If you happen to find yourself in London this Fall and if you have a romantic inclination you could do no better than going to the Tate Britain to attend the Edward Burne-Jones exhibition running from 24 October until 24 February 2019. Made up of more than 150 works including stained glass and tapestry, many designed for his friend and fellow social reformer William Morris, as well as portraits, gifts he made for family and friends, and a piano painted inside and out with scenes from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the centrepiece will be some of his most ambitious projects, the Briar Rose and Perseus cycles of paintings.
The Briar Rose paintings – each almost 3 metres long, illustrating the fairytale with the artist’s daughter, Margaret, as Sleeping Beauty – are still in the house for which they were bought in 1890. For the first time they are being loaned with the decorative panels Burne-Jones created to link the paintings on the walls of the Georgian saloon.
The client for the Perseus cycle had a harder time: the 26-year-old MP and future prime minister Arthur Balfour was required to block up windows and change doors to make room for a 10-painting telling of the Greek hero Perseus’s rescue of Andromeda. This exhibition marks the first time that the two cycles of paintings will be exhibited together.
Burne-Jones was a charter member of the Pre-Raphaelites a society determined to restore what they saw as the best art. Although Burne-Jones’s dreamy-eyed maidens and muscular heroes in melancholy romantic settings became some of the best-loved paintings in British art and influenced generations of artists including Pablo Picasso, this will be the first large exhibition in London in decades and the first at the Tate since 1933, the centenary of his birth. Many loans are from private collectors, including the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.
Fall 2018
]]>The Glenbow Museum in Calgary is hosting what could turn out to be a fascinating series of exhibitions, The Artist’s Mirror: Self Portraits, running until January 6, 2019. The show is being mounted in partnership with Library and Archives Canada. This first edition will be followed up by more of the same. In this exhibition, featuring self-portraits from the collections of Library and Archives Canada and Glenbow, the legacy of the artist’s mirror lives on. Here artists are looking deeply at themselves, a practice reflected across a wide variety of media, artistic styles and time periods. From biographical self- expression to political commentary, the motivation behind creating a self-portrait is as diverse as the artists themselves.
As part of a five-year collaboration with Library and Archives Canada, Glenbow will host a series of exhibitions drawn from this national portrait collection. The inaugural exhibition features fascinating works by Emily Carr, Norval Morriseau, Yousuf Karsh, Alma Duncan and many others.
Fall 2018
]]>Going from the sublime to the tragic it may be time, as the world seems in danger of facing a major conflict, to revisit what war actually means and in that case the Art Gallery of Ontario is the place to be as they are hosting a mammoth exhibition, Photography: The First World War-1914-1918. The AGO holds 500 photographic albums depicting the First World War from all sides and because of the amount of material available divided it up in two like this. Part I: April 28 – October 28, 2018. Part II: November 10, 2018 – April 14, 2019.
Adjacent to the main display, the McEwen Gallery will showcase works by Australian war photographer James Francis “Frank” Hurley (1885–1962), who was on official assignment throughout World War I. His album Australian Units on the Western Front (1916–1918) presents a series of compelling photographs, each offering views of different aspects of life on the Front. Soldiers, in action and at ease, are pictured, as well as the grimmer realities of war: casualties, scorched landscapes, and destroyed architecture. The album — disassembled for the exhibition — highlights Hurley’s skill as a photographer and features a rich breadth of imagery.
Fall 2018
]]>Continuing right along with modernism The Montreal Museum of Fine Art is running: Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor, running from September 22, 2018 until February 23, 2019.
No matter which way you cut it Calder was an important artist. Montreal has a piece of his art, Les Trois disques, on St. Helene’s Island in the Parc Jean Drapeau that was given to the city after Expo 67. The sculpture consists of five overlapping stainless steel discs that have an arachnoid cast to them. It stands 22 metres, the second highest stabile Calder created. Trained as an engineer Calder created his first sculpture at the age of eleven.
During the 1920s, Alexander Calder developed his art among the artistic and intellectual circles of the day, mingling in Paris with the international avant-garde including figures such as Cocteau, Duchamp, Le Corbusier, Léger, Mondrian, Miró, Prévert and Varèse.
While you may not be familiar with Calder’s work you are probably familiar with the mobiles that are used as educational toys that hang over children’s cribs. No less a person than Marcel Duchamp named Calder’s kinetic sculptures Mobiles. While Jean Arp described his stationary sculptures as Stabiles. The exhibition consists of over a hundred works will be shown in Calder’s first Canadian retrospective. Calder is known as the man who set art in motion.
Fall 2018
]]>One of the nice things about Quebec City is that you never need a reason to go. Just the fact that its architecture and food exists is a good reason to visit.
The Musée des beaux-arts national du Quebec has mounted what looks like another excellent exhibition on one of Quebec’s pivotal artists, Marcel Barbeau In Movement, runs from October 11, 2018 until January 6, 2019.
A notable figure in contemporary Canadian art, Marcel Barbeau produced an impressive body of more than 4,000 works spanning seven decades. Intersecting several significant periods in the history of recent art, his output provides an overview as singular as it is insightful.
Barbeau was at the forefront of numerous avant-garde movements and artistic trends in Canada. He was a leading contributor to the first stirrings of Abstract painting was renowned internationally for his contribution to OpArt.
The Quebec show is the most ambitious retrospective on the artist to date. Works on display are from his entire career, from the 1940s to 2015.
Fall 2018
]]>If you happen to find yourself in Nova Scotia this Fall, and let me encourage you to go, the people are fantastic and the Cape Breton Highlands are a joy during Fall foliage season, make your way over to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Said Gallery is attempting to punch above its weight in the art world by mounting and touring world class exhibitions and the one I am about to tell you about qualifies as just that.
