Dog plays Fountain Peek-a-Boo - B.E. Mercer

Barbara Mercer was a painter and poet, born in Galt (later Cambridge), Ontario, who moved to Toronto in 1950, where she lived and worked as a scenic artist and set and costume designer for Centre Stage Theatre. In the early 1960s, she specialized in pen and ink and pencil portrait drawings, and sketched internationally well-known classical and jazz musicians and ballet dancers, such as Glen Gould, Igor Stravinsky, and Isaac Stern. Mercer was the first woman allowed to attend the rehearsals of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, for the purpose of sketching the musicians.
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In 1962, she produced the cover and illustrations of opera stars for Opera in Canada. In 1964, she had an exhibition at Gallery Pascal on Yorkville Avenue, which included her drawings and monoprints. In 1964, in a press release for the Gallery Pascal show, she said: “Without music I could not draw a line. My love of music forced me to search it out in rehearsal halls, concert halls, in the streets, in the parks, in the jazz clubs, in coffee houses and in the hearts of men who devote their lives to it. I love to draw these men at work. The music picks up my pen and draws free lines across the page.”
 
From 1963 to 1965, she studied art in New York, learning techniques and art history. Upon her return to Toronto, in 1965 and until 1979, she was variously, a scenic artist, set designer, and makeup artist for various theatre, opera and ballet groups and did additional work for the CBC, CFTO TV and TV Ontario. (At TVO, she and her art were discovered by Harold Town who traded his work for one of hers). In 1973, she moved to Markham, to live in “Vinegar Hill” where she worked from 1979, as a full-time artist with increasing success. In 1983, she moved to Caledon East, to the country home she called “Spirit Pond” which inspired her Spirit Pond Suite.