Canada Council Art Bank Exhibition
at Penticton Regional Hospital

DATES TBD
Penticton Regional Hospital

ABOUT

In the 1970s, the Canada Council Art Bank’s little-known Commissioned Print Programme wove its way across the country, connecting artists and arts professionals in unforeseen ways that would leave an impressive legacy. To bulk up its newly created collection, the Canada Council Art Bank commissioned 25 artists to produce prints at studios across the country that could then be rented out. This matchmaking scheme paired artists with printmaking studios, sending artists in and out of province to produce new works.

The scheme also helped build networks as these artists, from different artistic and cultural backgrounds and at different points in their careers, were given free creative reign at studios in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), St. John’s, Halifax, Montréal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Banff, among other places. The studios would host the artists, provide them with studio space and resources, and introduce them to the local artistic community.

The resulting lithographs and silkscreens were divided between the artist, the Art Bank, and the printmaking studio. Few records remain of the Commissioned Print Programme, however personal correspondence between the artists, the studios, and the Art Bank demonstrate how it facilitated the creation of personal and artistic connections across the country.

The Canada Council for the Arts, Canada’s public arts funder, established the Art Bank in 1972 to raise awareness of the remarkable breadth and quality of Canadian art being produced at the time. The aim was to purchase works and make them available to a wider public across the country through an art rental program and outreach initiatives.

Since then, Canadian art has continued to grow and earn acclaim nationally and on the world stage. The Art Bank collection has grown significantly, and now includes more than 17,000 paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures by over 3,000 emerging and established artists. This collection includes works by both Indigenous and settler artists in Canada, including those from culturally diverse communities. The collection is currently valued at over $71 million. At any given time, a large part of the collection is on view to the public—across Canada and around the world—through the Art Bank’s corporate art rental program and its exhibition and outreach program, which includes loans to museums.

Paul Crawford, Curator

MARCEL BARBEAU (1925-2016)

Over the course of his career, Marcel Barbeau's artwork has taken a variety of directions as he continually responds to his creative impulse and a desire to exceed the limits of a given form. He was a signatory of the controversial 'Refus Global' in 1948, and has remained faithful to the ideals of spontaneous expression and the primacy of the arts.

Barbeau studied at the école du Meuble in Montreal from 1942 to 1947 where he was taught by artist Paul-émile Borduas, with classmates Jean Paul Riopelle and photographer Maurice Perron. They all became involved in the Automatiste movement, which was based on the French Surrealist idea of turning to the subconscious mind for inspiration.

Between 1958 and 1974 Barbeau lived and worked in Vancouver, Paris, New York and southern California respectively, before returning to Quebec. While in Paris, he concentrated on using pure colour and altering the viewer's optical perception. In 1963, he painted Jules, a composition consisting of three large black spots on a bright red rectangle surrounded by a white ground. After looking away from the work, the viewer experiences seeing these spots everywhere.

Barbeau is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He was one of the earliest winners of the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, which recognizes the work of artists at mid-career. In 2013 Mr. Barbeau was a recipient of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

Read more on the National Gallery of Canada’s website.

ALAN WOOD (1935-2017)

Alan Wood was one of Canada’s leading artists. He received international acclaim for his use of colour, and for his undertaking of the large-scale outdoor environmental work, “Ranch”.

Wood was born in 1935 in the town of Widnes, in Lancashire, England. His early interest in art was due to the support and encouragement he received from both his father and his high school art teacher. Following graduation from high school, he studied art at the Liverpool College of Art and credits his success as an artist to his good fortune to be in the right places at the right times. His involvement with the lively art and music scene in Liverpool during the late fifties led him to the innovative St. Ives Artists Colony in Cornwall, which in turn opened the door to a successful 6-year teaching career at the prestigious Cardiff College of Art in Wales.

Alan Wood moved to Canada in 1971 and settled in British Columbia in 1974. Since that time he produced his most personal and mature work as an artist. His interest in the dynamics of light and colour from the ocean, beach, forest and sky dominated his landscape work throughout his career. In 1983 Alan Wood gained international recognition for taking his painting directly into the landscape with his “Ranch” creation. This 320-acre painted construction built in the foothills of the Alberta Rockies was a monumental exploration of colour and form.

Read more on the Petley Jones Gallery website.

