• 1
• 2

(at 1010 Broad St.)

Lorne Toews was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. After receiving a B.F.A. at the School of Art, University of Manitoba and a M.F.A. from Indiana University at Bloomington, he headed east to teach first at McMaster University, and then the Ontario College of Art and Design where he presently teaches painting and drawing. Toews has had numerous solo exhibitions and been in many group exhibits. He has had a number of portrait commissions, both official and private. His work is in private and public collections in Canada and the United States.

Toews' major interest has always been the familiar and the ever-changing facets of portraiture, the figure and his immediate world. An interior, a pile of clothes or a wife of many years can capture the artist's eye and challenge him to respond in paint.

Formal concerns are apparent in his work, in his handling of light, colour, space and composition, but these aspects are the bones that his love of the paint itself rests on. There is a physical and assured response to the mutability of the paint. That combined with a keen observation of life, the joy in the everyday, the familiar and even the mundane challenges the viewer to look again at the myriad possibilities there are in life.

"Big" subjects are not necessary for Toews. The challenge is to capture that small moment of stillness in this ever faster moving world.