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Retrospective exhibit for Canada's first female comic book artist

Show runs until May 23 at Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant

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A new exhibit at Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant celebrates the work of a pioneering female artist.

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Doris Titus (nee Slater), who lived in Brantford from 1952 to 1960, began illustrating comic books in 1941 for the Anglo-American Publishing Co. in Toronto, making her the first Canadian female comic book artist.

Her initial work was Pat the Air Cadet that chronicled the adventures of brother-sister twins that often foiled the enemy during the Second World War. The female character Pat’s knowledge of mechanics and aeronautics helped to assert that women were capable of performing roles traditionally held by men.

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Titus also produced Martin Blake, The Animal King in 1942, followed two years later by the country’s first teenage romance feature, Penny’s Diary, published in Active Comics.

“I feel like we’ve discovered this long lost treasure,” said Ana Olson, gallery director at Glenhyrst. “When you look at the depth and breadth of her work exhibited here, it’s so clear how much of an impact that she had during her time.”

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Born in 1917 on a farm near Chatham, Ont., she graduated from the Ontario College of Art.

Titus came to Brantford as a single mother-of-two, and was hired as an art instructor at Brantford Collegiate Institute.

In 1960, she accepted a teaching position in Ottawa, but died in a traffic accident four years later.

While in Brantford, Titus founded the Brantford Sketch Club, a plein-air group of artists that met weekly. She also was a member of the Brantford Art League.

The artist advocated for the creation of scholarships to encourage and enable talented local students to pursue a formal education in the arts.

She provided graphic illustrations for marketing campaigns, and had her illustrations published in Byng Whitteker’s Baby Bee’s series of children’s books in the early 1950s.

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Toward the end of that decade, Titus turned to abstract work and experimenting with unusual materials.

“Abstract painting may have offered Titus a sense of freedom that commercial design and comic book illustration could not,” said Glenhyrst curator Matthew Ryan Smith. “It went deeper than the surface, beyond the things that we experience with our eyes.”

The curator shared little known facts that Titus would sometimes dip her canvas into the Grand River to see the esthetic results of flowing water on the painting.

The artist would also, at times, use her own bath water as part of the medium.

“It is conceivable that she was interested in creating a self-portrait of sorts, an extension of her body, where her likeness was not represented but lived in the paint itself,” Smith observed.

Olson is impressed with the artist’s diversity.

“For someone who passed away so young, you see this type of diverse mediums in people who are 80 and 90 years old, not typically someone as young as she was,” Olson noted.

Doris Slater Titus: Retrospective, 1941-1964, runs until May 23 at Glenhyrst at 20 Ava Rd.

The exhibit then will travel to Chatham, where it can be seen from Nov. 19 to Jan. 16 at the Thames Art Gallery, 75 William St. N.

bethompson@postmedia.com

@EXPbthompson

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