Joe Fafard: Still Working at 75

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Joe Fafard, "The Yearling," 2017

patinated bronze, 14.5" x 8.8" x 5.3"

Joe Fafard wants everyone to know that, despite turning 75 on Sept. 2, he plans to continue making art for many years to come. That’s why he has titled his latest exhibition ’Til the Cows Come Home. It opens Sept. 1 at Slate Gallery in Regina.

“I want to keep going until the cows come home,” explains Saskatchewan’s most celebrated sculptor. And if any city folk don’t understand the meaning of that expression, let’s just say Fafard doesn’t expect to retire any time soon.

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While the Slate exhibition is deliberately timed to mark Fafard’s birthday, it’s not his only iron in the fire. A travelling exhibition of his small steel works began earlier this year in the Alberta communities of Medicine Hat and Sherwood Park and will resume next year in Whitehorse and the Saskatchewan cities of Swift Current and Prince Albert.

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Joe Fafard, "Dieudonné," 2016

patinated bronze, 5" x 7" x 2"

Fafard has been hoping to have about 20 bronze animal sculptures completed in time for the Slate exhibition. Many are new additions to the Fafard menagerie, best known for cows, coyotes and bison. New beasts on the block include a muskox, a donkey, a young deer sprouting antlers, a Poitevin draft horse and a mule. These animals range in height from just a few inches to 40 inches. Fafard, in an interview earlier this summer, seemed most excited about a planned larger-than-life prairie dog. “It’s almost a humorous piece, very Buddha-like.”

The exhibition will also include drawings of animals and an approximately half-size sculpture of the artist himself. “I’m pretty short,” Fafard quips. “The figure will be less than 30 inches.” Actually, Fafard’s doctor recently told him he was 5 foot, 4 inches, a two-inch drop from the height the artist thought he was. Shrinkage does come with advancing age.

For Fafard, the most significant thing about turning 75 is that he is one-half the age of Canada, which marks its sesquicentennial this year. Fafard is very much a Canadian nationalist and proudly describes himself as a 12th-generation Canadian.

Some Fafard ancestors emigrated from Normandy and settled in Trois-Rivières (in what was then New France) in 1638. Another of the artist’s ancestors, Françoise Fafard, married one Mathurin Meunier in 1647 in Montreal. It was the first “French” marriage celebrated in Montreal.

Joe Fafard’s “Canadian” credentials seem tailor-made for a novel or movie about a soft-spoken man who turns cows into art and without portraying them as cuddly Disney characters. Fafard’s cows have cow personalities. They are not anthropomorphic. What’s a cow personality? Anyone who has tended cattle knows every cow has its own personality, be it bossy, clumsy or fearful.

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Joe Fafard, "TLC," 2017

patinated bronze, 11.5" x 13.5" x 8"

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Joe Fafard, "Umimmak," 2016

patinated bronze, 13" x 22" x 12"

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To add poignancy to the Fafard story, young Joe was born in a log house in the tiny Saskatchewan hamlet of Ste-Marthe, near the Manitoba border. Today, Fafard and his wife, Alyce Hamon, live on 72 acres in the Boggy Creek area near Lumsden, a 15-minute drive northwest of Regina, where they raise turkeys, ducks, chicken and guinea hens.

With the exception of art studies in Winnipeg and Pennsylvania, Fafard has spent his entire life in Saskatchewan. “I wonder sometimes what would have happened; what opportunities did I forego by staying; what opportunities did I gather by staying? You never know the ‘what if’ question.” After a brief pause, he continues: “I’m glad I didn’t go because I really love the province. I think I would have found myself ‘out of country’ if I had left.” (Actually, Fafard used the French “dépaysé,” a word that implies culture shock in a strange place.)

Fafard is living proof that assimilation of francophones is not inevitable in Saskatchewan. But one must be persistent. Despite living in a francophone community as a child, only English schools were available for young Joe. Nevertheless, he clung to his francophone identity. More French services are available now than then. His youngest children were educated in French in Regina.

Fafard’s touring exhibition is called Retailles, a French word meaning scraps or remnants. In this case, the works are sculptures, mainly animals, made from scraps of laser-cut steel left from other sculptures.

The artist’s most famous laser-cut steel sculpture is an installation of 11 almost life-sized horses. The horses used to be in front of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa but were removed as the horses began to rust in Ottawa’s harsh winters. That is being fixed. Fafard is making a similar installation out of aluminum and it will be sturdier, five-eighths of an inch thick rather than a quarter inch. The rust-free aluminum horses will be displayed outside the National Gallery year-round, with the steel ones reserved for interior exhibitions.

Another series of eight near-life-sized running horses, Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si Do, a further example of Fafard’s whimsical naming strategy, was created in 2010 as an edition of two for the Calgary Stampede. One gallops through the Harley Hotchkiss Gardens in downtown Calgary; a second races along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec City, a gift from its twin city Calgary, to commemorate its 400 th  anniversary.

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Joe Farfard’s series of running horses, "Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si Do," in Calgary’s Harley Hotchkiss Gardens earlier this summer.

So what else is ahead for Fafard? Painting, he says. For years, Fafard has been considering a series of paintings, but sculptures keep getting in the way. Still, he likely has enough ideas to keep his paintbrush going until the cows come home.

• View 1973 NFB film on Joe Fafard "I don't have to work that big!"