RANDY GLEDHILL

Randy Gledhill has a Canadian and International history spanning three decades describing a plethora of activities including performance, installation, public art commission, video, sculpture, critical writing, pedagogy, curation and cultural activism. His ground breaking collaborative partnerships in Randy & Berenicci enjoy a rare precedent of accolade and influence. He is currently Executive Director and Curator of Vancouver’s LIVE Performance Art Biennale, and is independently researching new global performance art manifestations, movements, and networks.

Read more on Gledhill’s website.

FLEMMING JORGENSEN (1934-2009)

Flemming Jorgensen was born in Aalborg, Denmark, in 1934. He immigrated to Canada in 1956 taking on work as a designer for Eaton's. Soon after he dedicated himself fully to becoming a successful artist. Jorgensen studied commercial art under Herbert Siebner from 1958-61. He travelled and painted with Toni Onley in Greece in 1973.

Jorgensen worked in many mediums exploring oil, casein with wax, acrylic and watercolours. His style ranged from figure studies to landscapes and abstract expressionist works. Along with painting he was also a printmaker and sculptor. Jorgensen taught at the University of Victoria, Lester B. Pearson College, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria College of Art and Victoria College of Art and Design. He co‐founded the Metchosin International Summer School of the Arts where he was nicknamed ‘Maestro’.

In 2007 Jorgensen donated many works to raise funds for a press and to establish a print program at the Vancouver Island School of Art. In 2008 he donated pieces to Abkhazi Garden and raised over $15,000. Jorgensen received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the University of Victoria in 1998.

He exhibited with the Royal Canadian Academy in 1970 and 1976, the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts in 1960, 1961 and 1964, and held solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 1961, 1965 and 1974 and the Maltwood Art Museum at the University of Victoria in 1985. Over his career he took part in international shows in France, Switzerland, England, Brazil, the U.S. as well as across Canada. 

His work is part of the collections at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Winchester Galleries, and The National Gallery of Canada, among others. 

Read more on the Legacy Art Gallery’s website.

E.J. HOWORTH

E.J. Howorth’s passion has been printmaking throughout most of his artistic career. He received his BFA from the University of Manitoba,  apprenticed under Wilfredo Arcay of Atelier Arcay in Paris. and received an MFA from the University of North Dakota. In 1995 he was appointed to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, R.C.A.

Howorth has worked for Open Studio in Toronto, and MPA in Winnipeg. He and Michael Schonke introduced water-based screen printing to Druckwerkstatt/BBK in Berlin in 1991. For over 40 years he has exhibited locally, nationally and internationally, received numerous commissions and is a part of many collections.

Howorth has exhibited in International Juried Print Biennales in Norway, Korea,. Yugoslavia, Germany, Macedonia, the Netherlands and Canada.  He was a medal winner in the International Grafik Biennial Freschen, West Germany. His work has been shown at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (1971); the National Gallery of Canada (1972); the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Montreal (1975) and the Grand Western Canadian Screen Shop Show at the Canadian Cultural Center in Paris. It toured France throughout 1977. In 2002, Howorth was invited to participate in Artists from Finland and Abroad, Gallery Villa Jankovsky, Kajaani, Finland and recently In Plain Sight: Printmaking from the Canadian Prairies, Marostica, Italy, & Venice, Italy. He has had solo exhibitions in Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal. Haworth was one of the founding members of <SITE> Gallery and exhibited regularly throughout its ten years of operation.

Read more on Gallery Gurevich’s website.

BARBARA ALEXANDRA HALL (1942-2021)

Alix was born in Bronxville, New York, USA, on December 22, 1942. She was raised by her mother in New York, and doted on by her maternal grandparents. Her grandfather, David B. Hills, a commercial artist, particularly encouraged her artistic development. She attended Dalton School and enjoyed a cosmopolitan New York life until her mother's second marriage to a US Army officer took them to the wilds of New Mexico, Texas, and Kentucky. She first attended San Francisco Art Institute, then transferred to the Art Institute of Chicago, earning her BFA there in Drawing, Painting, and Printmaking.

Alix co-founded, along with Richard Sewell, the groundbreaking Open Studio artists' co-operative on Queen Street West in Toronto in 1970. Open Studio continues to this day on Richmond Street West, offering accessible, inclusive and affordable printmaking facilities, programs and services for artists and the public from across Canada and abroad. During this time, Alix focused on printmaking, creating many silkscreens, etchings, and lithographs. Her work was often surrealistic in nature, combining everyday objects in unusual combinations. She returned to painting in 1980, creating a series of ten large canvases in response to her mother's sudden death in 1979. She taught printmaking, two-dimensional design, drawing and painting at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute in Toronto; Scarborough College at the University of Toronto; Ontario College of Art; Queens University in Kingston; and at Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario.

