- ATD Fourth World

Meeting point is Finch Station. I hold a small Swiss paper flag in my hand, the sign we agreed upon to recognize each other. Then I spot him. Between all the people rushing towards the exit, I see a man sitting relaxed on a bench, his eyes calmly roaming around, waiting. This must be him. I pack away my Swiss cross and approach him. It’s Urs Kehl. He says he’d like to show me a couple of the neighbourhoods where he works. First stop: Jane & Finch. On the bus I ask him about the organization he works for, the International Movement ATD Fourth World. “It’s all about encountering the poor. The founder, Joseph Wresinski, said that there’s a great deal to learn from them, because of their specific experience to live and resist extreme poverty,” Urs replies.

We get off at Driftwood Avenue. It’s quiet. The sun is shining, lots of green, no cars, no people. Almost idyllic. We walk down Driftwood Avenue and see the houses with their neat yards. In one of them a man is busy fixing his lawn mower. Urs says: “This is Jane and Finch. People say it’s one of the worst neighbourhood of Toronto. But look at it. It’s quiet and peaceful and I never did experience fear here”. We then walk through the Yorkwoods Village Community Housing. Here, the signs of poverty are apparent. The buildings are run-down, the façades, doors and windows are shabby-looking. The backyards are enclosed with mesh wire fence. Old dirty-looking toys lie around. It doesn’t feel like children have played here in a while. Trash bags are stored in shopping carts. “When I am painting I am always trying to see all the signs of the efforts done beyond this first impression” Urs comments.

We pass the fenced backyards and come to a small building surrounded by a park. It’s the Boys’ and Girls’ Club. “I used to paint right here in this park. That building,” Urs tells me and points at a large tenement block across the lawn. I ask him what his motivation is to paint such a menacing construction. “My painting is lead by one of the Fourth World’s objectives: knowing poverty with people themselves in the neighbourhoods where they live. Sharing creative expression for the development of each person and population is another objective of the Movement for reinforcing efforts to end exclusion and poverty, bringing together poor and non poor.” Urs explains as he enters the Boys’ and Girls’ Cub. Inside we meet Wayne who exclaims: “Hey, I remember you! You’re the painter!”. The club is a small unit of the Community Housing. There are a few tables, a pin board, some computers and a separate room that looks like it’s being renovated. “This is our studio,” Wayne explains. “Once we finish the insulation, the kids can come here to record their music.” He then shows us around the rest of the club and Urs talks about the jail he is currently painting. Wayne suggests that he go paint the court house, where juvenile offenders are tried. With interest Urs jots down the address in his notebook before we move on to our next stop, a community center nearby.

We head to our next destination: Dundas & Sherbourne. Urs wants to show me the All Saint Church, one of his more recent discoveries: “When I was painting this church, I could not get myself to go inside for over a year. I felt like I did not belong here and would stick out. Eventually, I went inside and realized that nobody minded my presence. I even got served lunch!” Inside, we meet Barb, the supervisor. There are long tables where homeless people sit and drink coffee or play cards. In the nave, there are two men lying on the bare floor, sleeping.

We catch the Streetcar on Dundas towards Regent Park. One stop after the All Saint Church we pass my house. Urs laughs: “I’m trying to show you the bad neighbourhoods of Toronto, but it seems you already know them better than I do! Well, you’re living proof that they’re not as bad as people say they are, right?” At Regent Park we examine the half-finished buildings. Urs tells me about the mixed housing concept: “The idea is to avoid a concentration of social housings, the city wants to mix up the neighbourhood. This is why one of these towers will be social homes and the other condominiums.”

From Regent Park we go further east to Bayview. After lunch at the KAKA Lucky Restaurant Urs pulls a portfolio out of his backpack: “I’ve applied for the Adult Visual Art Program at Central Technical School, I’m waiting for the invitation to the interview,” he says. Aha, so there is more to his painting than his modesty allows him to admit! His detailed brochure reveals that Urs does not limit his artistic work to painting buildings in poor neighbourhoods. There are also portraits, sketches of bodies, abstract paintings and even some installations. The sentence which describes his work: “I want to be influenced by the courage, desperation and forgiveness of the most vulnerable human beings. I go wherever I can get more understanding to capture the potential of change in myself and the world. That’s the way I paint.”

Urs then leads me to the storage room for his paintings – a small room in the back of his hairdresser’s house! “Well, I come here to have my hair cut and I saw that the owner didn’t use this room. So I asked her if she was willing to rent it out to me,” Urs explains. He shows me his different paintings that are starting to pile up. I see why he needed an extra room for them. They’re smaller than I had expected and most of them are not painted on canvas, but on thin plates of wood or even cardboard. “I ran out of wood one day but wanted to continue painting. So I just picked up a piece of cardboard somewhere from the street and started painting…it worked quite well!” And then I spot his famous “two hand painting box”, a construction that allows Urs to paint outside even in the toughest winters. “I simply took a crate, attached a pole, and remodelled it a little bit. On the inside I can place the canvas, the paint and a petrol lamp. Thanks to the heat my hand doesn’t go numb in the cold and the paint doesn’t freeze. The way this works is that I balance the box with my left hand and paint with the right. All winter long,” he says and proudly smiles, looking at his nifty invention.

Our last stop is the St. John’s Bakery, an artisan social bakery that employs people struggling. Here, Urs used to work occasionally weighing the flour, cracking the eggs and kneading the dough in the early morning hours. Right outside the entrance we meet Shane, the manager, who gives me a short tour of the store and hands me a walnut-raisin bread: “Try it!” he says (which I did that night when I got home and it was excellent!). At Queen & Broadview Urs and I say goodbye. We both have to get back to work – I head to my office and Urs goes to paint the Don jail.

A week after our encounter, Urs sends me a message saying he’d gone to the interview and he will start his art class in September. Congratulations, Urs!

J.B.

Original source: http://swisscontacts.ca/swiss/are/areportraits.aspx?FilterField1=Article&FilterValue1=urskehl