By Larry Krotz –
When he started crawling around on scaffolds high up inside the sanctuary of St. Peter and St. Simon Church on Bloor Street, Maurice Kwiecinski expected surprises.
For the next seven weeks the artist and restoration specialist painstakingly scraped four layers of paint loaded on the church’s upper walls, hoping to uncover and then restore what he had been told lay below.
There weren’t even proper photographs of the fresco-mural hidden under the paint. When he found it emerging—a pair of angels facing each other from either side of the main stained-glass altar window, and then other ornamentations including an image of the paschal lamb on a side wall—it was thrilling.
Mysteries abound about the fresco, whose restoration is a parishioner’s memorial project to a partner who died in 2023. The church archives seem to have no information about the provenance of the original, which was undoubtedly painted soon after St. Simon the Apostle Anglican Church was built in the mid 1880s. The widely respected Eden Smith was one of the architects and his favouring of the arts-and-crafts style of William Morris lent itself to such decorative touches.
The story of everything getting covered up a century later, in the early 1970s, is also obscure. Older parishioners who remember the original paintings don’t recall what discussions took place prior to the cover-up paint job. Parishioner Margie Huycke says that they just came to church one day “and there it was.”
It was done, it seems, to suit a choir master who pushed for alterations to the chancel area believing it might improve musical acoustics.
According to Kwiecinski, such paint-overs in churches are not uncommon. “People find interiors laden with murals and frescos too dark, or they think flat monochrome walls are more modern.”
Kwiecinski‘s father, Andrew, was an artist in Poland. When the family emigrated to Canada in 1981, the Roman Catholic Church they attended in Kitchener had a flood. Andrew was asked to repair wall frescos damaged by the water, which launched the careers of him and Maurice, who was his apprentice. Many churches (and work on the Hockey Hall of Fame) later, Maurice found himself high on the scaffold with angels emerging.
The St. Peter and St. Simon church prides itself on the historic nature of its architecture. Parishioners plus visitors find the restoration delightful.
The rector, Rev. Geoffrey Sangwine, exclaims that in a city that tears things down and often replaces them with something ugly, it is great to help restore the heritage of both Toronto and the parish. “Reclaiming the beautiful is a way to draw us toward God’s grace.”
