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.

AVAILABLE WORKS

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.

AVAILABLE WORK

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. 

AVAILABLE WORK

Canadian Artist; YR (1962- )

Attila Richard Lukacs was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1962. He lives and works in Vancouver. Attila Richard Lukacs famously combines reverence and irreverence in his large-scale paintings. Lukacs graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1985 and a year later moved to West Berlin, where he would stay for a decade and make his name. Part of a group of artists known in the 1980s as the Young Romantics, Lukacs used the lauded chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and the flattened planes and gold leaf of symbolist painters like Gustav Klimt to create startling works depicting homosocial and, often, blatantly homoerotic scenes. The skinheads of 1980s West Germany were of particular interest to Lukacs, who used the men of this subculture as his studio models.

Lukacs moved to New York in 1996 and to Hawaii in 2001, eventually resettling in Vancouver, where he currently lives. Later series, exhibited extensively and internationally, have depicted primates and flora, while even more recent works have veered into abstraction and installation. A 2008 exhibition, accompanied by a monograph, displayed a number of the Polaroids Lukacs took of his studio models in Berlin and New York, a body of work stored and catalogued by artist Michael Morris. Lukacs’s work has been collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Vancouver Art Gallery, among other institutions.

AVAILABLE WORK

Canadian Artist; (1977- )

Andre Ethier was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1977. Andre is a Canadian rock singer-songwriter and visual artist, who was formerly associated with the indie rock band The Deadly Snakes. He has also released three solo albums. He attended Etobicoke School of the Arts for Visual Arts and received a BFA from Concordia University in 2001. On June 10, 2007, Ethier sang the Canadian national anthem in Los Angeles where the Dodgers were hosting his hometown Toronto Blue Jays. He got the gig because he shares his name with Dodgers outfielder Andre Ethier.

Ethier paints portraits, figures and landscapes in oil, his work has been described as a grotesque realism and is influenced by neo-expressionism, primitive art, underground comic art and the works of Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Odilon Redon. He has had solo shows at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, Greener Pastures Contemporary Art in Toronto, and Derek Eller Gallery in New York. In The New York Times Ken Johnson wrote: “André Ethier’s funny, faux-naïve paintings resemble the works of a self-taught, semi-talented high school stoner steeped in heavy-metal music, fantasy novels and the visionary arts of the French Symbolists”.

AVAILABLE WORKS

Canadian Artist, CSPWC OC OSA RCA (1910-2010)

Doris Jean McCarthy was born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1910. McCarthy attended the Ontario College of Art from 1926 to 1930, where she was awarded various scholarships and prizes. Among her mentors and teachers at the Ontario College of Art were members of the Group Of Seven: Arthur Lismer, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald and Lawren Harris. She became a teacher shortly thereafter and taught most frequently at Central Technical School in downtown Toronto from 1932 until she retired in 1972. She spent most of her life living and working in Scarborough (now a Toronto district), Ontario, though she traveled abroad extensively and painted the landscapes of various countries, including: Costa Rica, Spain, Italy, Japan, India, England, and Ireland.

McCarthy was nonetheless probably best known for her Canadian landscapes and her depictions of Arctic icebergs. In 1989, she graduated from the University of Toronto Scarborough with a B.A in English. McCarthy’s work has been exhibited and collected extensively in Canada and abroad, in both public and private art galleries Including: National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and Wynick/Tuck Gallery. McCarthy also penned three autobiographies, chronicling the various stages of her life: A Fool in Paradise (Toronto: MacFarlane, Walter & Ross, 1990), The Good Wine (Toronto: MacFarlane, Walter & Ross, 1991), and Ninety Years Wise (Toronto: Second Story Press, 2004). She was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. She was the recipient of the Order of Ontario, the Order of Canada, honorary degrees from the University of Calgary, the University of Toronto, Trent University, the University of Alberta, and Nipissing University, an honorary fellowship from the Ontario College of Art and Design and also had a gallery named in her honor at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Doris has received many awards and distinctions including: President, Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolor, 1956; President, Ontario Society of Artists, 1964; Canadian Woman Artist of the Year Award, 1983; The Order of Canada, 1986; Bachelor of Art in English, University of Toronto, 1989; The Order of Ontario, 1992; the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Centenary Health Centre Foundation, Scarborough, Ontario named in her honor, 1998; William Kilbourn Award in recognition of her lifetime contribution to the arts in the City of Toronto, 1999. Doris McCarthy’s extraordinary career embraces more than 70 years of Canadian art history. Her paintings and liturgical art are found in selected galleries and museums including The Gallery at Jasper Park Lodge, Alberta and The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario. Doris McCarthy has been featured in articles for the Toronto Star, CBC and The globe and Mail.  A major retrospective exhibition at the McMichael Canadian Collection in Kleinberg, Ontario, that opened late in 1999, Celebrating Life: The Art of Doris McCarthy, was a clear measure of the level of recognition that had finally come her way. She died on November 25, 2010.

SELECTED COLLECTIONS: McCarthy is represented in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinberg, Ontario; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Art Gallery of Hamilton; the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta; the London Regional Art Gallery, London, Ontario; the High Court of Australia, Canberra; The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, England; and the Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto, Scarborough, where her archives are also housed.

The record price for this artist at auction is $193,259.00 for Antarctica from Above, sold at Heffel Vancouver in 2021. 

AVAILABLE WORK

Indigenous-Canadian Artist, OC RCA (1928-2015)

Allen Sapp was born in Saskatchewan January 2, 1928. Sapp was a Canadian Cree painter, who resided in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. His art and his story have become well known throughout Canada and became an inspiration to many. His paintings tell a personal story, and many feature images of his grandmother, and reflect the love he had for her. His paintings seem to touch something in all people and his work and life story have been the subject of numerous books and television documentaries.

Sapp was born on the Red Pheasant Reserve, south of the city of North Battleford. His mother suffered from tuberculosis and eventually died during his adolescence. Sapp was raised by his maternal grandmother and grandfather, Albert and Maggie Soonias. As a child he was often ill and spent long hours in bed. His grandmother nurtured him and encouraged his love of drawing, teaching him in the Cree ways. He attended the Red Pheasant School, but was often mocked and teased by the other children and teachers because of his desire to draw. His grandfather removed him from the school because he needed him on the farm. Sapp remained at home and cared for his grandmother until she died in 1963. After her death, he then moved to North Battleford to try to make a living as an artist, selling paintings door to door. In 1966 he met Dr. Allan Gonor. Dr. Gonor recognized Sapp’s talent and encouraged him to paint what he knew — life on the reserve. As soon as Sapp began to paint his childhood memories, he was flooded with images, and would stay up all night painting.

By the 1970s, his work was known across North America and as far away as London, England. In 1986, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada “for his portrayals of Native peoples and of life on the reserve”. In 1985, he was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit. In 1975, he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 2003, he received the Governor General’s Award for English language children’s illustration for the book, The Song Within My Heart. He died in his sleep on December 28, 2015.

SELECTED COLLECTIONS: Sapp works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; Allan Sapp Gallery, North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Canada; Madrona Gallery, Victoria, BC Canada; Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON; Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec; Museum Association of Saskatchewan, Regina, SK; Gorman Museum Of Native American Art, Davis, CA. 

The record price for this artist at auction is $28,125.00 for Nicotine and His Brother Passing By, sold at Heffel in 2020.   

AVAILABLE WORKS