Author Archives: amy
Janina Ceglarz
Below are quotes from an interview with Michael Williams’ former business manager Janina Ceglarz and Gareth Clayton, Research Assistant with the Williams Oral Art History Project on Sunday, October 9, 2011.
“At the very beginning it was only me and Michael. He was looking for a property manager and Swan’s was not existing yet. He had a few buildings on the lower part of Johnson Street and was looking for a property manager and that’s how we met. When we met he hired me and that is it. It was back in 1987, 7 or 6.” -Janina Ceglarz
“Yes, he was a pioneer in redeveloping downtown Victoria. I know a lot of people are thinking that he was nuts to do that because he was buying building that was worse than this one and making them beautiful. He had a love for all buildings, he took an enormous amount of risk buying these buildings and hoping it’s going to work. But it did.” -Janina Ceglarz
“We still have hotel guests coming and saying “can you take this piece of art down, I can’t sleep at night” and we still do have that, so we go and take the picture and the guest leaves, we put the picture back. You know I still have…even here, there is one picture of the work in the pub that I get from time to time the complaint that it is not suitable for the restaurant, but you know what? The majority of people like it, I’m never going to please everybody. And by getting one phone call I’m not going to go and remove the picture, but it is happening. But Michael loved that because he always felt that art is art and even if it’s controversial it’s a piece of art and people have to be okay with this.” -Janina Ceglarz
“He did a lot of good things for Victoria, he did. He always said he was an immigrant and he always said he makes his money in Victoria and he will leave his money in Victoria. That speaks volume about a person. And what he did leaving everything for the University that speaks volume about him. But the fact that people didn’t like him…he was very…he always had a very strong opinion about absolutely everything.” -Janina Ceglarz
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Robert Amos
Robert Amos interview with Leah Taylor, Research Assistant for the Williams Oral Art History Project on Thursday, November 25, 2010 at Robert Amos’ studio in Victoria.
Click the arrow to play the sound bite of the quote from the interview (below).
“But I did come to the West Coast, I was attracted here with my friendship of members of the Western Front Society, Eric Metcalf, Michael Morris, Glen Lewis and so on. Also, friends of mine from Ontario were moving to the coast at that time. I spent a little more than a year in Vancouver working at that fun and frolic of being an artist on the West Coast on the backside of the hippie movement. But again, I hadn’t I wasn’t really getting on with what it was I felt I should do. I came to Victoria because the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria had apparently a collection of Japanese prints. I’d seen a catalogue of them and when I came to Victoria that first afternoon in 1974–75 the Japanese art wasn’t on show at the gallery. But in short form I discovered that I thought Victoria was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. I knew the collection was in the gallery somewhere and I really needed a job. So I started in and began lobbying the gallery to hire me. And in 1975 I was hired for the afternoon to sort out a collection of old magazines which Maxwell Bates had given to the gallery. When I arrived to do the afternoons work the director took me aside and said actually he’d applied for a grant to hire me and he did receive the grant and he hired me as his assistant which was a terrific job, on the chain of events at the gallery there was the director, there were including him, 5 curators and then all the support staff under that, but on that organizational chart there was a little spur off the director and my name was written in that, I was his assistant.” -Robert Amos
Click the arrow to play the sound bite of the quote from the interview (below).
“To help make a living in those very desperate economic times, because you know, here we are in 2010 and people are saying, ‘oh that economic depression in 2008 was so bad that was the worst we’ve had since well 1982 was the previous one’. It was really desperate times. So to help make a living I began writing freelance art reviews for Monday Magazine and for various other places that would have them, and in 1986 I was hired by the Times Colonist right out of the blue to write a weekly column on art for the TC. You know I had no expectations of that line of work and honestly it doesn’t pay that well. But it provided me with a position within the community which I had come accustom to from working at the art gallery.” -Robert Amos
Click the arrow to play the sound bite of the quote from the interview (below).
“Because as an artist and as a writer and as a other things I do I’m very much involved in documentation. I have a sense of the history of things.” -Robert Amos
Click the arrow to play the sound bite of the quote from the interview (below).
“I’m going to make that my job. I’m going to take the responsibility. So for many years I’ve done the whole of Victoria, and over the more recent years I’ve been working on commissioned paintings of Victoria, one address at a time. You’d be surprised at how many pictures of Victoria I have painted.” -Robert Amos
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