As a fine artist, Alix exhibited her work at numerous galleries throughout North America and Europe, including solo exhibitions at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound, The Station Gallery in Whitby, and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in the early 1980s. Her artwork is held in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Vancouver Art Gallery, among many other public and private collections. Over the course of her art career, she received grants and awards from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.

Alix stopped making images in 1983. Thereafter, when asked, she would describe herself as a "recovering artist", and resisted all efforts to persuade her to begin again. Instead, her attention shifted to achieving social change through work with organizations serving people in need. Among these were Interval House in Toronto, a centre for abused women and children; the AIDS Committee of Toronto; Margaret Frazer House for women with mental health issues in Toronto; as well as stints as a librarian in Indiana and California. In midlife, she became a Tibetan Buddhist, and also delved deeply into genealogy.

Read more on the Open Studio website.

WILLIAM FEATHERSTON (1927-2009)

William Featherston was an artist and activist who engaged in social justice causes beyond his political art. His artistic career spanned sixty years. Originally from Toronto, he lived, worked, and exhibited in Europe for over a decade. While living in St. Ives, England, he was immersed in a dynamic art community and associated with artists like Francis Bacon, Patrick Heron, and Barbara Hepworth, and with poets and playwrights such as W.S. Graham and John Antrobus. He exhibited extensively in London and took part in the Edinburgh Festival for eight consecutive years. With the exception of the creation of a public art piece for the plaza at Toronto City Hall and a commission for Expo 67, he did not return to Canada until 1971.

Featherston briefly taught at UVic from 1972 to 1973 and became disillusioned by the political climate of the administration at that time. His print The Blind Leading the Blind references the presidency of Bruce Partridge, who oversaw numerous conflicts among faculty and the administration. Featherston concluded that the university art department and other art schools were missing the kind of political dissertation in their art teaching and practice that he was passionate about. After UVic, he taught at California State in Hayward followed by a ten-year period at the Vancouver College of Art, where his students included Attila Richard Lukacs and Angela Grossman.

Influenced by artists he met in Europe and America, Featherston shaped much of his art around his political activism. Often a political satirist, he critiqued imperialism and corporatism and addressed difficult subjects such as violence and torture. Stylistically, he drew upon colour, process, art history, composition, material, and accessibility to create confrontational works with a sense of vulnerability, anxiety, or fear. Also a sculptor, he created works that were fundamentally abstract but that also referenced architectural forms.

Featherston’s work is held in the collections of the Canada Council, Ottawa Art Bank, B.C. Art Bank, University of Buffalo, Leeds Art Gallery in England, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the University of Glasgow in Scotland, among others.

Read more on the Legacy Art Gallery’s website.

JOHN K. ESLER (1933-2001)

John K. Esler was born in 1933 in Pilot Mound, Manitoba and attended the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, graduating in 1960. He continued studies there, receiving a Bachelor of Education degree in 1962, and in 1964, after a period of travel in Europe, took a teaching position at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. He joined the faculty of the University of Calgary in 1968 where he taught intaglio printmaking, staying there until his retirement in the 1980s. Esler was well-known in the Calgary arts community, and did much to raise the profile of printmaking in the province. He played a major role in the expansion of the printmaking department at the Alberta College of Art and Design and at the University of Calgary and in partnership with artist Ken Webb, established Trojan Press to provide a facility for local printmakers to develop their skills. Esler's works were exhibited widely throughout Canada and abroad and he is represented in many public and private collections. His awards included the C.W. Jefferys' Award from the Canadian Society of Graphic Arts and the G.A. Reid Memorial Award from the Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers.

John Esler had an irreverent, somewhat Dadaist sensibility which he expressed in his art and in his teaching methods. He encouraged his students to experiment, to make art with a mind open to unexpected possibilities. A series of artworks that offered a typical example of his approach were called “Relics of the Twentieth Century” and involved the use of cast-off garbage and refuse that he ran through the press to create relief prints. Objects that became fodder for the creative process for this series ranged from a squashed lunch box to the flattened chassis of a television set.

Read more on the Alberta Foundation for the Arts website.

