Charles Pachter puts iconic Queen-moose paintings in new alphabet book

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Charles Pachter puts iconic Queen-moose paintings in new alphabetbook
22 hours ago
TORONTO — It's been more than three decades sinceToronto-based artist Charles Pachter painted the first of severalimages of the Queen with a moose (saluting astride one, paddlingthrough water on one, and so on) and he still doesn't know if HerMajesty has actually seen the whimsical works.
Pachter, 65, says he's twice tried to bring the pieces - some ofwhich are in his recently published alphabet/art/poetry/historybook, "M is for Moose: A Charles Pachter Alphabet" - to theattention of the Royal Family.
The first attempt, Pachter recalls, was at a Toronto dinner partyin honour of Prince Charles. It was hosted by Hilary Weston, formerlieutenant-governor of Ontario.
"We're all standing around sheepishly waiting to be introduced toHis (Royal) Highness and it's finally my turn and Hilary says: 'Nowdon't be shy, tell him what you did.' So I says, 'Well, yourHighness, thanks to your mother I made a living for 20 years,' andhe goes, 'Really? How extraordinary! What do you mean?"' thepainter and printmaker recalled during an interview at hishome/gallery.
"Well, I happened to have a postcard, of course, of her on themoose so I gave it to him. He cracked up ... and he said, 'Do youhave copies for Harry and William? I'd like them to see granny on amoose.' So I sent him copies and he wrote me a handwritten letter.It came from St. James's Palace or whatever saying how delighted hewas because he understood the affection in it."
Pachter's second attempt to alert the reigning monarch of hisQueen-moose images - which caused some controversy in Canada in the1970s - was two years ago when he mailed her a print of one of thepaintings for her 80th birthday.
"So I get a letter back from Buckingham Palace and they said: 'Yourmajesty wishes to thank you for your thoughtful gift and assuresyou that an appropriate place will be found for it.' They didn'tsay where," he said laughing.
"The loo, the bar, the rec room, who knows? But anyway, they founda spot for it in the palace somewhere."
The Queen and the moose are but two of many symbols of Canadianculture depicted in Pachter's works, which have travelled aroundthe world and are on display throughout his home, an architecturalmarvel he started building in 1996 and called Pachter Hall and theMoose Factory Gallery.
"M Is For Moose" also includes his signature paintings of buttertarts (his favourite Canadian treat), John Graves Simcoe, ElizabethSimcoe and longtime friend Margaret Atwood (he did the artwork forher poetry collection, "The Journals of Susanna Moodie").
The moose is the most prominent image in the new book, as it'salways been the image Pachter is most associated with (his Torontohome and cottage north of the city are filled with paintings andsculptures of the antlered animal).
His fascination with the moose began, he says, at age four when hewas able to pet the huge beast while starring in a National FilmBoard of Canada movie on the re-opening of the Canadian NationalExhibition after the war.
"My memories of being a little 30-inch-high tyke petting thiscreature with the smell of the sawdust and the fur and everythingin the midway stayed with me," said Pachter, whose paintings hangin the Toronto Stock Exchange and in the Canadian Embassy inWashington. His hockey murals also decorate a Toronto subwaystation.
Pachter says he also took to painting the moose and other Canucksymbols after being told by his university professors that suchimages were of little importance while American pop-culture objectspainted by Andy Warhol and others were thriving.
"It was as if nothing from our daily life here had any validity andI couldn't understand it," said Pachter, a member of the Order ofCanada.
"It just was a complete bewilderment to me that there was so muchiconography waiting to be exploited whether it was the Mounties orthe cowgirls or the Prairie grain elevators or the moose, Idiscovered, which is ubiquitous."
Pairing the Queen and the moose stems from a childhood memory ofconfusing the words "moose" and "monarch," he said.
"In school, the moose was 'the monarch of the north' and she wasthe monarch and it was the monarchy and I couldn't understand howcome we were this big huge Western country and our head of statedidn't live here," he recalled. "As a teenager that used to bugme."