When I do Ross Rules workshops, I ask attendees to estimate how much of their working time they spend on email. Recently, at a major corporation in Vancouver, the responses ranged from 50 percent to 80 percent.
Those estimates are supported by a survey recently conducted by Adobe. Respondents reported being on email six hours a day, or 30 hours a week. Three-quarters of their work time, in other words, was spent on email.
Most of that email is unproductive. Several surveys and consulting reports tell us that at least 60 percent of email in any organization is useless — i.e., unrelated to business objectives.
At a French IT company, Atos, a detailed analysis found that on average each of the firm’s 80,000 employees dealt with about 100 internal emails a day. Of those, 15 were useful and 85 were irrelevant, redundant, or unnecessary. The drain on productivity was such that the firm banned internal email altogether
Not long ago on an Air Canada plane, half-asleep at 35,000 feet, I was roused by a perky flight attendant asking, over and over, “Something from the OnBoard Café? ” Her words conjured the mirage, behind the first-class curtain, of rows of plump sandwiches and pastries and a big, hissing espresso machine. It took me a moment to realize that the OnBoard Café was actually the dinky little cart she was pushing up the aisle. Her script, of course, was more effective than “Something from my dinky little cart? ” but I was irritated nonetheless.
As Steven Pinker observes in his latest book, The Sense of Style, it’s fashionable in this iPhone age to bemoan the decline of language. Fashionable, but hardly new. Grumbling about this deterioration goes “at least as far back as the invention of the printing press,” he points out, adding that language “is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs.”
In fact, he argues, we’ve become more literate as the written word, albeit of the two-thumbed variety, has supplanted oral communication. Thanks to technology, everyone’s now a writer; and college students, he’s found, “are writing more than their counterparts in earlier generations did” and “make no more errors per page.”
The great pleasure of Pinker’s book is his painstaking dissection of the many ways in which language both serves and fails us. A Montreal-born McGill alumnus who went on to glory at MIT and Harvard, the experimental psychologist has mastered the public intellectual’s art of adapting scientific inquiry for popular audiences. His research has been widely honoured, his books have been bestsellers, and he chairs The American Heritage Dictionary’s usage panel. He’s interested in how we acquire language; how it reveals and alters the workings of the mind; and how we use it and, especially, misuse it.
As anyone with an inbox can attest, misused language abounds, and misunderstanding follows. Much of this misunderstanding, Pinker says, flows from what he calls “the Curse of Knowledge”—the writer’s difficulty in conceiving what it’s like for readers not to know something she knows. He’s referring mainly to jargon, shorthand, and specialized vocabulary, the use of which he calls the “single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.” This seemed to me a great oversimplification until I asked someone I’d just met what he did for a living. He said he was “managing director, digital” at a public relations firm.
“I don’t really know what that means.”
“I’m a digital and social-media strategist,” he explained. “I deliver programs, products, and strategies to our corporate clients across the spectrum of communications functions.”
“Sorry to be a doofus, but pretend I’m ten years old. What do you do all day? ”
“I teach big companies how to use Facebook.”
There. Quite simple, really, but arrived at only after my insistence on my ignorance. Ever tried explaining baseball to a Brit who’s never even seen a game? You quickly realize how much you take for granted. Ever tried to make sense of a manual written by Korean automotive engineers who use terms such as “stoichiometric ratio”? They’re not showing off arcane knowledge or cloaking themselves in grandeur; they just assume you know what they’re talking about.
In his earlier books, such as The Stuff of Thought and The Language Instinct, Pinker used a vast trove of academic studies to refute Benjamin Lee Whorf’s famous—and once widely accepted—hypothesis that language determines the nature of thought; that we all live, as Nietzsche put it, in “the prison house of language.” Pinker dismantled this notion of linguistic determinism by showing, among other things, that differences in thinking (how we count, how we orient ourselves in the world) are not generally caused by our words but rather by other factors, and merely reflected in our speech.
The Sense of Style further investigates the links between language and thought, and does so in ways that offer practical benefits to anyone wishing to become a better writer. Pinker contends that a “hunger for coherence [drives] the entire process of understanding language.” Is it really as simple as “Whenever one sentence comes after another, readers need to see a connection between them”? He makes a persuasive case. What he calls “coherence connectives”—despite, because, however, therefore, nonetheless, and so forth—are, he maintains, “the unsung heroes of lucid prose” and “the cement of reasoning.”
