Vivian Reiss’s creative approach is clear the minute one enters her Victorian mansion. There’s an explosion of colour and artworks and objects (always interesting, often eccentric) that she’s accumulated over a lifetime, every piece underlining her more-is-more philosophy.
“I once had a nightmare that I had to live in an all-white house with only a few objects,” says the Toronto painter and bon vivant, laughing. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate that aesthetic, it’s just that it’s not me and I don’t feel any need to conform to it, really.”
Walking through the halls of her home is akin to visiting a relaxed and messy museum: 150-year-old glass chandeliers from Italy share space with statuettes acquired on travels abroad. A maroon-carpeted staircase snaked up through the core of the narrow house. Even the computer in her small basement office sits on an antique gold-leaf desk.
And, of course, there is her art, lots of it, adorning every wall. Framed in gold, her paintings are technicolour fantasies, some depicting the natural world, others scenes of busy domestic interiors. Many are studies of friends in the local arts scene, like Nursing Diva, a portrait of opera singer Fides Krucker and child that hangs in the opulent living room.
Reiss has been a mainstay on the local cultural scene ever since she arrived in town from Boston (where she went to art school during the ’70s) after marrying local developer Irving Garten. Garten owns and refurbishes stately properties like their home and another large house further up the street at Lowther and Spadina that this summer was home to Reiss’ Ambitious Compound art gallery. But she’s recently closed up shop there until she’s ready to roll out her next exhibit.
Not only do they happen to live right next door to campus, but the Garten-Reiss family’s connections to U of T run deep as well-daughter Ariel (a Varsity cover girl last year) is a neuroscience grad and now runs the Flavourhall boutique on College St., and son Joel, an accomplished pianist, also goes to U of T.
In keeping with her zest for life, their mom decided to take up some higher learning as well, and a few years ago joined up for a unique physics course for mature students at U of T headed up by noted professor Lynn Trainor (now retired, currently a Professor Emeritus at the university). The intimate seminar-style class resulted in much cordial discussion that went on long into the evening and spilled into after-class drinks, and Reiss found herself fascinated with the concepts she was learning in the course.
The 51-year-old artist is as vibrant as her paintings, dark hair setting off an elegant jacket in shades of electric orange and red. Curled up in an antique chair in her salon-like living room, she enthuses about Trainor’s open-minded approach to science.
“He had a way of making even the most abstract concepts seem to come to life,” she recalls. “Even after the course was over, we kept in touch and continued to discuss the parallels between art and science. We had the most fascinating talks.”
And so, the painter and the scientist decided to collaborate. Along with Trainor’s colleague Charles Lumsden, the trio is working together on a book about quantum physics that aims to bridge the seemingly disparate worlds of art and science. Trainor and Lumsden will write the scientific text, and Reiss will contribute illustrations and paintings with brief explanations about how they tie into the content.
“It’s going to be a very accessible project,” Reiss notes. “It’s not an ‘academic’ thing so much as something that aims to open people’s eyes to how science and art have intersected throughout history.”
While the book is a priority for Reiss, working with two other people is a slow and ongoing open-ended process, with no definite deadline for when it will be released. “It will definitely come out; we just don’t know when yet,” she smiles.
Reiss approaches her own work much in the same way-she has her own painting studio in the sunny attic-type space on the top floor of her house, where she works on and stores her many canvases.
“I never sketch before I paint, never really contemplate what’s going to happen,” Reiss explains. “I go straight to the canvas and start to draw on the canvas, and that’s how the painting emerges.”
Her paintings are bold and rainbow-bright, inspired by nature (a series of rooster paintings, lots of flowers) and interesting people (she says she loves to paint portraits because it’s a partnership between the artist and the subject, and therefore “not as lonely”). Her extensive travels (she’s been everywhere from Kyrgyzstan to Bali) also inform her art.
“For so long, we’ve been living by less is more, but that seems to go against the grain,” Reiss declares. “More is more, that seems to be obvious. I love to explore, I love to travel, I love to grab life. I have a great zest for living, and I don’t think that it should be limited to one little white box in one little white room.”
