New Watercolours

At 2260 Oak Bay Avenue
SEPTEMBER 8 – SEPTEMBER 26, 2009

Preview
September 8 - 12, 2009
10:00 am – 5:30 pm
(work subject to prior sale)

Opening Reception
Sunday, September 13, 2009
1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

David Blackwood in attendance
Elizabeth Ely, harpist; Karel Roessingh, pianist

At Winchester Galleries on Oak Bay Avenue

This exhibition is the result of an ongoing series of watercolours inspired by an exhibition of works by David Milne (1862-1953) at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2005.  Curated by Dr. Katherine Lochnan, the exhibition travelled to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the British Museum in London.

Watercolour painting is a great challenge; its refusal to be controlled discourages many artists.  The medium insists on doing its own thing – which can produce exciting results.  It can also be hazardous with the medium taking over and becoming, in itself, the subject.

As a student at the Ontario College of Art (1959-1963) I was inspired by two great teachers of watercolour painting:  J.W.G. (Jock) Macdonald (1897-1906) and Carl Schaefer (1903-1995).  MacDonald believed in a free style approach….allowing the medium to work for itself, hoping that it would produce remarkable results.  Schaefer demanded a deliberate design on which to hang drawing and colour.  For Schaefer everything depended on planning and ‘decisive’ drawing and – “your greatest asset is the whiteness of the paper”.

In this series I have attempted to combine the MacDonald and Schaefer approaches.  They both held a strong belief that any true work of art had to have some unexplainable mystery – a life of its own.

David Blackwood
Port Hope
July 5, 2009