Pinker found that underperforming high school students tend to be flummoxed by the challenge of stringing together coherent sentences. A program that trained them to construct arguments, with an emphasis on the connection between successive ideas, dramatically improved their performance. As for troublesome passages in the hundreds of things I’ve written, and the thousands of pieces I’ve edited, the problem is, indeed, usually one of coherence: How does this sentence relate to those that precede it? Why are you telling me this now? Where are we going?
This hunger for coherence has important implications. As Pinker shows, the letter sequence m-d-p-h-d-r-s-v-p-c-e-o-i-h-o-p is difficult to remember, though not when chunked as md-phd-rsvp-ceo-ihop. Each chunk contains subsets of meaning; if these unfold coherently, the reader makes sense of them; complexity is rendered into manageable bits. That helps explain how a memory expert dazzles 100 audience members by recalling their names, and it’s what makes even a detailed text with a clear hierarchical structure easy for the reader to assimilate: “At any level of granularity, from clauses to chapters, the passage can be represented in the reader’s mind as a single chunk, and the reader never has to juggle more than a few chunks at a time as he figures out how they are related.”
It’s fascinating to learn the science that underlies the stylistic techniques good writers seem to intuit—for example, a list is most easily grasped if the bulkiest item comes at the end (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ; or The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle; or Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!). “Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics,” Pinker writes, “having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Pānini.” Why? Because the mind must hold the early items in suspension before incorporating the final one, and it’s easier to retain simple things than more complex elements.
Much of Pinker’s research leads naturally to prescriptive advice; the book doubles as a manual worthy of a place on a shelf just below Fowler’s Modern English Usage and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. “Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images,” Pinker tells us. (This explains why white Econoline van is preferable to getaway car; and a mound of flowers, balloons, and teddy bears is more effective than impromptu roadside memorial.) Or this: “It’s good for a writer to work with the ongoing newsreel in readers’ minds and describe events in chronological order.” He showered and put on his new suit before he went to dinner is easier to understand than He went to dinner after he showered and put on his new suit. Similarly, positive statements are more readily grasped than negative ones, and so negation should not be used for no good reason. (That’s a joke.) And my favourite Pinkerism of all, the undisputed first rule of worthwhile prose: “a writer has to have both something to talk about (a topic) and something to say (the point).” Are you listening, bloggers of the world?
Language, Pinker reminds us, is always evolving. Silly meant “pious” long before it came to mean “foolish,” and the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage includes a new definition of literally as a mere indicator of emphasis, like “very.” Why, then, do I cringe when someone uses fulsome to mean “full,” or incredulous to mean “incredible”? If enough people misuse a word, again and again, they’re redefining it. In the age of Tim Hortons and Hells Angels, why learn the difference between its and it’s? What’s an apostrophe here or there? As long as people know what you mean, why bother with rules and conventions at all?
Because clarity and consistency are not the same as needless pedantry; nor is grammar, as Pinker argues elsewhere, “an ordeal of jargon and drudgery,” but rather “one of the extraordinary adaptations in the living world: our species’ solution to the problem of getting complicated thoughts from one head into another.” Syntax he describes as “an app that uses a tree of phrases to translate a web of thoughts into a string of words.” (It’s a helpful simile, but if you find the accompanying schematics tedious, it’s easy enough to skip over them.) The evolution of style and usage doesn’t obviate the need for consensual guidelines about what’s correct and what’s sloppy or erroneous. Today’s rules will eventually change; until they do, them’s the rules.
Inadvertent miscommunication is one thing; in Pinker’s next book, I’d love to gain a fuller understanding of how the calculated misuse of language turns nonsense into received wisdom. How, by drawing clear pictures and eliciting visceral responses, do advertisers and propagandists persuade people of things that are patently untrue? That a dinky cart is an OnBoard Café, for example, or that North Korea is the greatest country on earth? Why, if you repeat a falsehood often enough (I’ve saved Toronto taxpayers a billion dollars), does it grow less false in people’s minds? How does it become part of a Scientologist’s beliefs that, 75 million years ago, a galactic tyrant brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling DC-8s? By what psychological and neurolinguistic means does the careful deployment—and deliberate distortion—of language lead to atrocities large and small?
The 2014 Mazda3, we’re told, is “a game changer.” Really? If you could drive it right onto the tarmac, flip a switch, and fly it to Winnipeg, now that would be a game changer. The waves of hyperbolic, distorted language that wash over us every waking hour numb us to the deeper, more troubling currents that replace global warming with the somewhat less alarming climate change, or massive layoffs with optimization, or incinerated schoolchildren with collateral damage.
