrative of a busy lagoon, replete with vignettes. For this painting, he had to buy tinier brushes.

Helen died peacefully on Oct. 17, 2022, when she was 85. And as Attila’s paintings fade from autumn into winter, we face NOVEMBER, Fallen Garden Ornaments, and DECEMBER, Cactus Under Snow. They are simpler and more evanescent, reflecting a shimmering silvery world. In the former painting, the head of a shattered concrete donkey seems to nuzzle wounded limbs, perhaps its own rear half, a mysterious yet tender moment rendered more precious by the delicate application of thin paint. The work resonates with one of Helen’s early memories of Hungary, a story Attila told in a moving eulogy: “On a cold winter morning (in) the heavy dead silence of a Red Cross-brokered ceasefire, a six-year-old child clutches her mother’s hand tightly as they walk across a levee that divides the front lines, through the potholes left by artillery and trucks, her only shoes filling with freezing water and mud, wet under the rain from heavy gun-metal grey skies. A cart pulled by a borrowed donkey carries the casket of a favourite uncle.” 

Two paintings in the series are titled without a month. The Buddha Passing Through the Ether Seeking Vishnu’s Celestial Garden is the most ethereal. A floating skyscape is teased out of two ingredients: loosely painted oil and thin, silvery palladium leaf. The other is I am Death, Mine is the Final Victory. As Attila says: “Death knows no season.” 

In Greek mythology, Charon, the old ferryman of the underworld, carries souls across the rivers Acheron and Styx, which divide the worlds of the living and the dead. Attila’s rendition shows a graceful skeletal figure steering a skiff that resembles a pink flamingo. The tip of the skeleton’s pole illuminates the murky water, where submerged souls reach toward the surface, clinging to ladders leading up from the depths. 

Dante, in his epic poem, the Divine Comedy, casts the Roman poet Virgil as one of the few able to return from death’s shadowy haunts as a living mortal. Virgil convinces Charon his return is the will of God, but perhaps it’s his role as an artist that makes such a journey possible. Washes of bitumen, one of Attila’s signature materials, suggest reeds along the water’s edge, clearly identifying the image as his, and intimating that his role as a witness might be akin to that of Virgil, a man who can visit the nether reaches of loss and grief but return through his art. ■

Attila Richard Lukacs, In Helen’s Garden, at Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary from May 27 to July 1, 2023.

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