November 12 - December 5, 2010
Opening reception with David Blackwood, Friday November 12, 7-10 pm  
A catalogue is available on request.

For over five decades now, David Blackwood’s imagination has hovered over the rugged coastlines of his beloved Newfoundland, recording the landscape, the people, and the stories of Bonavista Bay. His strangely beautiful images have come to represent to many of us the essence of Newfoundland's history and traditional way of life. Blackwood’s intense, long-distance relationship with his childhood home is a rare phenomenon, especially when one considers that he has lived outside Newfoundland since leaving it in 1959 to attend the Ontario College of Art. I can think of few artists, from any time or country, that have laid claim to a place so strongly, and made it so completely their own. The power of this vision, and the indelible impact of Blackwood’s imagery upon the Canadian imagination, will be honoured with a major exhibition of his etchings and related works organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2011.

Blackwood’s achievement as a printmaker has often been viewed chiefly through the lens of history, and admired as a detailed visual record of a traditional culture that was disappearing by the 1940’s - a map of a world now vanished. Critics have tended to emphasize this connection to the past, without commenting on the poetry found in his work. Yet the emphasis on history, heritage, and the ‘documentary’ function of his work has always seemed to me to overlook a central aspect of Blackwood’s art – its profound spiritual qualities. If David has indeed been shaping a memorial to the past (real or imagined) all of these years, he has also expressed a spiritual dimension that transcends the particulars of time and place. Behind the various constructions of memory and history, beyond even the powerful desire to resurrect and pay tribute to his own past, there is an archetypal significance to Blackwood’s imagery that speaks of larger truths; an over-arching suggestion of another order of reality hidden behind the fleeting world of appearances.

This awareness of the infinite is perhaps unsurprising, coming from an artist whose seafaring family spent generations living on the vast wilderness of the ocean, contemplating its limitless horizon through the cycles of the seasons. The presence of the Deity was always close at hand, powerful in the landscape. Blackwood’s conception has more to do with faith than with religion; a combination of Methodist teaching, primitive folk beliefs, archaic magic and ancient superstitions. It’s an understanding of reality that accepts the matter-of-fact importance of dreams and visions. This spiritual mindset is evident from his earliest etchings (the almost hallucinogenic visions of the Lost Party series), and is becoming more clearly defined in his latest work. These new paintings expand the variety of media and materials at Blackwood’s command and demonstrate a master’s restraint, deftness, and sure judgment. The Ephraim Kelloway’s Door works, in which so many of the artist’s most enduring themes and concerns are now bound up, provide a remarkable glimpse into the luminous mysteries at the spiritual core of his art.

Our exhibition takes a retrospective look at the recurring image of Ephraim Kelloway’s shed door; an unlikely subject that the artist has continually addressed in various media since 1980. David’s ongoing fascination with this humble object is without parallel in contemporary art. His continued ability to draw decades of inspiration from such an apparently slight motif tells us volumes about the quality of his imagination, and about the sources, intentions, and meaning of his art. We are proud to mark David’s sixty-ninth birthday with this exhibition, and thank him for his kindness, co-operation and support in putting it together. We would also like to thank Ken Forsyth for his invaluable contribution to the design and production of this catalogue and his assistance in curating the exhibition.

 Ineke Zigrossi, Director

View Images from This Exhibition