As Humpty Dumpty tells Alice: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Now there’s an epigram for our times. Call me old-fashioned, but when a sportscaster uses words meaning just what he chooses them to mean—The Blue Jays were literally on fire in late July—I want to unspool a firehose and use it not just to douse the flames but to soak the announcer as well, for his casual disservice to the language Steven Pinker so artfully examines, explains, and celebrates.
Before I watched Philip Seymour Hoffman play a character in a movie based on a book I’d written, and before I spoke to him about his craft, I imagined that acting was fairly straightforward—especially film acting, with its erasable takes. You feign being someone else. You imagine yourself into a story, a set of circumstances unlike your own. You memorize a script—verbal clues to this life you pretend to inhabit—and you recite it with all the conviction and consistency you can muster.
I met Philip in 2002, soon after he arrived in Toronto to shoot Owning Mahowny. Luckily, he saw me not as a journalist who would ask him a bunch of dumb questions but as someone who could give him insight into his character, a precocious young banker who was defrauding the bank to feed a gambling addiction. Philip flattered me by saying my book, Stung, helped persuade him to take the role; I wasn’t flattering him when I said that the film had been in development, off and on, for more than a decade, but came together only when he signed on. Even then, the acting world knew he was special.
In a hotel lobby, he asked me dozens of questions about Brian Molony’s background, his tastes, what he liked to eat. (Answer: Swiss Chalet chicken.) Then he asked how I’d sum him up in a sentence.
“Actually, believe it or not, I’d say he’s one of the most principled and trustworthy people I’ve met. Ten-million-dollar fraud and gambling addiction notwithstanding.”
Philip wanted to meet him. (Brian had pled guilty and received a six-year sentence, long since past.) Brian agreed, so Philip took a limo to Brian’s suburban office and spent three hours with him. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall as they took each other’s measure. I do know that both men came away intrigued and impressed.
The next time I saw Philip, later that week, on the set in downtown Toronto, he’d become a character—Dan, in the movie—that incorporated the actual Brian. It was uncanny. Philip’s shoulders had risen an inch. His gait had become splay-footed. His droopy moustache disguised his upper lip as he issued crisp instructions with a sort of exhausted confidence.
In the scene being shot that morning, he and Minnie Driver (his love interest) played off each other. Between takes, Minnie fussed over hair and makeup and costume while Philip sat in a corner, inviolable, staring at the floor. Take six: once again, she knocks meekly on his office door. “Dan, I’ve brought your coat.” It was like watching a minor-league hitter against major-league pitching.
A few days later a casino scene was being shot late at night. The set was a shabby hotel near the airport in Toronto. The entrance had been tricked out to resemble the casino entrance. On set, throughout the entire thirty-eight-day shoot, nobody could speak to Philip or make eye contact. He stayed in character during the interminable adjustments between takes, hands thrust into suit pockets, pacing back and forth in the lobby, using a forefinger to nudge his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He was in a bell jar; the crystalline air of concentration was palpable.
The same thirty-second scene was shot over and over again: Philip walking to a limousine where John Hurt, playing the sleazy casino boss, waited with ribs in a Styrofoam box. To each take Philip brought an almost imperceptible new inflection—a hesitation, a change in vocal pitch, a glance at the box. Then he hurried back inside to pace in silence, and concentrate, and wait. Hurt, meanwhile, chatted with crew members, sucked fiercely on a cigarette, and told funny stories about Ireland, where he lived.
By the time filming ended, at 3:30 a.m., everyone was exhausted. Shooting was set to resume less than seven hours later, in Niagara Falls, more than 100 kilometres away.
I visited the set again the following week. Seeing a film shot out of sequence (Minnie could spend only the first two weeks of principal photography in Toronto) makes you appreciate the focus that acting demands: we’re shooting this closing scene today, which means everything else has already happened, though we’ve not yet shot everything else. Philip’s grasp of the script, of emotional nuance, left at least a couple of the other actors in awe. Maury Chaykin, who plays a bookmaker in the movie, told me he’d turned down a major part in another film, against his agent’s wishes, because he’d have scenes with Philip Seymour Hoffman.
