One of The Spectator’s most colourful and well-known personalities of recent decades has died.
Blaine, who was the newspaper’s editorial cartoonist for 30 years until his retirement in 1993, had been in poor health in recent years after heart surgery and a stroke and was living at Macassa Lodge. He died at Juravinski Hospital Sunday evening.
He was born in Glace Bay, N.S., with the name Blaine MacDonald. But as he gained profile in the world of cartooning, adopting a style that was strongly influenced by the great Toronto Star cartoonist Duncan Macpherson, he legally changed his name to Blaine.
Blaine was anything but bland. He had a black belt in karate, played guitar and sang, liked wearing cowboy boots and jewellery and was remembered for driving motorcycles and a Corvette Stingray monogrammed with a drawing of a butterfly on the hood.
The story goes that he once picked up an injured butterfly by the side of the road, nursed it back to health, and then used the experience of releasing it for inspiration to buy lottery tickets. He matched numbers to the letters of the song Butterflies are Free (B=2, U=21 etc.) and won $15,443 in Lottario.
But that wasn’t the only thing he won during his life. For his editorial cartooning, Blaine received National Newspaper Awards, a Reuben Award and a Salon of Cartoons Grand Prize. Blaine created a national profile for himself and the paper through the syndication of his work.
Roy Carless, a local cartoonist who died in 2009, once described Blaine as “probably the most brilliant caricaturist that I ever met. A lot of artists were jealous of him.”
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