Canadian Artist; OC OSA ARCA (1934-2022)
Anthony Morse (Tony) Urquhart was born in 1934 in Niagara Falls, Ontario. His long and remarkable career began while earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the State University of New York, Buffalo, when he became known in the Toronto art scene as one of the first Canadian Abstract Expressionists.
In 1956, Av Isaacs, the owner of the Isaacs Gallery (one of Toronto’s most cutting-edge art venues which emerged in the mid-1950’s) asked Urquhart to join his growing stable of artists, which included Michael Snow, Joyce Weiland, and Graham Coughtry. Urquhart had his first works shown at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto when he was only 22. He also had a one-man show in January 1957 and a second in November of the same year with Isaacs. At the time, Urquhart’s influence was from Buffalo, directly from the New York Abstract Expressionists and in 1956 the influence of this movement was still new to the Toronto public.
By 1960, he was the first artist-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, where he continued as both a teacher and director of the McIntosh Art Gallery. During this time, he founded Canadian Artists Representation (CARFAC) which established a fee structure for the exhibition of works by artists in museums and galleries – making Canada the first to formalize artists’ copyrights and fees. He also exhibited with renowned London art group that included Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe and Murray Favro. In 1972, Urquhart became full professor of Fine Art at the University of Waterloo, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, teaching drawing, painting and printmaking. He also served periodically as the head of that department until his retirement in 1999.
His distinguished career in Canadian art earned numerous honours and awards, including the Order of Canada in 1995. He was the recipient of the 2009 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and the CARFAC Outstanding Contribution Award. In 2016, he was given an Honorary Doctorate by Carleton University.
Tony Urquhart began his career as a painter and later became known for his ‘box’ sculptures. He was also involved in the Canadian literary scene, particularly with his wife – the novelist Jane Urquhart – and illustrated various books. Throughout his career, however, drawing has been central to Urquhart’s art. Tony passed away January 26, 2022
SELECTED COLLECTIONS: Urquhart works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY, USA; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; the Hirshhorn Collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., USA; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France: and the Museo Civico, Lugano, Switzerland.
The record price for this artist at auction is $12,980.00 for THRESHOLD, sold at Waddington’s in 2013.
NEW WORKS
OTHER AVAILABLE WORKS
German-Canada Artist; (1952- )
Thomas Ackermann was born in Bad Hersfeld, Germany in 1952. As a painter for more than 40 years Ackermann has endeavoured to elicit a visceral experience of paintings for the viewer. Ackermann’s interest is not only WHAT (subject) he paints but HOW (process) he physically makes a painting. Half his subject is the painting itself. Ackermann developed a very personal way of applying materials onto the canvas, in spirit, much like Jackson Pollock or Yves Klein for their audacious experiments with new techniques, dripping, using living brushes or pouring directly onto canvas. Ackermann’s current new works use a 600 year old medium (oil paint) and re-invented (altered) it to suit his unique process. He can apply the process creating several unique works from one image, repeating the image in reverse, comparable in a way to Andy Warhol’s use of silk screens. Ackermann’s paint surfaces are either highly reflective (without topical varnishes) or extremely rough and textured. A brush has not touched the final surface. Yet when examined closely the oil paint looks as if applied by brush comparable to brush strokes on a Picasso painting.
Thomas Ackermann’s paintings can be enjoyed and appreciated on several levels. As explained by the Spanish sculptor, Luis Ramos. “Tom Ackermann, is no different from others who have used the Bible as a source. He has a particular interpretation, admittedly a radically different one because of an alternate translation. Step up to an Ackermann painting. It is as if the movement of all these figures implies for Tom the passage of the human spirit – the essential dynamism of the life-force itself.”
Form has coalesced into content, and we are presented with the next level of an Ackermann: evidence of a profound curiosity that still questions, with Gauguin, “What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?* Painting, for Ackermann, is the medium through which he explores these questions. The spiritual quest embarked upon a paint brush, into the mysterious past or into the future like a rocket. No wonder the movement feels energetically compulsive, the colours joyful, the textures rich, the space free of gravity. To Ackermann, questions of the soul are of prime importance, and to explore these questions are the most significant thing we can do. There is in his paintings nothing tentative or hesitant about getting on with that exploration. Fearless and eager explorer. Joyful and enthusiastic discoverer. His paintings lead us on to extra-terrestrial territory, to a higher elevation of thought.
