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A Long View

Don McCallum (oil by Clint Barnett)

Donald Heath McCallum was born in Kingston in 1919. Well known in the city as a musician and downtown merchant, he also painted all his life.

Don learned to paint in the early 1930s during summers spent at Arden, Ontario, under the direction of his uncle, Clare Barnett. Barnett was a commercial artist with Brigden’s in Toronto, where he worked alongside several members of the Group of Seven. Three of his children, Don’s cousins Clint, Ruby and Dora Barnett, became commercial artists.

Don took classes at Queen’s University in the late 1930s and again after the war, studying under Andre Bieler, Goodridge Roberts, and Grant Macdonald. He also worked in the family businesses, McCallum's Granite Company and McCallum’s China and Gifts.

In January 1942, he married Martha Carr. He and Martha had both attended KCVI, but they got to know each other in Bieler's art class. In the 1950s they built a house on the St. Lawrence River, where their three children, Maureen, David and Robbie, grew up.

Through the 1970s and ‘80s, Don had a number of successful shows of his work, at the Brock Street Gallery, the FD (Francoise Duncan) Gallery, the David Brown Gallery, and others. For over a decade, from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, he wrote a weekly column for the Whig-Standard Magazine profiling the works of local artists. He loved to teach and led a large group called the Monday Painters from the late 1970s pretty well up until his death. The group continue to hold an annual show at the public library each fall.

While he continued painting in watercolour, oil, and then acrylic, Don became interested in photography after the death of his father, William J. McCallum, in 1965. McCallum Sr. had been a lifelong photographer, acquiring his first camera in 1909. Don began using his father’s cameras, including a 4 x 5, and developed a darkroom for both black and white and colour images. An exhibition at the Francois Duncan Gallery in the 1970s featured the photographs of William, Don, and Don’s son, Robbie.

Watercolour, however, was Don’s first love and his preferred medium. His subject matter is varied but many of his paintings reflect the natural world of eastern Ontario and the fading vestiges of pioneer agriculture on the rocky landscape north of Kingston.

Don died in December 2011 at the age of 92.