At the end of the shoot, there’s a wrap party. Diverse people who’ve come from far and wide to work together—hauling cables, changing lenses, applying makeup, driving rental cars, making food, amending scripts, adjusting lights, loading cameras, rearranging sets, pretending to be characters they are not—get drunk and celebrate the completion of something irreplicable.
The party was at a cavernous place on Adelaide Street. Philip had promised we’d talk there, but all night he was surrounded by the crew, to whom he had plainly endeared himself. He was relaxed and upbeat and drank ginger ale. Drivers waited outside, and at midnight we shared a car up to Bloor Street. He apologized for not having chatted, gave me his number, and suggested I look him up next time I was in New York.
I did so, rather sheepishly, a couple of months later. When I called him and asked whether, busy as he was, he was still willing to meet for coffee, he said, “Of course. I don’t say things like that just to be polite.” We met at a little spot in Greenwich Village, close to where he lived, and again I asked him about his craft.
“Is it a natural gift, like being able to do long division in your head? Like being able to run fast? ”
“It’s really hard work,” he said. “Every time. It’s exhausting.”
“The way therapy is hard work? The work of getting to the heart of things?”
“The thing is, if you don’t leave it all out there it’s not going to be very good.”
“How do you find in yourself so many different people?” I asked.
I didn’t understand his answer: “You have to look in the mirror every day and not be afraid of what you see.”
The last time I saw him, we met for lunch at another place in the Village. It was a muggy spring day. He arrived on his bicycle, wearing baggy camouflage shorts and a ratty orange T-shirt. He locked the bike to a lamp post. This was pre-Capote, before the best actor Oscar made him a household name. Still, many diners did a double-take as we sat down: I know you, I just can’t remember who you are.
His work on Owning Mahowny was complete. Since we’d last spoken he’d done some looping (redoing dialogue to match film that’s been shot) but he hadn’t yet seen the final cut. He asked whether I had.
“I had my own screening. I saw it in this big, empty theatre on Bloor Street at noon. Looking at rushes gives you no idea what to expect.”
“What did you think of it?”
Apart from the odd jolt—a moment of feeling that John Hurt was overdoing it, or that Minnie Driver was trying awfully hard to nail a Canadian accent—I’d been transfixed. I could barely answer. “Holy fuck,” I said. “I wept.”
“That’s a good sign.”
Philip talked about the low-budget film his brother had written, Love Liza, in which he plays a character who, after being visited by grief, gets addicted to gasoline fumes. He was rehearsing a play with his off-Broadway company and preparing to fly to Los Angeles, a city he didn’t much like, for a film shoot and a good payday.
I asked about the differences between film and stage. He said that what happens onstage on a good night has no parallel, it’s the purest high, the tightrope artist making it all the way across while the crowd below goes “Oooohh.” I had a young daughter, and he asked what I liked most about being a parent. I said that having a kid has no parallel, it’s the purest love. He insisted on paying for lunch before discovering he didn’t have any money. Outside, he unlocked his bike and pedaled off, a circus bear on a bicycle, raising a hand without looking back.
There’s a scene in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in which Philip, who plays a psychopathic jewel thief, gets tied off and injected before delivering a woozy, zonked-out self-assessment: “All of my parts,” he says, “don’t add up to…one me.”
I remember asking him, just before shooting began on Owning Mahowny, what he’d found in Brian that corresponded to something in himself, something he could build on to create the character of a compulsive gambler.
“I had some pretty wild times when I was young,” he said. “I know how you can fool the people around you—even people who know you well—into thinking you’re okay. You can fool yourself, too.”
He does no PR, so most of his accomplishments go unheralded. He runs his restaurant, Cioppino’s Mediterranean Grill & Enoteca, like a military operation, which keeps his kitchen brigade on alert. He says exactly what he thinks, which doesn’t always endear him to others. But nobody doubts Pino Posteraro’s hard work, dedication, and singular talent.
Even when he’s organizing a conference at the Sheraton Wall Centre, or cooking for Formula One drivers in Italy, or being honoured by Gambero Rosso (the Italian wine guide) for his contribution to Italian cuisine, or arranging for $25,000 in scholarships for young chefs at Vancouver Community College, or flying off to Toronto to judge Top Chef Canada-all of which he quietly did in 2013-Posteraro, 50, personally upholds the standards that have made Cioppino’s a fine-dining magnet since it opened in Yaletown 15 years ago.