SELECTED COLLECTIONS; Kunstmuseum Stadt, Bad Hersfeld, Hessen, Germany; El Tercio, Ayuntamento Cuevas del Almanzora, Spain; Casa de la Cultura, Aguilas, Almeria, Spain; El Centro Cultural Lorca, Murcia, Spain; Escuela de Marmol, Macael, Spain; Thames Art Gallery, Chatham, Ontario; The Learning Resource Centre, Toronto, Ontario; Lambton Gallery, Sarnia, Ontario; and Casey House, Toronto, Ontario.
Canadian Artist; CGP CSPWC OSA P11 RCA (1924-2006)
Thomas Sherlock Hodgson was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1924. Hodgson, a member of the “Painters Eleven” from Toronto, was well known for his distinct use of colour in his abstract painting. Hodgson spent his youth on Toronto’s Centre Island and developed his talents as both a champion canoeist and talented abstract expressionist painter. Hodgson represented Canada for canoeing, competing at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, and again in 1956 at the Melbourne Olympic Games. As a young boy of ten years, Tom Hodgson’s interest in art took him on a ferry ride to the city every Saturday morning for art classes at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the AGO). At nineteen years old, in 1943, Hodgson joined the Royal Canadian Air Force to train as a pilot. In 1945, after his discharge from the Canadian Air Force he enrolled at the Ontario College of Art. Tom Hodgson graduated from the Ontario College of Art and the Central Technical art program in 1946. Like many of the “Painters Eleven” members, Tom Hodgson began working in the advertising industry in 1946. He had a successful commercial career, working as a freelance illustrator, a layout artist and an art director. To further develop his fine art practice, he became a member of the Ontario Society of Artists, the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, the Canadian Group of Painters and the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolours.
Hodgson’s works were selected to be exhibited in several of these group’s shows in the early 1950’s because of his unique and rich sense of colour, as well as the emerging interest in non-figurative art. In 1953, Hodgson was one of the seven artists who exhibited in the historically noted “Abstracts at Home” art show at the Simpson’s department store. The exhibition was created by “Painters Eleven” member William Ronald, who eventually left Toronto to spread his wings in New York. In 1953, Hodgson also had a solo exhibition of his work at the Douglas Duncan Picture Loan Society, and Hart House Gallery at the University of Toronto. In 1955, Hodgson’s work was selected for an international exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Tom Hodgson explored a “pop art” style of portraiture from 1965 to roughly 1972; this more figurative work was a detour from his abstract expressionism.
In the late 70’s Hodgson stepped back from the art world, losing contact with dealers and curators. It was not until 1983 and 1985 that he was offered solo exhibitions with Bau-Xi Gallery, painting again in the abstract expressionist style. In the 1990’s Christopher Cutt’s Gallery had taken on Hodgson and held several solo exhibitions of Hodgson’s work until 1995. In 1995, friends and family recognized a deterioration in Hodgson’s health. Hodgson passed away in 2006 as a result of complications arising from Alzheimer’s disease. Tom Hodgson has been recognized as one of the early mavericks of abstract expressionist painting in Ontario and an important member of the “Painters Eleven”.
Canadian Artist; OC GGA (1943- )
Ron Martin was born in London, Ontario 28 April 1943. Ron Martin studied at H.B. Beal Secondary School in London, Ontario. Then began working in a studio shared with Murrary Favro in 1964, and had his first solo exhibition at Jack Pollock’s gallery in Toronto in 1965. Martin admired Jackson Pollock, Milton Resnick and other Abstract Expressionists, and his interest quickly turned to abstraction.
Martin has consistently worked in series, such as the monochromatic “Bright Red Paintings” of 1972 and the subsequent “Black Paintings,” with which he was engaged from 1974 to 1981. In these series he employed a wide range of techniques: pouring, brushing, scraping, and using his bare hands, and consistently worked on the floor or other flat surfaces. The monochromatic paintings began as vigorously gestural works and then evolved into thin surfaces, from which much of the paint had been scraped away, and ultimately to highly textured accumulations of dense, encrusted acrylic. The “Black Paintings” represented Canada (along with Henry Saxe’s sculptures) at the Venice Biennale in 1978. Throughout his career, Martin has rigorously moved on from each series to other quite different ones. The “Black Paintings” were followed by much sparer grid works, the “Geometric Paintings” (1981-85), and then by the more painterly “Black, White and Grey Paintings.” In the 1990s he created a number of series based on a configuration of circles, using oil paint squeezed directly from the tube.
