David Collier's Hamilton Sketchbook By Jeet Heer National Post (October 12, 2002) Ever since the 14-year old David Collier started drawing in his sketchbook in 1977, he's been making pictures of Hamilton. Even as a teenager, Collier was attracted to the cast-iron aesthetic and aging smokestack beauty found in this Southern Ontario metropolis. "I've always liked old buildings," he notes. "The details that catch your eye and give your mind something to play with. The decay, the sense of time's passage, even the worn steps..." In his Hamilton Sketchbook, a rich collection of drawings and text, Collier places his life-long love for the city in the context of his larger career as an artist. As an adult, Collier spent several years puttering all over Canada before he found his vocation as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist. With his strong feeling for rustic scenery, Collier carved a niche for himself drawing homely images of grain elevators and abandoned cabins for publications like The Globe and Mail, the National Post, Saturday Night and Geist magazine. While building up his reputation as an illustrator, Collier honed his narrative skills in a series of independent comic books where he published biographies of interesting Canadians. Recently collected in the volume Portraits From Life, Collier told the life stories of Grey Owl (the Englishman who pretended he was an Indian), Humphry Osmond (the Saskachewan pioneer of psychedelic drugs), and David Milgaard (who spent half a lifetime in jail after being wrongly blamed for a brutal rape and murder). As both a writer and artist, Collier is consciously trying to revive long-dormant journalistic traditions. In the newspapers of the early 20th century, cartoonists like H.T. Webster and "story-tellers" like Greg Clark practiced an anecdotal art that strove to capture everyday life in daily snippets. Like these newsprint forbearers, Collier relishes the quotidian: his drawings often focus on the everyday domestic struggles he and his wife Jennifer Hambleton have in raising their young son James. Much of Hamilton Sketchbook is taken up with the tribulations of the Collier household as they move from Saskatchewan to Southern Ontario. Although missing the peace of the countryside, Collier finds artistic renewal in their move to Hamilton. "I'm fascinated and concerned by Hamilton's architecture in the commercial core," Collier notes. "Fascinated by the number of beautiful and impressive structures from the early decades of the last century that are still standing ­ this bit of providence thanks to the fact that Hamilton almost entirely missed out on the glass and steel building boom of the 1960s and 70s." Looking at Collier's pen-line drawings of Hamilton, it is easy to understand why the artist was smitten by the slightly decrepit charms of this particular city. His own drawing style, which harkens back to the detailed cross-hatchings of old newspaper illustrations, is an exact visual analogue to Hamilton's downtown core. Like the Art Deco and Art Nouveau buildings that still can be found in the city, Collier's art is both well-crafted and made on a human scale. As with many of his comic book biographies, Collier tells the story of his family's move to Hamilton in a loose and off-hand fashion. Some might be put off by his roundabout story-telling: as is typical in Collier's way of doing things, Hamilton only occupies the last quarter of the book. Yet, Collier's method also possesses a great deal of vernacular charm. Congeniality and charm are qualities much prized in beauty pageants, yet they are rarely discussed in other contexts where they might be useful, such as literary criticism. Some writers, at least in their prose persona, are much more companionable than others. Like good hosts, they have the ability to make the audience feel at home. Believing that art and personality should be kept apart, critics usually avoid talking about whether a writer is likeable or not. Yet congeniality is a useful category if it is used to describe a writer's tone, rather than their merit. Chaucer, Jane Austin, and G.K. Chesterton are all congenial writers. We warm to them as we read their work. John Milton, Alexander Pope and Ezra Pound are no less great, but their prickliness keeps readers at a distance. As a laid-back storyteller with an eye for domestic life, David Collier clearly belongs to the camp of agreeable writers. A friendly soul and gifted yarn-spinner, Collier has the ability to draw readers into his world. As revealed by his Hamilton Sketchbook, that world includes a rural and industrial Canada that many of us pass through but few have really observed.