Phillip and Jeanine Ross began to collect folk art and antiques 35 years ago as a fun and interesting way to furnish their first home together. Both Phillip and Jeanine were working visual artists at the time. Jeanine was a sculptor and art teacher. Phillip was making large multi projection slide shows for clients like Ontario Place and the Royal Ontario Museum. In 1981, when their daughter Cassandra was a toddler, they decided to leave the urban art world and buy an old church in Norfolk County, Ontario. Here they settled into an "alternative lifestyle" of raising chickens, working on creative projects, gardening, and traveling back and forth between their rural Ontario home and Jeanine's childhood home in the South of France. Although they enjoyed this idyllic lifestyle, eventually the savings ran out, and at that point Phillip and Jeanine decided to join the antiques trade as a way to support their family.
Phillip and Jeanine heard from the old timers that you could go to Quebec and find "pickers" barns full of antiques which could then be brought back to Ontario and sold at a profit. They followed this advice and began to buy in Quebec and sell at the Toronto Harbourfront Antique Market. Harbourfront proved to be a place where you could turn up at 6am Sunday morning with a pickup truck full for "stuff in the rough", and be on your way home with an empty truck by 5pm that afternoon. And so it went for about ten years with trips to and from the Victoriaville region of Quebec every couple of weeks, and selling trips to Harbourfront every Sunday. They named their business Old Church Trading after the unusual building they called home.
Alas, all things must pass, and in the 1990s the market started to decline and so did the availability of great inexpensive stuff in Quebec. Phillip and Jeanine decided to move from wholesaling general antiques to retailing higher end, specialty items. They dealt almost exclusively in furniture with original finishes. In particular they also became well known as the purveyors of Canadian folk art. There were few other dealers specializing in this at the time. Over the years they met, befriended and became suppliers to many of the "serious" folk art collectors in North America. This led to them helping to build many large and ultimately important folk art collections. Most notable of these collections is that of Susan A. Murray of Toronto, whose collection traveled across Canada and to the Canadian Embassy in Washington in 2009.
By 2003 the kids had grown up, and Phillip and Jeanine decided they didn't want to be old people rattling around the church for the rest of their years. And so they moved to town. They found an old Victorian place in Port Dover with a retail zoned building right next door. They bought both buildings and moved into one and began setting up the other into the kind of eclectic, proper shop they had always loved to visit. They named their new shop and business Shadfly Antiques in reference to the bugs that also make their home on the shores of Lake Erie. The shop now includes Phillip and Jeanine's stock which is mostly folk art, as well as contributions from four long time friends and associates. All the dealers in the shop share a passion for handmade furniture in original finishes, vintage Canadian fine art, the best Canadian folk art, and unique items of artistic merit. Shadfly Antiques continues to be the type of vibrant, interesting shop that Phillip and Jeanine love, and they hope you do too.
(Phillip & Jeanine Ross with friends)