There’s a reason people with a love of great food-from Hollywood stars and CEOs to pro athletes and international dignitaries-make a point of stopping in. It has nothing to do with seeing or being seen, and everything to do with memorable dining experiences. Never has complexity been made to seem so simple on the plate.
Posteraro sources the best ingredients and fashions them into dishes that grow authentically out of his southern Italian upbringing and West Coast environs. Some are classics (pappardelle with braised veal cheek and porcini mushrooms; osso buco with saffron risotto), others strikingly original (Salt Spring Island mussels with gnocchi and caviar in saffron broth; lingcod ravioli with botargo, chili, and garlic). All deliver intense, beautifully balanced flavours. He’s his own pastry chef. His culinary knowledge is encyclopedic, and his ability to devise dishes that pair with unfamiliar wines is unparalleled.
The renowned Daniel Boulud recently called Pino Posteraro the best chef in Vancouver. After his busy, varied, and productive 2013, who are we to disagree?
The Heffel brothers lift The Crazy Stair (The Crooked Staircase), 1928-1930, an Emily Carr painting that sold for a record-breaking $3.39-million at Heffel’s fall auction last year
From NUVO, Spring 2014
By Gary Stephen Ross
On the October morning in 1987 that Kenneth Heffel was scheduled to fly to Switzerland to look at paintings, he planned to stop in at his gallery in Vancouver. His younger son, Robert, would take him to the airport. When Ken failed to appear at the gallery and didn’t answer his phone, Robert drove to the house in Shaughnessy. No one answered the door. Robert found his dad on the bathroom floor, dead of congestive heart failure.
Ken Heffel had packed a lot into his 52 years. “He was born in 1935, middle of the Depression,” recalls his older son, David. “My grandparents saw a piece in the Edmonton Journal: ‘These Eight Tiny Tads Need Homes.’ My grandmother circled one of the faces and wrote ‘Ken’ beside it. They literally just went down to the hospital and picked him up.” Things were simpler then.
“I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out our dad,” says David. “As far as I know, he never looked into his own background. My mom told me an older man used to show up for all his baseball games and sit by himself in the stands. She always wondered if that was his natural father. Maybe because he was adopted, he was determined he was going to be somebody. He was driven to be successful.”
Succeed Ken Heffel did, at everything he turned his hand to. He was a good enough catcher that the Cincinnati Reds signed him, and he played a few seasons in the minor leagues. He started a little welding company that grew into Great West Steel Industries and made him a millionaire. He bred Hereford cattle, and he began buying and selling Canadian art, astutely putting together a major collection. Turning his passion into his business, he sold his 2,000-acre ranch near Camrose, Alberta, bought a former Royal Bank of Canada building on Granville Street in Vancouver from Nelson Skalbania, and opened the Heffel Fine Art Auction House.
The boys grew up in a comfortable British Properties (a residential area in West Vancouver, British Columbia) house that contained what Robert describes as “an important collection of paintings by the Group of Seven and their contemporaries.” It’s no surprise that an Emily Carr painting resided in the home’s family room: Alert Bay, 1912. “We got to look at it every day,” says David. “As kids, you absorb that environment.”
Despite their youth, then, they weren’t entirely unprepared to take over when their father died. Robert was 22, recently graduated with a degree in art history at the University of British Columbia. “I loved the academic aspect, the way a painting captures both history and culture,” he says. “But of course, that’s very different from the business side.” He’d worked at the gallery, doing a bit of everything, and had even begun to sell the odd painting.
David, a couple of years older and employed in the film industry in Toronto, had also worked at the gallery during university, cleaning, crating, and shipping, as well as doing some groundwork for his dad’s Vancouver gallery. And a few years earlier, rather presciently as it turned out, Ken had hired his best friend, the art dealer Peter Ohler, to teach the boys about the gallery business—“retail detail,” says Robert. Sharing their father’s love of art and having the cushion of an inheritance and what David calls “the confidence of youth,” they embraced their father’s legacy and set to work. In the years since, they’ve transformed the art business in Canada and become the dominant force in the sale of fine art.
In the 1970s, most art sold privately. Art auctions were mainly for the trade, not the everyday collector. Looking back, the Heffels’ decision to concentrate on live auctions (their first was in November 1995), rather than private retail sales, was a turning point. So was their decision in 1999 to move the auction process online. The Heffels were ahead of the competition, and it wasn’t long before the Internet, as David explains, “allowed us to sell 500 paintings in the time it used to take us to sell 10.