CATHRIN HOSKINSON (b. 1949)

Cathrin Hoskinson is a Brooklyn-based sculptor and printmaker. She received her BFA in printmaking from Concordia University, Montreal in 1971 and BFA in sculpture from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1992, as well as an MFA from Hunter College in New York in 1995. Her works have been exhibited across the US, most recently on the Suwanee SculpTour in Suwanee, GA, in 2013.

Read more on the Marlborough website.

EUGENE OUCHI (1943-2010)

Eugene Ouchi was born in Vernon British Columbia. He received a Diploma in Commercial Art from the Alberta College of Art in 1967. Ouchi continued his studies with a Post Graduate Study in Printmaking and Painting at the Alberta College of Art. Ouchi was a graphic designer, a Creative Director, and an Art Director as well as the owner of his own design company, Stepstone Design, before becoming a member of the Visual Communications Faculty, at the Alberta College of Art & Design, in 1985. In 2001, Ouchi became the Design Chair at the Alberta College of Art & Design. Ouchi worked primarily as a mixed media artist, utilizing a plethora of materials in his work, ranging from sheet metal, to cloth, and stones. Ouchi’s work has been shown at group and solo exhibitions across Canada since the early 1970’s. In 1972, the National Gallery selected Ouchi’s prints to represent Canada at the 36th Venice Biennale, in Venice Italy, and his prints were also showcased at the Third International Print Biennale, in Bradford England. His series of mixed media work entitled, Hiroshima Rain, was shown at the group exhibition, That Still Place…That Place Still, at The Nickel Arts Museum in 2003. This powerful series depicts the bombing of Hiroshima Japan near the end of World War II, and was created as a response to hearing the stories of the survivors of the bombings. Ouchi passed away at the age of 66 after a battle with cancer.

Read more on the Alberta Foundation for the Arts website.

GEORGE TIESSEN (b. 1935)

George Tiessen is a painter and printmaker whose work in the 1970s and ‘80s often reflected an interest in landscape themes and imagery. He has described past work as being “of no ‘one particular place,’ but could be best described as landscapes of the imagination.”

Tiessen’s studies began at Toronto’s Ontario School of Art followed by New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University with a major in printmaking. While at Mount Allison, he studied under Lawren P. Harris (son of Lawren Harris of the Group of Seven), whom he has called an influence for his knowledge of hard-edge colour field painting. Tiessen subsequently studied with artists Stephen Poleskie and Arnold Singer at Cornell University, where he completed a Master of Fine Arts in screen-printing in 1971. After returning to teaching at Mount Allison, he then moved to Victoria in 1972 to teach printmaking and painting at the University of Victoria. He also served as department chair from 1983 to 1987.

Tiessen saw his teaching role as both a technician and an educator: “Printmaking can be an arduous technical process. It can take weeks to see the result of what you are trying to get. There are no instant results.” He maintained his own artistic practice throughout his tenure, with particular focus during the summer months.

Tiessen has been featured in solo exhibitions at the University of Victoria, Cornell University, and the University of Moncton, as well as in group exhibitions in galleries and universities across North America. His work can be found in collections of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Canada Council Art Bank, Mount Allison University, the National Gallery of Canada, and the New Brunswick Museum.

Read more on the University of Victoria Legacy Art Gallery’s website.

ROBERT W. ARCHAMBEAU (b. 1933)

Robert Archambeau has been an influential artist and teacher in the Prairie pottery scene for over 40 years. He is best known for his wood-fired stoneware vessels — jars, vases, teapots, and bowls — in which he masterfully synthesizes Asian ceramic techniques and philosophy with elements inspired by the Canadian Shield and the indigenous flora near his remote home in Bissett, Manitoba. In 2003, he was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) bestowed a lifetime achievement award upon him in 2008. His work is held in numerous collections, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, QC.

Archambeau grew up in Toledo, Ohio, dropping out of high school at age 17 to join the US Marines. In 1954, he entered the University of Toledo, where he studied biology, ceramics, drawing and printmaking, skills that he continues to employ in his artistic practice. He attained a BFA at Bowling Green State University in 1959 and an MFA at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1964.

After teaching for four years at the Rhode Island School of Design, Archambeau moved to Winnipeg in 1968, joining the faculty of the University of Manitoba’s School of Art. He taught there for 23 years, influencing many students who established their own successful practices, including Grace Nickel, Kathryne Koop and Alex Yeung. Archambeau retired from teaching in 1991 and is currently Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Manitoba.

