If you're strolling a beach or ferry deck as sunset casts its glow on British Columbia's Coast Mountains, there's a good chance someone within earshot will say, "It looks just like a Toni Onley." That's how closely Onley is identified with the landscape of Canada's West Coast.

Don't be fooled. The serenity of those watercolours reflects only one facet of Onley's work--and very little of his tumultuous life. Flying Colours gives you the whole canvas, from a rustic riverbank on the Isle of Man to a plane wreck on a mountain glacier. With sly humour, disarming candour and an artist's eye for detail, Onley recalls a life of professional triumphs and personal tragedies. For a painter known for landscapes and collages, Onley proves a dab hand at word portraits, from haughty maharajahs and quirky Manxmen to the alcoholic--and even homicidal--habitués of an artists' colony in Mexico.

None is more colourful than Onley himself. From the cocky schoolboy painting an extra petal on a daffodil to the Rolls-Royce rebel facing down Revenue Canada--and winning--Onley's passion for art and zest for life leap from every page. Art lovers will cherish his lucid, unaffected insights into the creative process, not to mention the lavish illustrations, representing every stage of Onley's career.

An Officer of the Order of Canada, Toni Onley was born in 1928 on the Isle of Man, where he received his early training and was influenced by the work of the great British watercolourists. He came to Canada in 1948. Onley's work is featured in galleries around the world, including the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Onley took up flying in 1965, a passion he credits with taking him to the work for which he is best known today: landscape of simplicity and power.

An Officer of the Order of Canada, Toni Onley was born in 1928 on the Isle of Man, where he received his early training and was influenced by the work of the great British watercolourists. He came to Canada in 1948. Onley's work is featured in galleries around the world, including the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Onley took up flying in 1965, a passion he credits with taking him to the work for which he is best known today: landscape of simplicity and power. Onley died when his floatplane crashed in 2004.

Toni Onley's profile page

With degrees in creative writing and language education from the University of British Columbia, Gregory Strong has written several hundred articles, features, and stories published in Canada, Britain and the United States. At present he lives in Tokyo where he is an associate professor in the English Department at Aoyama University and an art reviewer for The Daily Yomiuri.

Gregory Strong's profile page

Rainbow Chaser: Captivating life story of B.C. artist full of successes

0f the many funny, poignant and captivating anecdotes Toni Onley includes in his lively and entertaining memoirs, none is more revealing and symbolic of his life than his story of repeatedly flying his Champion SkyTrac airplane through a rainbow and its storm-cloud centre. About the experience he said, "I've been chasing rainbows ever since."

As his book amply illustrates with Gregory Strong's expert assistance, the storm clouds were always close by as well. Onley's early life on his birthplace on the Isle of Man had its share of stormy moments. Once when he defended himself by punching a bully in the face, the bully's glass eye fell to the ground. Another time he blew out the windows for blocks around when he detonated a home-made pipe bomb. Then there was the time he half-filled a school wastebasket with water and papers knowing the teacher's habit of stomping the papers to the bottom of the container.

As Onley tells it, his later life held a number of major setbacks. During his first marriage, for example, he was affronted by his wife's affair and then devastated by her untimely death, leaving him with daughters aged two and four to raise. Realizing the enormity of the task, he moved from Ontario to Penticton to be closer to his mother and father. Later while he and younger daughter, Lynn, were living in Mexico, the older girl, Jennifer, was killed in an automobile accident in Canada. And in Mexico, Lynn was the victim of a botched appendectomy for which the surgeon demanded an exorbitant $3,000. Onley fled the country since he couldn't pay the fee, arriving in North America just in time to save the child's life...

But the rainbow he pursued with the greatest vigour, and Onley makes no bones about it, was his goal of becoming a self-employed, financially independent creative visual artist His pursuit wasn't always held in high regard, however, as he notes when he tells how even after he tallied a large number of sales his mother told him, "That's all very well, Toni, but your father and I want to know when you're going to get a job."