“There were definitely growing pains,” he adds in the deliberate, thoughtful, self-effacing way both brothers speak. “Our balance sheet was static for the first five or six years. But we didn’t have any fear of failing. Our dad had set an example of coming from nothing and doing well, and we didn’t doubt we’d be successful. There was just a change in lifestyle—all of a sudden we were working 12 or 14 hours a day.”
Besides developing their web presence and introducing monthly auctions (along with the major spring and fall sales), the brothers took a scholarly approach to the work, using academic experts like Lisa Christensen, Dr. François-Marc Gagnon, and Dr. Mark A. Cheetham to produce a detailed essay about each painting. The Heffels also create and distribute high-quality colour catalogues, which are a major expense, but an effective promotional tool. And though investing in infrastructure and maintaining a state-of-the-art website is also costly, technology has been central to the Heffels’ success.
So has the mentorship and advice of the many collectors who’ve become friends over the years—people like Peter Brown, Jacques Barbeau, Stephen Jarislowsky, Michael Audain, Roy Heenan, and the late Dr. Donald Rix, as well as contemporaries like Paul Reynolds, Jonathan Hyman, and Bob Rennie.
Rennie, the most influential real estate marketer in British Columbia (who’s probably sold half the condos in Vancouver), is a long-time friend whose own involvement in art curiously parallels the brothers’. The Heffels started out as retail dealers, developed their marketing infrastructure, and moved online; Rennie started out selling individual homes, developed his sales infrastructure, and moved into project marketing. The brothers’ success has allowed them to establish a national presence; Rennie’s success has allowed him to put together a major collection of contemporary art and create the Rennie Collection at Wing Sang on East Pender Street in Vancouver. “The Heffels are a seamless team,” says the real estate mogul. “They’re knowledgeable, honest, and hard working. They’ve earned their very respected place in the art world.”
Was there a tipping point, a moment at which the brothers realized they were changing the paradigm? “I’d say it had more to do with stubbornness and hard work than any single moment,” says David, who’s given to sports metaphors. “There’s generally a lot of work in the corners before the puck ends up in the net.”
Robert points to an auction in 2000 at which an Emily Carr (War Canoes, Alert Bay) sold for the first time for more than a $1-million. “She’s [Emily Carr] been a big part of our success,” he says, “and her star just continues to rise. I’d say that sale was the start of the bull market in Canadian art. It was the beginning of a good economic period, but it was also a case of a great painting coming up for auction. People took notice, not just in Canada but outside the country as well.”
Ever since, 20th-century Canadian art has been on a roll. The Heffels have sold more than 60 Canadian paintings for over $1-million. Meanwhile, Canada’s financial centre of gravity has moved west, and the art market has followed suit. And the dollar has become a safe-haven currency. Many foreign investors view Canadian art the way they view Vancouver condos—as a safe place to park wealth.
Our visual artists are taking their place in the world—the “Canadian” qualifier is evaporating.
Just as writers like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Alice Munro and musicians like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen are widely celebrated, our visual artists are taking their place in the world—the “Canadian” qualifier is evaporating. You see it in the global success of the photo-conceptualists (Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace) and in the record prices that painters like Carr, Lawren Harris, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and E. J. Hughes are fetching in Heffel auctions.
At Christie’s summer sale last year in New York, a Jack Bush went for more than $600,000 (U.S.)—12 times the presale estimate. When the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London presented Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, the exhibition received stellar reviews, drew record attendance, and set new benchmarks for gift-shop sales. (The exhibition went on to the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway, followed by the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, before arriving at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Ontario.) The Dulwich is mounting a solo Carr exhibition, Painting Canada 2: Emily Carr and the Indigenous Art of the North West Coast, come November, which will only drive prices for her work higher.
All of which portends a bright future for the Heffels. Their strategy of investing in infrastructure and opening galleries in Toronto and Montreal (as well as offices in Calgary and Ottawa) is paying off handsomely. From a staff of five in 1990, they’ve grown to 27 employees today. In Vancouver, Heffel is the only game in town. Yet the brothers have spent so much time in the East, and developed so many long-term relationships, that they’re not viewed there as Westerners. Their Sherbrooke Street gallery in Montreal and their success selling Quebec painters—Riopelle, Jean Paul Lemieux, Paul-Émile Borduas—have given them a high profile in that province.
