Internet ephemera afflicts many, as it did my friend, an elderly artist living in Vancouver, Canada, who was well respected in the olden days but became less known during the internet age. Terence Greer’s art was featured in major museums in London and Oxford, but his artistic history was elusive on the internet. As a mid-century illustrator, he captured the feeling of post-war London (where he was born) during a time when the world transitioned from listening to BBC radio dramas to watching BBC shows on television. His illustrations were viewed by millions in Britain as they studied the Radio Times weekly radio (then later TV) guide magazine to decide which radio show to listen to or television show to watch. He was commissioned by the BBC to draw illustrations to accompany a paragraph description of the show. Though a Radio Times archive exists online, the work of an illustrator is not findable via a key-word search. Thus, finding Greer’s illustrations would require reading through two decades of publications to randomly stumble across his art. His Penguin book covers from the 1960s were avidly collected, yet collectors knew little about the artist. Photos of his Penguin covers appeared on book sales websites, but the covers were not identified as his work. In the 21st century, his art was featured at a museum in Oxford, but images from that exhibit no longer exist online. Like many artists, Greer fell victim to internet ephemera—it was as if he didn’t exist, since his bio and art weren’t easily findable online. Although he had been mentioned in newspapers, books, and museums, these were hard to find online when I first started working with Terence. Over a decade ago, I tried to help my friend fix his internet problem by creating a Pinterest board featuring his art. I didn’t realize how much this would mean to him as his health declined.
This is the bio that he helped me write for the board. With a 500-character limit, using ampersands and abbreviations to squeeze more in, it feels stunted and inadequate: “Born in England (Surbiton-SW London), Greer (1929-2020) studied at Twickenham School of Art, joined the RAF in 1947, then studied at the Royal Academy School. 1950s-1980s he was represented by Saxon Artist Agents as a playwright (plays premiered in London) & illustrator (for The Economist & Radio Times magazines, book covers, etc). He focused on painting while living in Australia then Canada (Vancouver—his home since the mid 1990s). His works were exhibited at the V&A and Ashmolean museums.”
In 1982, the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) presented The Art of Radio Times exhibit. BBC Publishing printed the exhibition catalog in a hefty book: The Art of Radio Times. It was only digitized a couple of years ago. Searching the V&A’s website, there is no longer a mention of this exhibit, and the book is not listed in its collection. Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum included Greer in a 2002 exhibit Artists of Radio Times and printed an exhibit catalog. In online searches, the Artists of Radio Times catalog book is only viewable with brief lines of text. In searches on the Ashmolean website, this exhibit is no longer listed and the book is not in its collection. The book is only available at ninety libraries around the world.
Penguin Collectors Society published an essay on “Terence Greer and Penguin Covers 1962-1965” in its June 2019 newsletter (which is only available as a slim paperback). A Greer illustration was on the cover, and the essay included photos of his Penguin covers. Only the newsletter cover can be viewed online. The essay is not available online and was read mostly by the 400 members of the society. So, although books were written that mentioned Terence, and his art was featured in exhibits by important museums, this was found in only brief snippets on the internet.
I wanted the world to know the artist I knew. Greer’s humor and love of old Hollywood films are felt throughout his illustrations. However, the full scope of his art was only seen by friends who were invited to his house and saw walls filled with his illustrations and paintings. Since I use Pinterest to help pin links to research or in my obsessive explorations of art and history, I created a board for Terence as a quick way to get his work online. Though some people use Pinterest to dream about redesigning a room or to plan trips, I use it as a way of thinking through my research. I don’t use it as a social media tool that I try to drive traffic to. It’s purely for fun, which, for me, is researching art and history. In the two and a half years that I taught at the University of British Columbia, I became close friends with Dr. Sneja Gunew and her husband Terence Greer. Both were immigrants to Canada who met while living in Australia. Sneja and I taught at UBC. Though I was a junior faculty member, (fresh out of my Ph.D. and in a Visiting Scholar position), and she a distinguished professor and internationally renowned scholar, she extended a warm welcome when I needed it most. As a single American gal, with no family in Canada, Sneja and Terence became part of my beloved Canadian family. We had all lived in the UK, Australia, and Canada, so we shared many reference points.