Hiroshige: The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaido will be running through until March, 17, 2019. Utagawa Hiroshige (1797—1858) was a master of the traditional Japanese Ukiyo—e, a genre of art showing the thriving life of the Japanese middle class in the Edo period.
During the Edo period the Tōkaidō was Japan’s main highway. It linked the two capitals, Tokyo, then called Edo, and Kyoto. In view of the road’s importance, stages or stations were set up at strategic points where the traveller could find lodging, meals, and entertainment. Having travelled the Tōkaidō in 1831, Utagawa Hiroshige created a series of prints showing the fifty-three stages as well as the points of departure and arrival.
Woodcut printing was virtually the sole method of reproduction in Japan for nearly 1 200 years. During the eighteenth century it became indeed a popular method of reproduction as it allowed the printing of a large number of prints that could be sold at low prices. When Japan opened its doors to trade in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Japanese art, especially the print, spread throughout the world causing a sensation in artistic and literary circles in France and England. The revelation of Japan’s creativity breathed new freshness into Western art, and its influence continues to this day. The Hiroshige prints form a complete set from the original set first published in 1834. They are of great interest, not only as a complete set, but also as impressions from the original blocks. The set is in exceptional condition and has a unity that indicates that they were assembled as a group at the time of production rather than being brought together piecemeal at a later date. They are fantastic.
Fall 2018
]]>Painting to Live and Living to Paint. 50 Years of Impassioned Creation!
Great Encounter
Meeting painter Normand Boisvert and visiting his studio is an experience that undeniably changes a person given how striking, magical and colourful is his body of work and how warm, passionate and human is the artist. The workshop, vibrant with poetry that defies any limitation of freedom and joie de vivre, welcomes you as spectator to the atmospheric enchantment created by the images.
Indeed, Normand Boisvert’s work gives access to a succulent universe that reverberates a bygone era of joie de vivre. The highly imaginative landscape artist mixes reality and poetry to structure dazzling compositions that catch the eye at first glance. For 50 years, the artist has endeavoured, dedicated himself even, to depict the beauty of Québec’s nature and its human imprint.
Normand Boisvert
Text by Michel Bois
The artist is represented by: Galerie Douce Passion, Québec – Galerie d’art Iris, Baie-Saint-Paul – Stephen Lowe Gallery, Calgary – Dimension Plus, Montréal – Westmount Gallery, Toronto – State of the art Gallery, Toronto – Ryan fine art Gallery, Ontario
]]>When a Medieval Universe Merges with Contemporary Reverie
Artist Profile
The finest of paintings is always achieved via the solid and balanced organization of shapes and colours. Each of Nathalie Lapointe’s works rests on her knowledge of classic structural composition. Portraits. Shadows and lights. Images occupying one third of the canvas.
Mastering the theory of colours. Oil medium transparencies bonding with the grain of the canvas. Skillful work with painting knife. I could go on and on, so broad is her experience. Fascinated with atmospheres and tall buildings, here she is embarking on a new adventure, painting medieval castles precariously clinging to cliffs. Thank you Nathalie Lapointe!
Summer Shades, oil on canvas, 36 x 18 in
Text by Michel Bois
Galerie Québec Art, 40, Notre-Dame street, Québec, Qc 418-692-8200
]]>Art in a Feminine Perspective
It has actually become daring to do something that is aesthetically pleasing. – Loretta Fasan
Loretta Fasan says that she paints because: “I need to bring certain images to life. I have a strong feeling that I want to create an image of females that have qualities I admire, and as much as possible I am trying to make them iconic.”
Although Fasan will paint landscapes and accept commissions, she also works in series. In particular she has done a number of female heads that are striking for their decorative embellishments. They would be at home on the set of Game of Thrones. “I paint female figures. Sometimes they are mysterious, humorous or serene. Sometimes I use intense and sometimes I use subtle colours, textures, gold leaf and patterns and costumes and I try to create an iconic aspect and then soften it by the facial expression.”
She likes to create and emphasize qualities that are timeless, serenity, hope and attaining grace or being at peace. She likes to represent kindness and gentleness and has no truck with fierceness: “I avoid fierceness, it’s easy to do ugly. It has actually become daring to do something that is aesthetically pleasing.”
Iris, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 30 x 30 in
Text by Noel Meyer
]]>Pure Outbursts of Joy
Contemporary Realism
Everything really takes off for René Lalonde with his 1999 participation in the famous New York Art Expo, one of the largest worldwide showcase for visual arts in North America. Although there is a long waiting list of hopeful participants, an unpredictable turn of events provides him with a stand where he exhibits some twenty of his works.
At the time, Lalonde essentially paints imaginary landscapes where are anchored warm and comforting small houses which earn him a loyal audience in Canada. As he has been exploring this theme for some time, he is tempted to do something different for this major art event and decides to embark on this adventure with a completely new proposition: colourful geometric drawings the cubist roots of which are freely and whimsically reinterpreted. He had previously entertained this idea but the public had shown little interest upon his first try at the Denison gallery in Old Montreal. Here was his opportunity to explore this longstanding inner desire to create fragmented abstract structures. Once on site, a major art editor notices his work and promises to convince the President of the Chalk & Vermillion Fine Arts Company and the Sales Manager for Martin Lawrence Galleries to come and see his artworks.
Happiness in a vase
Text by Lisanne Le Tellier
In Montréal, some of his works can be seen only at Cazeault Gallery on Sherbrooke Street West. The artist can also be reached by email at [email protected] to obtain further information pertaining to his exceptional body of work.
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