(September 14, 1927-August 13, 2006)
Artist Gwen Cann was admired for her technique, her versatility and for creating art that pushed the boundaries.
She was a highly experimental artist who was a painter and weaver, and also mastered puppetry, origami, macramé and bobbin lace. Her work mirrored her personality. She was bold, assertive and outspoken.
The Ohio-born artist whose father was Bermudian was a primary school teacher by profession. She moved to Bermuda at age 33 and made her mark in education, in the arts and in the wider community.
She taught at Northlands School and was the founding principal of Bishop Spencer School on Glebe Road, Pembroke, where she exposed her students to the arts.
She also loved the theatre and performed in plays and pantomimes. But it was in the visual arts where her greatest talents lay. Artist Charles Zuill, in a review of a memorial exhibition mounted eight months after her death, wrote: “Her work is so technically varied that the Masterworks exhibition hardly does justice to her accomplishments.”
The exhibits on view ran the gamut from watercolours and oils to mosaics and bobbin lace.
Zuill was most impressed with her weaving. Her textile creations, he said, “are particularly interesting and possibly her most successful works; they dominate the show with twenty pieces in the exhibition.
“What is remarkable is that in making her fibre creations, she started at the very beginning of the process, first by spinning her yarn, dyeing it and then weaving the design.”
Zuill also observed that Cann, who collected wool from local sheep, was a keen observer of the visual world and had a great curiosity about other places and cultures.
Cann was born into a family of doctors from Somerset: Her grandfather Dr. John Cann and uncle Dr. Eustace Cann were physicians who both served in the House of Assembly. Her own father, Dr. Braxton Cann, remained in the U.S. after he completed his medical studies and established his career in Cincinnati, Ohio. He married Reber Simpkins Cann, a social worker, and Cann was one of their five children.
Cann—who enjoyed dual US and Bermudian citizenship—was raised in a highly cultural home. She studied piano, dance and voice as a child and majored in art in high school.
She wanted to pursue art studies in college but began pre-med studies at Bennett College in North Carolina at her father’s urging. She quickly came to the realization that medicine was not for her but graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree.
She had a short-lived marriage that produced a daughter, Deborah Allen. After her divorce, she moved to Cleveland and obtained a job in the children’s department of the Cleveland Library.
There, a librarian, clearly impressed by her ability to connect with children, encouraged her to become a teacher. After taking night courses at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University), she obtained a master’s degree in education. She taught in Cleveland for two and a half years and then moved to Washington DC.
Her life changed course after she came to Bermuda for a vacation. She met her second husband, Walter Robinson, a lawyer and future opposition leader. After a whirlwind romance, the two were married in 1959 and she moved to Bermuda the following year.
She taught at Northlands School for five years and when the Government opened a new primary school Bishop Spencer on Glebe Road in 1965, she became its first principal.
She earned a reputation for being a creative and caring educator, who would feed and clothe her students if she had to. She taught them macramé, puppetry and weaving, wrote and directed their school plays, and also composed the music. Gaynelle Smith, who taught under her, said she was “ahead of her time.”
Bishop Spencer was only in existence for nine years. When it closed its doors in 1974, Cann, the school’s first and only principal, retired and became a full-time artist.
“I’ve been a teaching head teacher,” she told The Royal Gazette on the eve of her retirement. It’s always fascinating to teach young children. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my nine years at Bishop Spencer, but I’d like to spend all day doing art.”
Art had always played a central role in her life, despite working full time as a teacher and being a politician’s wife. From her earliest years in Bermuda, she was a member of the Bermuda Society of Arts, under whose auspices she exhibited her work, and studied sculpture with Byllee Lang.
She was a found artist who created collages from seashells she collected from the beach. Her passion for art took her to Mexico, India and Japan. She took to origami with such a fervour that at one phase in her life she was creating paper sculptures almost constantly and became an origami master.
She took up weaving and puppetry after taking a course at the University of Hawaii in 1970. She immersed herself into the fundamentals of weaving: In 1972, she took a spinning course on a sheep farm in Kansas and bought her own spinning wheel.
Cann and Walter Robinson eventually divorced and she resumed the use of her maiden name. She taught art classes at her home and in the prisons even as she continued to push the boundaries in her work.
Reviewers of her shows praised her techniques, the sheer variety of her work and her use of colour and textures.
As Charles Zuill noted in his review: “Not everything experimental artists do is equally successful, but she was willing to take the risk.”
Cann once said that the art and the theatre were her life. She performed in countless plays staged by the Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society and the Studio Foundation. She also became known for taking a strong stance against smoking.
Cann’s talents were eventually lost to a chronic illness. She died on August 13, 2006.
She was survived by her daughter Deborah Allen Fleming, her grandaughter Julia Barrus, and great-daughter Josie Barrus. Great-grandson Trenton Torres was born after her death.
In December 2007, she was a posthumous recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bermuda Arts Council and in February 2007, Masterworks mounted “A Retrospective of the Diverse Art of Gwen Cann 1927-2007”.