I was grateful for their friendship and spent many nights having dinner at their house. They came to parties at my teeny apartment overlooking Vancouver’s English Bay. They enjoyed meeting my friends, who were mostly academics in their thirties. My friends were fascinated with Terence. His stories ranged from surviving the WWII Blitz in London, to doing illustrations for cultural powerhouse publications, to writing plays performed in London and an episode of Doctor Who, to adventures with famous artsy friends in European cities, to living and painting in Australia for decades and then painting in Canada for decades. Terence, Sneja, and I roamed the Croatian Cultural Centre’s antique markets over on Commercial Drive. We excitedly showed each other our finds of Inuit and First Nations art. We shared a vendor booth at the West End Community Center’s Yard Sale to reduce clutter in our homes, knowing full well that we would fill them back up with more vintage finds.
In 2001, I took an admin/faculty position in the US, at Portland State University in Oregon. If I leave late at night to miss epic traffic in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, then it’s a six-hour drive north from Portland to Vancouver, British Columbia. As I married and had children, my husband and children have enjoyed the perks of becoming a part of my extended Canadian family’s lives too.
At many dinner parties over twenty-two years of friendship, I looked in awe at Terence Greer’s stunning art, covering the walls—paintings, prints, illustrations, playbills and posters from his plays. Ranging from the 1940s to recent works, his illustrations were an explosion of personality and his paintings bursting with color, with his wit twinkling through.
One of my favorite paintings is from his “Sun Machine” series that he did in the 2000s. I joked with Terence about him sitting in the Vancouver rain, furiously re-setting the narrative by filling his house with bright yellow sun machines. I coveted one of his paintings of Vancouver—an abstracted view from their townhouse, looking over False Creek and Granville Island, with downtown skyscrapers framed by the North Shore Mountains in the distance. Eventually, I talked him into selling it to me. (He didn’t like to part with his paintings.) I think of Terence and Sneja every time I pass this painting in my home in Oregon. Terence mailed personalized Christmas cards to those lucky enough to be his friends, creating a saucy new illustration each year.
Over the years, I chided Terence. “Terence, the world is online now! I know that your work has been mentioned in books and exhibits. But if your story and your art and writings aren’t findable online, then your work fades from memories. I want the world to see what I see when I’m in your house!”
He agreed but didn’t have the energy or computer knowledge to do anything about it. So, every time I visited Vancouver, I took photos of the art on his walls and in his memory albums and posted them to a Pinterest board. It is a low-tech and fast way to get his work online since I didn’t have to create and pay for a website. It was important to him that his art must be used with his consent, so my photos were purposefully at an angle or a bit fuzzy. Sometimes I regret that decision. But after seeing photos that I took while in his home now proliferating on websites and social media without attribution, it made me think that low res was the right way to go. Greer gave his enthusiastic consent for me to post the photos that I took of his collection at his home.
On Pinterest, I save images to refer to later—exploring research for future books—songs sung by cotton sharecroppers in Arkansas (five generations of my family) and Native American art and history in Oregon. Or I use it for quirky explorations (just for fun, no books planned): folk artists from the American South, South African beadwork, and 1940s-1960s advertisements. Along the way, I realized that I should also create a board for my own work, as an author and public historian. I pinned links to my publications and kept track of my book interviews and links to public lectures, such as at History Pub Night. I started to notice that pins of my own online mentions (posters for talks on Oregon history; announcements about my book launches at Powell’s Books; newspaper, TV, or blog interviews and features, etc.) often lead to a dead link after a few years. The image pinned on Pinterest doesn’t disappear, even if the site it was pinned from no longer exists or goes behind a paywall. I accidentally found that, as I helped my artist friend with his internet ephemera problem, I also helped my own internet ephemera problem.
Surprisingly, many artists have a hard-to-find online presence, even those represented by galleries, even those whose works appear in books, newspapers, and museums. Terence Greer’s illustrations were exhibited at museums, but unless you visited those exhibits in England, you wouldn’t have seen those illustrations. Once the museum exhibit ends, once the newspaper story about the exhibit goes behind a paywall, once an art gallery sells the art, once someone sells a dusty painting online, those online images disappear.
