Hanging along Yonge Street in downtown Aurora are banners paying tribute to several inductees in the Aurora Sports Hall of Fame.
There’s one for Olympic volleyball medallist Mark Heese. Another for longtime golf volunteer Jim Clark. Each of them features a detailed, black-and-white portrait, drawn by artist Paul Riley.
Riley, who has lived in Aurora since 2001, retired from a 40-year-long career in the animation industry about a year ago and has now carved out a niche for himself as the man behind the portraits of many of Canada’s halls of fame.
The career pivot first came after both his children aged out of their hockey programs. Riley had spent several years coaching their hockey teams, but after they were done, he found himself with more free time on his hands.
“Suddenly there was nothing, there’s this giant void and I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ Because I wanted to do something in the community,” he said.
After around a year of searching, Riley started drawing the images for the Aurora Sports Hall of Fame. He also does the portraits for the Hockey Hall of Fame, the Canadian Business Hall of Fame, and the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame.
Riley said he has always loved life drawing since his school days, and enters a state of “relaxed concentration” when he’s working on them.
“I’ve been drawing as long as I can remember and people have always been my main thing.”
The ‘ruthless’ animation industry
While he’s carved out a niche as a hall-of-fame portrait artist now, Riley spent most of his career working in the “ruthless” animation industry. While his career took him to Los Angeles and as far afield as Seoul, Korea, he spent the majority of his career working from Canada, largely in Toronto.
In the early days, before the internet and emailing files, drawings were sent back and forth via package.
“My daughter, she thought the Fed-Ex guy was my boss,” chuckled Riley.
He said he feels proud to have worked on “a few gems,” among them iconic children’s animations like the Rugrats, Johnny Test and Fairly Odd Parents.
While he looks back on patches of his career with fondness, he said the industry was tough. Riley recalls he was first laid off six months into his first job in the industry.
But his favourite part was the people with whom he worked, adding his kids and now grandchild Emma have all enjoyed shows he’s worked on throughout his career.
The process
For each portrait, Riley starts by gathering information on the person to learn more about them, particularly if doesn’t know them closely as it “helps bring out the character,” he said.
From there, he’ll assemble a series of photographs, the main reference photograph of the person that he will use as the basis for the drawing, as well as several others from different angles.
Then he will photograph the final drawing and compare it with the real photograph. Sometimes he will be satisfied, but most often he’ll make adjustments. Sometimes he’ll be more than two-thirds done but decide to restart all together.
“It’s all in the eyes. If you get the eyes right, you can often find the rest of the face is more forgiving. But more often than not, if people are like, ‘Something’s not quite right,’ it’s the eyes,” he said.
All told, each portrait takes up around 35 hours, or a full week of work.
“The things with these it’s really nice to see people when they first see it, to see the expression on their face,” he said.
“In a lot of cases, these are in memoriam, we’ll be doing it for someone who has been big in sports in the 1920s and it’s their grandkids, and it gets very emotional for them. So it’s really nice to be a part of that.”
President of the Aurora Sports Hall of Fame Javed Khan said working with a “legend” like Riley has elevated the work of his organization beyond what might be expected of a small-town sports hall of fame.
“When you go to the SARC, it has a very different feel, and I think Paul and the portraits are a very big part of that,” said Khan.
Even now that he’s into his retirement, Riley has no plans to pause his artistic pursuits.
“I’ll keep drawing till they pry the pencil from my cold, dead hand,” he laughed.
