JOHN FOX   Early and Late Works
Helen Piddington  Selected Works
Benita Sanders  Four Pastels

758 Humboldt Street (beside The Marriott Hotel)
June 18 – July 30, 2011

Opening Reception
Saturday June 18, 2011, 2 – 4 p.m.

WINCHESTER GALLERIES MODERN

John Fox (Montreal 1927 – Venice 2008) studied at the School of Art and Design, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Slade at the University of London.  After independent work in France and Italy, he returned in the mid 1950s to Montreal where he maintained his art practice for over fifty years.  His painting reflects his life-long appreciation of the work of Goodridge Roberts and his admiration for Degas, Bonnard and Matisse, as well as Titian and Tiepolo.  Fox’s career began with the intimist figures, interiors, and landscape images of the 1950s to the early 1970s.  After fifteen years of producing abstract images that relate to European and American non-figuration, he returned to representational painting in 1986.  His reconstructing of the reality of people and places suggests the incidents of contemporary life rather than its grand narratives.  Fox is a master colourist, where the substance of colour and light defines the emotional and intellectual meaning of his subject matter.

Helen Piddington was born in Esquimalt, British Columbia.  She studied at UBC and in France at L'Ecole Supérieure de Beaux Arts, L'Ecole Métiers d'Arts and Atelier 17.  In 1966, in West Vancouver, she established The Printmaking Workshop which she directed until 1975.  She and her family moved in that year to Loughborough Inlet.  Piddington has specialized in life-drawing and is an accomplished landscape artist.  Collections in which she is represented include Le Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the New York Public Library.  Helen Piddington is also the author of The Inlet (Harbour Publishing, 2001) and Rumble Seat (Ibid., 2010).

Benita Sanders, born in England in 1935, worked at William Hayter’s Atelier 17, Paris, in 1960-63 and at Robert Blackburn’s studio, New York, in 1963-73.  At Blackburn’s, she explored an abstraction based on organic and rock shapes. In 1973 Sanders moved to Haida Gwaii.  The islands’ coast and forest rhythms have continued to inspire her drawing and printmaking.  Collections of Sander’s work include the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Canada.