The world of antique stores and auctions refers to ephemera as something with only a brief usefulness—a ticket to a 1950s concert or a 1940s movie poster. Ephemera is easily lost, thrown away, overlooked in a junk drawer, or damaged. Ephemera is fleeting and remembered only briefly. I think of disappearing online images, unattributed online images, and mentions behind paywalls as internet ephemera. This new version of ephemera could include: museum or gallery exhibits featuring an artist, yet the exhibit is long past, the link is now dead, and photos from the exhibit are no longer online; or online newspaper mentions that are behind a paywall; or book cover illustrations that appear online but don’t mention who the artist is; or a book mention of the artist where only a brief line of text can be read online; or an illustration from the 1950s that appears online without attribution.
To combat this brave new world of internet ephemera, I created Pinterest boards on artist friends or on artists I was intrigued by. For example, when I realized that playwright Tennessee Williams was also a painter, I pinned every painting mentioned online. I bought a cheap vintage painting of a Native American man, signed by L. R. Miner. It took a lot of digging to find out that Leigh Richmond Miner was an art professor at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) and had painted a student from this historically Black and Native American university. I created a Pinterest board on Miner to keep track of my research and to try to tell a fuller story about him online. Miner now has a Wikipedia page and is a bit better known. I created a board on my neighbor, George Johanson, an important Oregon artist who did sketches of my children. Pinning an image saves a small version of the image and a link to the website where it originated.
I consulted Terence about each pinned image to see if he could remember when and where the illustration was printed or when the painting was done. He told stories about his transcontinental, wildly international, artistic life. He attended art school with photographer Lewis Morley, known as “The Man Who Shot the Sixties.” In Paris, Morley took photos of his friend Terence Greer. I pinned a Morley photo of Greer that is owned by the National Gallery of Australia and posted another Morley photo from Greer’s memory album.
I added captions over the years, as Greer remembered. He remembered getting commissions for The Economist, Radio Times, and The Listener magazines. As he remembered the names of books that he was commissioned to illustrate covers for, I hunted for online images of his book covers.
Terence was excited about this project. We had fun working on it together. I asked if he wanted to sell his paintings, as it would be easy to add a price and his contact info on each photo. He was reluctant, so it remained a museum of his life’s work. It became clear that the world loves his exuberant, mid-century style. Mid-mod with a splash of old Hollywood police films. His 1940s-1960s BBC illustrations and Penguin covers were obvious favorites, with many re-pins. I forwarded fan messages to Terence. He was excited to see his art being discovered by artists, graphic designers, historians, and collectors.
Throughout much of the pandemic, the Canadian/US border was closed except for essential workers. For almost two years, I was unable to visit my Canadian friends. Summer of 2019 was the last time I visited Terence Greer, at an elder care center in Vancouver. At ninety years old, his paints were still wet from a recent painting. He was funny, kind, and charismatic, as usual. When he passed away, the border was still closed. As was typical during the Covid pandemic, our grieving happened online. I frequently looked at Greer’s Pinterest board after he died, glad to have a place where I can always revisit the energy I felt when visiting his home, surrounded by a lifetime of art. Terence was an effervescent light and lived a great big life. The Guardian featured a lovely obituary for Terence Greer (1929-2020).
When reading obituaries and going to funerals, I always wonder if people were told these things while still alive. It feels sad to publicly announce feelings about people after they are gone. Sneja told me how nice it was to see the span of his work on Pinterest and how wonderful that Terence’s caretakers, in the last years of his life, enjoyed learning about him by seeing his work online. At his online memorial service, his family and friends, on three continents, spoke about how the Pinterest board helped them learn more about his artistic career. Though many hadn’t been able to visit him in years, they felt more connected to him by seeing his life’s work.
Terence Greer’s story is fascinating, but this is also a story about how ephemeral an artistic life can be if the dots aren’t connected online. How quickly artists can fade into obscurity if information about them is behind paywalls or links to exhibits are dead. I like knowing that Terence Greer felt his legacy appreciated during his lifetime. When I first started using Pinterest, I couldn’t have envisioned how it might prove so meaningful to my elderly friend’s life.