Archambeau’s aesthetic affinities are with Asian ceramics, having lived in Japan and worked with the artists Akio Takamori and Jun Kaneko, as well as visiting artisanal potteries in Japan, Korea and China in the 1980s. Now an octogenarian, he throws hefty pots on the wheel with great vigour, reflecting his own large size, and then fires them in a wood burning kiln at high temperatures to attain speckled and mottled bodies, glazed in atmospheric earth tones of golden and scarlet hues. The bronze lidded jar is a form that he returns to frequently and is one of his favourite objects for exploration. Archambeau rarely signs his ceramics, acknowledging the Japanese mingei philosophy that utilitarian pottery made by unknown craftsmen is the noblest art form.

Read more on the Canadian Encyclopedia website.

JACQUES HURTUBISE (1939-2014)

Jacques Hurtubise was born in Montreal in 1939. In 1956, at the age of 17 he attended the École des beaux-arts de Montréal, graduating in 1960. He received the prestigious Max Beckman scholarship to study in New York (1960-61). The work he produced during his time in New York was included in his first solo exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art in 1961 when he was a mere 21 years old. Hurtubise also spent time in China in the mid-1980s. In 1983, he moved to Cape Breton.

He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Grand Prix de Peinture, Concours Artistique du Québec (1965), the Prix Victor-Martyn-Lynch Staunton from the Canada Council of the Arts (1993), and the Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas du Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec (2000). He has been exhibiting regularly since 1961 in both solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally in the United States, England, Belgium, France, Brazil, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany.

A key figure in Canadian abstraction, Hurtubise was central in the post-Riopelle developments in Quebec, along with his contemporaries Yves Gaucher, Guido Molinari, Claude Tousignant and others. Developed over the past fifty years, his body of work has pushed the definition of “hard edge” abstraction through the use of painterly brushstrokes and a printmaker’s sensitivity for repeated, controlled pattern creating a language of his own. As a result of his time spent abroad, his paintings encompass a range of influences from abstract expressionism to Chinese ceremonial masks.

Working through notions of colour and form, Hurtubise’s paintings are often large in scale, forcing the artist to expend an energy to move his brush around the canvas. Ultimately these paintings are about gesture and mark-making and his strategies to maintain spontaneity.

Read more on the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s website.

JOE FAFARD (1942-2019)

Nationally and internationally acclaimed artist, Joe Fafard, was born September 2, 1942 to French-Canadian parents in the small agricultural community of Ste. Marthe, Saskatchewan and passed away peacefully at home on his farm near Lumsden on March 16th, 2019. Joe attended the University of Manitoba (BFA 1966) and Pennsylvania State University (MFA 1968). He was at the University of Saskatchewan, Regina from 1968–1974 and visiting lecturer at the University of California at Davis in 1980-1981. During his lifetime, Joe Fafard was a distinguished full-time artist and sculptor who lived his entire life on the Canadian Prairie.

Fafard was one of Canada’s leading professional visual artists and has exhibitions of a wide variety of work in galleries and museums across the country and around the world, including the United States, Great Britain, France and Japan. He is widely recognized as having been at the forefront of his art, and his outstanding contributions to the arts have significantly raised the profile of both Saskatchewan and Canada on the national stage.

He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981; awarded the Architectural Institute of Canada Allied Arts Award in 1987; received an honorary degree from the University of Regina in 1989, and from the University of Manitoba in 2007; received the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 2002; received the National Prix Montfort in 2003; received the Lieutenant Governor’s Saskatchewan Centennial Medal for the Arts in 2005; was named CTV Citizen of the Year in 2006; and the Saskatchewan Arts Board Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. Joe Fafard also received his third honorary doctorate degree from the University of Saskatchewan in June of 2012.

Perhaps the pinnacle of his career was the touring retrospective exhibition, hosted by six different venues, from September 2007 through September 2009, jointly organized by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina. However, most recently, Joe Fafard was chosen to be honoured by Canada Post in their “Art Canada” series of postage stamps, released February 23, 2012. Three of his artworks are featured on the domestic Canadian stamps, the USA stamps and the International stamps.

In the early 1970’s, much of his sculpture used clay as a medium. In 1985, he shifted to bronze as his chief sculptural medium, successfully establishing a foundry in Pense. His insight and humour characterized his portraits of neighbours, farm animals, wildlife, and famous artists that he came to respect as he learned his craft. His work in bronze is displayed across Canada and his cows became one of his trademarks. Some say that Joe Fafard added a sense of humour to his depictions of the everyday through his artwork; Joe said that he just never really took it out.