Since 1995, Heffel Fine Art Auction House has auctioned off roughly $350-million worth of fine art. Almost two-thirds of fine art auction transactions in Canada now pass through them. No more telling evidence of their dominance can be found than Sotheby’s decision last year to shut down its Canadian auction operation and concentrate on private sales, leaving the Toronto-based Waddington’s as the Heffels’ only real Canadian competition.
Any advice for the novice collector? Robert suggests that monthly web auctions are a great place to begin building a collection. Because the secondary market for most living artists isn’t strong, a piece that had a retail value on the primary market of, say, $15,000 might have an opening bid of $9,000 at auction. Sometimes the piece will sell for less than the presale estimate. “Focus on a certain area, one that really appeals to you,” he says. “Become expert in that area. Buy good names. Buy pieces you really like by those names. That’s how we’ve seen buyers do well over a long period.
“Actually, a client was in just this morning with a David Blackwood. He bought the painting from us for $9,500 in the mid-nineties, just before we got seriously into the online stuff. He’s probably going to consign it to our spring auction. The preauction estimate would probably be $40,000 to $60,000, and that’s conservative. He bought it because he loved it, but he also believed he’d do well with it over time.”
It’s been said that you never really own a work of art; you simply become its custodian for a time. In the way that a great painting speaks to history and legacy, a family business does as well. As midlife moves squarely into the brothers’ view, it brings with it the question of succession. Many legendary Canadian businesses were established by a visionary founder, developed by the children, but then dissipated by a third generation of family members who took for granted the comforts of success without having assimilated the values and practices that made it possible.
The Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia educates entrepreneurial families about everything from governance and business advisers to wealth preservation. “Their family business program has been helpful in shaping our thinking,” says Robert. “They’ve had some great speakers. We’ve been working with a fellow at KPMG in Ottawa as well as advisers in Vancouver, putting in place structures and guidelines for succession.”
Both men still work hard, but having an expert staff allows them to delegate and make more time for themselves. Trim and athletic, they both pursue recreational activities with the same quiet ardour that characterizes their approach to work. David skis (snow and water), practises yoga, rides motorcycles (on-road and off), fishes, and surfs. He’s also started to paint.
Robert, an avid windsurfer in his youth—he used to spend weekends in Hood River, Oregon—continues with the sport, primarily in Maui. He and his wife, Jennifer, an interior designer, have a place in Spreckelsville, Hawaii, where Willie Nelson is a neighbour and Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson are denizens. They have a teenage daughter, Ainsley. “She’s super artistic—she gets that from her mom,” Robert says with a chuckle. “She’s just started first year at the University of San Diego, where they have a really good fine arts program.”
David and his wife, Patsy, who is director of accounting at the gallery, have two teenage sons, Josh and Ryan. Like the grandfather they never knew, the boys love baseball. There’s a framed photo of Ken’s old catcher’s glove on the wall at their home in West Vancouver, and a pile of bats by the back door. “It’s funny,” says David, “the boys will see a great double play on TV and say, ‘Ken would have loved that.’ ”
On vacation last summer, David took his family to Boston and New York. “It was kind of a joint mission,” he says. “We saw as many baseball games as possible, and we visited as many art museums as we could fit in. Josh idolizes [Red Sox second baseman] Dustin Pedroia and wants to be a major league ballplayer. Ryan is in his second year of art history at UBC.”
Not long ago, in Montreal, David was given a tour of the art at the Power Corporation of Canada (a collection of the late Paul Desmarais Sr., who led Power Corp. as chairman and CEO from 1968 to 1996). “The curator, Paul Maréchal, is a walking encyclopedia about the collection, which is stunning,” he says. “I asked how he got interested in art, and he said he started out collecting coins and stamps. I told him Ryan collects baseball cards. We agreed that it’s part of the same passion—the quest for discovery, the excitement of sharing a prize find.”
Is there a thought that their children might succeed them? “At their age, you want to keep all the options open—you want them to find their own path,” says Robert. “But it’s nice that Ainsley spent some time at the gallery, helping out on Saturdays, and really seemed to enjoy it.”
David agrees: “You don’t want to force them into anything. You introduce them to the art world, educate them about the business, maybe start taking them around to artists’ studios, and see whether it’s something they have a feeling for. That said,” he adds, “developing a foundation for the future is something Robert and I have talked about a lot these past couple of years. Last year in Hawaii, we had our first-ever family meeting to talk about succession. One way or another, we hope to create a legacy for the Heffel name in the Canadian art world.”
Anyone less modest would realize that they already have.
