The 1970s, ’80s and Now

    At Winchester Galleries Modern
    758 Humboldt Street (beside the Marriott)

    December 4 – 29, 2010

    Opening Reception
    Saturday, December 4, 2010   2 pm – 4 pm

    James Gordaneer in attendance; Miles Black, jazz pianist

    Winchester Galleries is deeply grateful to James Gordaneer for making available some rare, exquisite works from the 1970s, '80s and very recent times.  James Gordaneer is a legend in Victoria and is known across Canada for his contribution to the Canadian art scene since 1953.  During summers from that year to 1963 he taught at the Doon School of Art where he discussed art with fellow faculty members Jock Macdonald, Karl Schaeffer, Will Ogilvie and Yvonne Housser.  Gordaneer's own realist style increasingly took the direction of abstract expressionism. 
     
    After living near Orangeville, Ontario, for ten years, Gordaneer, his wife Miria Rasanen and their children moved in 1976 to Victoria. Here Gordaneer pursued a teaching career at the University of Victoria, Camosun College and the Victoria College of Art.  He worked for two or three days a week at teaching and for much of the rest of the time in his studio.  The Abstract Expressionist movement during this decade conveyed to him that the mark and the gesture were pivotal.  The surrealism of such artists as Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon reinforced the appeal and power of illusion, the implied, and the poetic.
     
    An abstract year for him in 1981 did not feature the human figure but set the stage for the rest of his 1980s work which typically did include the figure.  Likewise prominent were broad passages of smooth flat colour influenced by Milton Avery.  The figure for Gordaneer was a rediscovery of his earliest training while the flat colour recalled his colour-field painting of the early 1960s.  He has always been an artist who reworked his older subjects and styles in a kind of cyclical manner.  
     
    In the 1990s Gordaneer focused on reconciling the figure with a curved, non-Euclidean space, influenced by the German mathematician Bernhard Reimann and his precepts of topology (the study of that which remains constant during change). Gordaneer flattened and toned his subject-matter to correspond with the curve and tone of the field, its concavities dark and its convexities light.  Further influenced by the concept of dual-singularity of wave/particle in quantum physics, Gordaneer saw his curved space as analogous to the wave, and his figuration as analogous to the particle.
     
    Gordaneer's latest paintings demonstrate a return to his more intuitive 1970s exploration of the integration of subject and implied space.  At the same time, these current paintings are more complex and sophisticated, suggesting a new breakthrough in sensitivity to the relationship between figure, space and canvas surface.

     

     

     

 

James Gordaneer