Martin often set arbitrary constraints on his process, eg, limiting a painting to one gallon of paint, two gallons or twenty gallons. Or he might set a time limit to the production of each work. These procedures suggest an affinity with conceptual art, but Martin also views them, and other aspects of his art making, as in keeping with Leonardo’s advice to the artist to “look at certain walls stained with damp or at stones of uneven colour” so that “the spirit [will be] quickened to new inventions.” Martin therefore places Leonardo in a line of thought leading to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and on the basis of their work he takes it for granted that “the creative process is an unconscious” one that functions best when the artist is focused on the sheer materiality of painting. In 2012 Ron Martin was awarded a Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts.
Canadian Artist; OC GGA (1950-2022)
Born in Windsor, Ontario in 1950, John Scott viewed himself as a political activist and blue-collar artist. His work combines counterculture aesthetics of the late 1970s and the 1980s with a sociological ideology that is wary of the consequences and human cost of a capitalist ethos and economy. Through drawings, installations and transformed objects, Scott presents an apocalyptic vision of a world ravaged by war and threatened by destruction. Before Scott completed grade 10, he had left school to work in a factory. He soon became involved in union activity and would later become sensitized to workers’ rights and larger political issues. He was also influenced by the Toronto street culture of heavy rock music and fast cars. John Scott was actually hit by lightning twice. He contracted and surmount Bell’s palsy, one watched in horror as his body gave way – mysteriously – to osteoporosis, crumpling him rapidly into the shape of the letter C and dealing him an immense amount of physical pain as it robbed him of four or five inches of his former height.
Scott’s bold and rough graphic drawings are characteristically crude, often made with the cheapest materials at hand. One of his working methods was to repeatedly soak paper in solvent and develop an image by grinding-in dark pigments, thick black paint, graphite and charcoal. Scott has depicted dark warplanes hovering over destroyed landscapes devoid of human presence. He has also drawn rabbit-like figures to stand in for the anxiety-ridden human being, the harassed victim of the technological threat and militaristic oppression. Heavy dark lines record an impending sense of tragedy and terror.
Perhaps Scott’s best-known work, Trans-Am Apocalypse No. 2 (1993) is a black, modified Pontiac Trans-Am that has text scratched into its surface from the Bible’s Book of Revelations of St. John the Evangelist. Scott’s intent was to suggest that, if the apocalyptic horsemen were to appear today, the muscle car would be a more impressive vehicle for their arrival. Scott considers the car’s substantial link to a macho masculine identity, suggesting that the car is symbolic of flaws of the male sex, which may drive humanity to destruction. As cars also generate pollution, he sees environmental damage as another step toward an apocalyptic world. Scott has being driven by his “imagination” that has been fed by science fiction, the Space Age and Motor City (Windsor) manufacturing might and blight. Sympathy for the worker as a human tool in the global industrial complex pervades what some have called his apocalyptic vision. John Scott was the recipient of a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2000. John passed away February 17, 2023.
“One of the realities is that any kind of production, especially since the industrial age, is going to involve a great loss of human life. It can be said that blood is the lubricant of the modern industrial world.” – John Scott, 1997
SELECTED COLLECTIONS: Scott works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON; Art Gallery of Stratford, Stratford, ON; Art Gallery of Peel, Brampton, ON; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, ON; Museum London, London, ON; Department of External Affairs, Ottawa, ON; BOS Insurance, Mississauga, ON; Hamilton Art Gallery, Hamilton, ON; Windsor Art Gallery, Windsor, ON; University of Toronto, Toronto, ON; Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, ON; University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, AB; Rodman Hall Arts Centre, St. Catherines, ON; Carleton University, Ottawa, ON; Arts Gallery of Vancouver, Vancouver, BC.
The record price for this artist at auction is $5,625.00 for The Beast from the Sea, Trans Am Apocalypse, sold at Heffel in 2020.
Canadian Artist; OC RCA (1929- 2023)
Michael Snow was born in Toronto in 1929. Snow studied at Upper Canada College and the Ontario College of Art. He had his first solo exhibition in 1957. In early 1960s Snow moved to New York with his first wife, artist Joyce Wieland, where they remained for nearly a decade. For Snow this move resulted in a proliferation of creative ideas and connections and his work increasingly gained recognition. He returned to Canada in the early 1970s “an established figure, multiply defined as a visual artist, a filmmaker, and a musician.” His work has appeared at exhibitions across Europe, North America and South America. Snows’ works were included in the shows marking the reopening of both the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2000 and the MoMA in New York in 2005. In March 2006, his works were included in the Whitney Biennial.
Snow is considered one of the most influential experimental filmmakers and is the subject of retrospectives in many countries. In his 2002 Village Voice review of *Corpus Callosum, J. Hoberman writes, “Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, Snow’s structuralist epics—Wavelength and La Région Centrale—announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, *Corpus Callosum heralds the advent of the next. Whatever it is, it cannot be too highly praised.” Corpus Calossum was screened at the Toronto, Berlin, Rotterdam, and the Los Angeles film festivals amongst others. In January 2003, Snow won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Five of his films have premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In 2000, TIFF commissioned Snow with Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg to make short films, Preludes, for the 25th Anniversary of the festival.