...If there were to be another rainbow to compete with Onley's love of painting it would be his love of flying, which enabled him to cruise North and South America and the Far North in search of unique visual experiences to be painted and shared with others. This love also brought him to the brink of disaster when he crashed his ski plane on Cheakamus Glacier in 1984 -- but managed to wedge the plane into a crevasse so it stayed suspended by its wings until he and his passenger could be rescued 18 hours later.
The first chapter of his book is the spine-tingling recounting of this adventure...As Europeans recognize their artists, so he has become a Canadian treasure, a long way from his early self-description of someone always chasing rainbows. His book, the black and white photographs and the several pages of coloured reproductions form an excellent written and visual record of the chase.
- M. Wayne Cunningham

Review in The Daily News, Kamloops

A Swashbuckling Landscape Painter

Flying Colours: The Toni Onley Story begins with dramatic incident-a plane crash on a glacier in the Canadian Rockies -- that suits its dramatic subject. Canadian artist Toni Onley's life can only be described as a bumpy ride: three wives; raising two small daughters as a single father; a hand-to-mouth artist's life in Mexico, London, and Vancouver; a rags-to-riches art career which distinguished him from almost every artist...

After the attention-grabbing plane crash, Flying Colours begins with the artist's childhood on the Isle of Man. By the time he was 6 or 7, his need to draw had already inspired a doting grandfather to build him a sketching table. By his early teens, he was desperate for lessons, but on an island only 52 kilometers by 18.4 kilometers, one can imagine that the possibilities were slim: The one teacher/artist there stopped speaking to him when it became clear that he had been outstripped by his pupil...

At a time when pop art, conceptual art, and multimedia art were de rigueur, Onley continued to explore landscapes. After experimenting with abstract collages in Mexico and minimalism in Britain, he finally settled on what he aptly describes as "still-life landscape."

It was Onley's passion for exploring the wilderness landscapes of Canada that led him to become the flying painter, flying into rainbows -- and of course dead center into the accompanying rainstorm-landing on lakes and mountain glaciers.

For readers in this country, there is a Japanese connection. Onley's third wife and the love of his life, Yukiko, is Japanese. Further, author Gregory Strong is an associate professor at Aoyama Gakum University who has written for this paper. Biographies are hard to do well - they are generally a litany of names and dates, too rarely giving us the personality of the subject. To that end, Strong made the decision to tell The Toni Onley Story entirely in Onley's words, drawing on hours of taped conversations, revisions during the writing of the work, and on Onley's diaries of, for instance, his trip to India.

Flying Colours is a good-read. Onley is generous in sharing the stories of the highs and lows of his life, from observing the gentle colors of Arctic icebergs, to fleeing murderous doctors in Mexico, to that plane crash, to the devastation of being left by Yukiko. You can't help cheering on a man who lives with such passion. And if you're interested in art, artists, or the art scene, you'll come out smarter to boot. Not a bad deal.
- Linda Ghan

Review in The Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo

The Artist as Modern Tarzan
THINK of B.C. artist Toni Onley as a modern-day Tarzan, and you will immediately conjure up images of excitement, danger, curiosity and dark places. Add to this Onley's talent of a visual artist with an infectious sense of humour and the skill to tell stories, and you have the essence of this entertaining book.

Flying Colours is not exactly an autobiography but rather a collection of stories told by artist Onley to writer Gregory Strong, who had been wondering for some years "about the obstacles and sacrifices a successful artist faced over a long career." The opening chapter is a riveting tale of the then 55-year-old millionaire artist piloting his own plane over the ski resort of Whistler and crashing into the Cheakamus Glacier.

While there were times he lived hand to mouth, his work eventually became recognized. Today it hangs in galleries around the world. In 1980, one of his art dealers negotiated the sale of more 1,200 pieces of his work to the so-called Fraser Valley phantom realtor, whose name was never revealed. But Onley's success also brought out the critics, not to mention Revenue Canada. In 1983 the government, in an effort to help pay for its inflationary spending, tried to make a "tax grab" on artists, classifying them as "manufacturers," who ought to be taxed on their production costs. Onley led the fight against the policy and threatened to burn all of his massive inventory rather than pay the tax. This book contains many other adventurous tales, including Onley's travels to India, Mexico and the Arctic, where he kept a detailed daily diary.

Onley's painting style, which he describes as "commentary on landscape," has taken him through most major art movements of the past half century from realism and minimalism and abstract expressionism to pop art. Today he is one of the few contemporary Canadian painters who has achieved celebrity status...
- Arnold Ross

Review in the Winnipeg Free Press

"Think of B.C. artist Toni Onley as a modern-day tarzan, and you will immediately conjure up images of excitement, danger, curiousity, and dark places," Arnold Ross, The Winnipeg Free Press.
"You can't help cheering on a man who lives with such passion," Linda Ghan, The Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo.

"Captivating life story of B.C. artist, full of successes and storm clouds," M. Wayne Cunningham, The Daily News, Kamloops.

"Onley's autobiography, as told to journalist Gregory Strong, chronicles a colourful life," Robin Lawrence, Georgia Straight.

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