Read more on Joe Fafard’s website.

JIM HANSEN (1939-2019)

Jim Hansen was born in Warren, Ohio, in 1939. The son of two artists, he grew up watching his parents paint and going on frequent family trips to art galleries. His early influences include Matisse, abstract expressionist works of the 1950s, and comic books.

In 1959, Hansen had a summer job bussing inner-city kids to a day camp near Hiram, Ohio. There, he photographed black and white children playing in the wooded campgrounds a stark contrast to the racial tensions bubbling in many American cities at the time. Hansen and his friend Lyle Linville self-published the photographs and some poetry in a book called Tiger. It never found a commercial publisher, but did lead to some subsequent work for Hansen as a photographer. The images from Tiger were later shown at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in 2011.

Hansen also worked for a brief period as a graphic designer at an advertising company before serving in the United States Army Medical Corps from 1962-65. In 1969, he graduated from Kent State University with a major in studio arts and a double minor in biology and chemistry.

He moved to Newfoundland in 1970 and began working on The Newfoundland Album - an ambitious series of more than 160 silkscreen prints that combined text, drawings, and photographs to create a visual journal. Hansen has referred to these prints as "thought machines" which allow him to process his ideas, propositions, reactions, and experiences.

In the 1980s, he began to explore themes of sexuality, masculinity, and domesticity, and to place images of himself in his art. His work became noted for its complex and often ambiguous imagery, and for its quirky sense of humor. He has used collage, photography, print and, more recently, digital imaging and Photoshop. Bruce Johnson, the curator of several of Hansen's exhibitions, describes his work as a "visual paper trail of his life" with which "he seeks to assemble and document himself and his universe."

Hansen's art has appeared in solo and group shows in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Recent exhibitions include the solo show Jim Hansen at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (2007-2008) and the group show Beauty Queens, which travelled across Canada from 2004-2006. In 2001, a 30-year retrospective of his work, Private Eye: The Art of Jim Hansen, showed at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery.

Hansen's artwork has been included in many public and private collections, including The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery's Permanent Collection, the National Gallery of Canada, The Canada Council Art Bank, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and Kent State University.

Read more on Heritage Newfoundland’s website.

SUSAN HUDSON (b. 1941)

Susan was born in Montreal in 1941 and studied art at the school of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Saidye Bronfman Centre, in Montreal and at the University of Quebec. She is best known for her silkscreens and coloured etchings. She worked as a graphic designer, illustrator and photographer and was a Professor and chairperson of the Department of design at Concordia University where she taught for 25 years.

Susan was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy on the basis of her illustrations, printmaking and painting abilities. Her work can be found in the collection of the National Gallery, Canada Council Art Bank, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Winnipeg Art Gallery and many others across Canada. Susan has now retired to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia where she is concentrating solely upon her artistic endeavours.

Read more here.

ROBERT SAKOWSKI (b. 1943)

A faculty member at the University of Manitoba School of Art, Robert Sakowski was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1943. He graduated in1967 with a Masters in Fine Arts from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. Robert Sakowski entered a piece into the Eleventh Winnipeg Show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in November 1968, that he called "Untitled construction" made of canvas painted with acrylics and a strip of plexiglass. The piece was displayed on the floor. The canvas having been stretched over a wooden frame was formed into an elegantly white geometric shape. The plexiglass strip, also white, served as a continum and a defined plane resting along the top of the construction. A graduate of the School of Art, James M. Barr was also represented in this exhibition. His sculpture "Flower Power" is a large painted steel piece with plastic parts that revolve. A pink cloud crowns the piece and large pastel coloured flowers rotate. Again it is a playful whimsical piece of sculpture. In 1974 the Winnipeg Art Gallery featured the exhibition, New Prints from the Screen Shop, featuring work by Jack Butler, Daphne Odjig, Winston Leathers, Howorth, Lobchuk and Robert Sakowski. Robert Sakowski was also a professor at the University of Manitoba School of Fine Art where his work was featured in the exhibition, Bob Sakowski: Recent Works, February 29 - March 13, 1988.

The inspiration for this work was a fall sunset at dusk on the Manitoba prairies. It represents an aspect of Sakowski’s attempt to come to terms with his new home. When looking at this image, one can envision the mass of evergreens, the yellow of the sunset and the dark areas as deep shadows. The print is part of a series that contains the same theme of interweaving coloured geometric and open octagonal forms outlined in white, thus defining the colours of each shape.