Originally a professional jazz musician, Snow has a long-standing interest in improvised music. As a pianist, he has performed solo and with other musicians in North America, Europe and Japan. Snow performs regularly in Canada and internationally, often with the improvisational music ensemble CCMC and has released more than a half dozen albums since the mid-1970s. In 1987, Snow issued The Last LP (Art Metropole), which purported to be a documentary recording of the dying gasps of ethnic musical cultures from around the globe including Tibet, Syria, India, China, Brazil, Finland and elsewhere, with more than thousands of words of pseudo-scholarly supplementary notes, but was, in fact, a series of multi-tracked recordings of Snow himself, who gave the joke away only in a single column of text in the disc’s gatefold jacket, printed backwards and readable in a mirror. One track, purported to be a document of a coming-of-age ritual from Niger, is a pastiche of Whitney Houston’s song “how will I know”. Snow was one of the four performers of the rarely performed Steve Reich piece Pendulum Music on May 27, 1969 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The other three were: Richard Serra, James Tenney and Bruce Nauman.
Before Snow moved to New York in 1961, he began a long-term project that for six years would be his trademark: the Walking Woman. Martha Langford in Michael Snow: Life & Work describes this work as employing a single form that offered an infinite number of creative possibilities, the figure itself perceived variably as “a positive (a presence to be looked at) and a negative (an absence to be looked through), Snow’s works have been in the Canadian pavilion at world fairs since his famous Walking Women sculpture was exhibited at Expo 67 in Montréal.
In 1981, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He received the first Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2000) for cinema. In 1993, The Michael Snow Project, lasting several months, was a multi-venue retrospective of Snow’s works in Toronto exhibited at several public venues and at the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Power Plant. Concurrently his works were the subjects of four books published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada. In 2004, the Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne awarded him an honorary doctorate. The last artist so awarded was Pablo Picasso. Snow passed away January 5, 2023.
SELECTED COLLECTIONS: Snow is represented in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Ludwig Museum, Austria and Germany; the Musée National d’Art Modern, Centre Pompidou, France; the Musée des Beaux Arts, Montreal; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, Ontario; the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta; the London Regional Art Gallery, London, Ontario; Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario.
The record price for this artist at auction is $175,000.00 for Sideway, sold at Heffel in 2011.
Canadian Artist; CSGA OSA RCA (1929-2010)
John Howard Gould was born in Toronto on August 14th, 1929. Gould attended the Ontario College of Art from 1948 to 1952. Gould was the rare artist that committed his entire artistic career to the art of drawing. His early style was to be directly impacted by instructors such as Jack Nichols, and the viewing of mid-century abstract paintings at Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, and in particular the work of Willem de Kooning. He took part in his first group exhibition at Greenwich (Isaacs) Gallery in Toronto and, in 1960, won the Elizabeth T. Greenshield’s Fellowship for figurative painting. During the early 1960’s he would participate in large exhibitions at University of Toronto’s Hart House and a group exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) in 1965. That same year, he began exhibiting at Roberts Gallery in Toronto. Drawings displayed at Roberts Gallery produced on a 1969 trip to Japan were viewed by famed mime Marcel Marceau, resulting in Marceau’s commissioning Gould to draw him during his performances in New York in the spring of 1970.
John Gould was part of the 1960s Toronto scene that saw abstraction vying with an evolving figurative art. Either it was Jack Bush’s Toronto or it was Harold Town’s Toronto and Gould was part of the latter with a fresh, loose, even sexy, drawing style that epitomized the improvisational spirit of the post-beat era. Around 1970 Gould and his wife Ingi moved to Waubaushene, Ontario, where he began to undertake the most complex and ambitious drawings of his career. The “Ancestor Series”, large-scale drawings made up of autobiographical elements, dream imagery and references from film history and literature, were to be some of the most expressive and technically masterful work he was to produce. After a stroke in 1996 Gould embarked on the next great period of his artistic life and continued to exhibit his artwork.
In 2007 John had a massive stroke at home, one that did end his ability to make art. He was eventually moved to a nursing home. He passed away in Barrie, Ontario in January of 2010.
The record price for this artist at auction is $4,720.00 for Portia, 1984, mixed media on board, 39 x 23ins (97.5 x 57.5cm), sold at Waddingtons in 2010.
