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The work of the artist may be one of the more delicate subjects to bring to the screen. The history of Hollywood film is littered with the ungainly residue of those who have rushed in where angels fear to tread, schmaltz-meisters who see all artists as drunken satyrs pursued to madness by their demons, riding bareback over the trampled lives of all those foolish enough to love them. (Last year's biopic Modigliani, starring Andy Garcia, was a classic example of the genre.)

This kind of mythmaking, however, does a subtle kind of damage. It reiterates the Romantic notion of the artist as a wild man (or woman), insisting on the artistic calling as a vocation of passion and self-destruction rather than one of steady inquiry, sensibility and intellect. I've known a lot of artists in my day, and so far not one of them has flung me onto a squalid mattress on the studio floor and ravaged me to the accompaniment of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

Instead, studio visits yield just the kind of deliberation and nuanced thought that we discover in the documentary films screening this weekend in the Canadian Art Film Series, a three-day event organized by Canadian Art Foundation acting director Ann Webb. Screenings begin tonight at the Royal Cinema. By and large, these films avoid the histrionics of the artistic persona in favour of a more sober reality. Anchoring the event is the work of New York filmmaker Michael Blackwood, who has completed some 40 films on artists over four decades. This weekend in Toronto, he will be screening films on photographer Gregory Crewdson, German painter Gerhard Richter, British figurative artist Francis Bacon and -- those darlings of the moment -- Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the masterminds of The Gates project, currently unfurled in all its saffron-coloured glory in New York's Central Park.

Talk to Blackwood and you'll find a man who believes that less is more. "I was very influenced by cinéma vérité in the sixties," he recalls, "and I originally thought that I would be able to record artists at the moment of breakthrough. I soon realized, though, that making a film about an artist is not like making a film about capital punishment, where you can film the prisoner on his last day, or on hearing that his sentence has been suspended. The moment of breakthrough for the artist is always very private. It can happen in the middle of the night, or while doing something totally unrelated." Blackwood soon realized he would have to experiment with another approach.

That other approach was to create a simple document of the artist in the studio, or in an exhibition, talking about his or her work -- pure and simple. "I believe in being very direct, in creating primary source material rather than expressing myself on film," Blackwood says. "I'm trying to be as uncreative as possible, in order not to load another element into the film that it doesn't need." A careful look at these films reveals masterful editing and pacing, but Blackwood's craft is unobtrusive, residing in the artful revelation of the telling detail with an absence of flamboyance.

Through the steady gaze of Blackwood's lens, we learn of Bacon's preoccupation with diseases of the mouth (a medical textbook was a steady source of inspiration to him), of Richter's fascination with Warhol's Disaster paintings, and of the fact that Crewdson's father conducted his psychiatric practice in an office beneath the living-room floor of the family's Brooklyn home. (Excavation would become a major theme in his work.) These are the fragments of remembered experience that tell all.

Other films in the series involve more cinematic bells and whistles. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the film Drawing out the Demons, about Vancouver's Attila Richard Lukacs, is full of filmic sound and fury, documenting as it does one of the Canadian art world's more genuinely tortured souls. However, rather than romanticizing the artist's dysfunction, the filmmaker David Vaisbord allows us to observe the squalor of addiction and the paranoia and rage that come with it, glorifying instead the artistic discipline and self knowledge that finally delivered the artist from death's door and back to the studio. In this, Vaisbord turns the romantic paradigm on its head.

Anne-Marie Russell's Worst Possible Illusion: The Curiosity Cabinet of Vik Muniz also uses some mannered editing and musical overlay to bring to life the work of an artist whom she sees as a sort of nomadic trickster. One moment we see him skywriting cloud patterns high above the desert. Another moment he is painting in chocolate, spaghetti or white sugar -- all works he then photographs to make his art. True, we get rather more than is strictly necessary of the charming Brazilian squinting into the sunlight in his cowboy hat, but the film does convey the artist's lighthearted and magical way with materials.

On Saturday afternoon, in a panel titled Imaging the Artist, Vancouver artist Myfanwy MacLeod and Toronto's Vera Frenkel will meet with Blackwood and University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell to chew over the issues raised by these films. Richard Rhodes, the editor of Canadian Art magazine, will moderate.

"Basically," Rhodes says, "what it comes down to is coming to terms with how we hold the image of the artist. One of the hallmarks of modernism is that the artist has become a performer, as opposed to an artisan and a craftsman. In the 20th century, we can see that every movement in art has come in lock-step with a new style of the artist-as-performer, whether it's Duchamp's nihilism, Warhol's cool, or Beuys's mysticism."

"In my day," he says, recalling his art-school years in the seventies, "it was Donald Judd and Joseph Beuys; they were two very different models of what artists could be, but they were the ones. In the eighties, it was Julian Schnabel and David Salle. For all those 20-year-old artists out there now, they have to deal with Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. It seems to me that it may be a worthwhile exercise to look carefully at this notion of what an artist is, independent of the art they make."

The weekend-long series begins tonight at the Royal, 608 College St., with a 7 p.m. screening of two films about Gerhard Richter and a talk by New York curator and critic Robert Storr. See http://www.canadianart.ca for details; call 416-872-1212 for tickets. Saturday's 1 p.m. symposium, Imaging the Artist, is also at the Royal.

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