Brush with Greatness by bknyh

T he Penticton Art Gallery proudly presents,

A Brush with Greatness, one of the most unique collections and exhibitions of contemporary art you may ever encounter.

The collection consists of over 60 paintbrushes used by some of the leading painters working today and offers a unique glimpse into the rich art history of the latter part of the Twentieth Century.

The impetus behind this collection was to find a way to approach the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading contemporary artists and have them contribute to a fundraising event at a gallery many have never heard of. The challenge was to have them contribute something of value to our fundraising efforts. We asked for a small donation of something that every artist has lots of, an old paintbrush.

What we didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t anticipate was the incredible response this project would receive; not only from the artists, but also from the public.

This exhibition ranks near the top as one of the Penticton Art Galleryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most popular and successful programs. This project has also caught the interest of other public galleries and educational institutions who have asked if the collection would be available for loan.

Originally the collection was to be sold off auction in November 2012 at Maynards Auctioneers in Vancouver. With the auction deadline looming the gallery set out to try and find a local buyer who would be willing to purchase the entire collection. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s when Ian Sutherland, Tony Holler and the board of Poplar Grove Winery agreed to purchase the entire collection as it stands today. Their invaluable partnership will allow the Penticton Art Gallery to further develop the collection, and will allow this collection to tour to galleries and educational institutions across the province and beyond.

With this exhibition, the Penticton Art Gallery now has the opportunity to generate additional revenue for the gallery and the Creative Kids Art Program, ensuring that this legacy will benefit future generations of artists whose own brushes may one day be also part of this incredible collection.

Irvine Adams Irvine Clinton Adams, born in Swan Lake, Manitoba in 1902, moved to the Okanagan Valley in 1904 with his family where they settled in the town of Summerland. The climate and geography of the region inspired his parents to start a new life fruit ranching. While attending school, Irvine worked at the local fruit packing house and in the logging business before turning to art. Irvine and his family, particularly his wife Doreen Adams, are linked with Summerland’s development. He is considered a pioneer that shaped the community of Summerland with his vivid works. Adams, a much revered and loved artist within his community, received significant recognition around the globe for his portrayal of the Okanagan Valley in his realistic landscapes. Considered one of North America’s foremost realists, his works were shown in juried exhibits in Paris, France, London, England, and in various galleries and exhibitions around the United States and Canada. His hometown and the geography that surrounded it became the subject of his well-known pastel paintings. Through his technique and the images he created, Adams captured the essence of the Okanagan Valley, leaving a legacy of his talent and impact for generations to come. He and his wife left their home which they deemed “Sleepy Hollow”, to the people of Summerland as a bird sanctuary. He passed away in 1992.

David Alexander David Alexanderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s landscape and waterscape paintings give the viewer a sense of the land in its raw and most immediate form. His larger works emphasize the surface of things in nature and tips them so that the sky is diminished to an almost insignificant strip. He provides us with an abstract view of the land that disregards our need for balance and recognition with his gestural application and broad palette. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, David studied at the Vancouver School of Art, Langara College, Notre Dame University, where he received his Bachelors of Fine Arts, and at the University of Saskatchewan, where he attained his Masters of Fine Arts in 1985. He has been personally influenced by impressionistic painters, such as Monet and Cezanne, and has an extensive knowledge of both historical and contemporary works. Since 1982, David has been invited as a guest as well as visiting artist at universities and public galleries throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe. David Alexanderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s art is in many public, private and corporate collections throughout the world, including The Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of London, University of Toronto and Concordia University in Montreal, Museum of Art in Iceland, Canadian Embassies in Berlin, Beijing and Krakow. He has recently returned to British Columbia, where he has been painting in remote areas of the interior.

Aelita andre

Aelita Andre, born January 2007, is an Australian abstract artist known for her surrealist painting style and her young age. Just five years old, Aelita is the youngest professional painter in the world. When her parents, both artists themselves, realized their daughter was doing something different from other children they took her work to a local gallery. Knowing Aelita would be judged because of her age they withheld the artist’s information so the paintings could be judged solely on their merit. Using acrylics and mixed media she creates large abstract forms, swirling layers of paint splatters and glitter to form an intricate whole. She often incorporates bark, twigs, children’s toys, feathers, and other found objects into her paintings to provide a sense of depth and texture. Aelita is of Russian heritage and currently lives with her parents in Melbourne, Australia. She first gained international recognition when she was just 20 months old, and created her first significant body of work before turning two. At the age of four she had her first solo exhibition that opened in the Agora Gallery in New York City in June of 2011; it sold out in seven days. She has earned more from her paintings by the age of five than most artists do in a lifetime. Aelita’s work is playful, vivid and expressive but what makes her work so compelling is a real attention to both composition and form, reflecting an understanding and artistic prowess far beyond her years. Instinctive, contemplative, and powerful, Aelita Andre’s work provides a window into the subconscious mind of a child.

Nick bantock Nick Bantock is known throughout the world for his art, for his writing and particularly for his marriage of the two. His art hangs in private collections all over North America and Europe and in 2011 he was given a major retrospective exhibition at the MOA in Denver. Nick was schooled in England and has a BA in Fine Art where he stud-ied painting. He has authored 25 books, 11 of which have appeared on the best seller lists, including 3 books on the New York Times top ten at one time. ‘Griffin and Sabine’ stayed on that list for over two years. His works have been translated into 13 languages and over 5 million have been sold worldwide. His paintings, drawings, sculptures, collages and prints have been exhibit-ed in shows in the UK, France and North America. Nick’s works are in private collections throughout the world and three of his books have been optioned for film, as well as his stage play based on the ‘Griffin and Sabine’ double trilogy that premiered in Vancouver 2006. Bantock has produced artwork for over 300 book covers, and has also designed theater posters for the London plays of Tom Stoppard and Alec Guinness. In 2011, Bantock had a show at the Penticton Art Gallery named ‘The Artful Dodger’ which featured many pieces from his ‘Griffin and Sabine’ trilogy. As a teacher and speaker for 20 years, he’s spoken and read to audiences throughout North America, Europe and Australia.

Marcel barbeau Marcel Barbeau was born in Montréal in February 1925. Between 1942 and 1947, he studied painting and sculpture with Paul-Emile Borduas at L’École du Meuble in Montréal, where he was a student in furniture design. He became a member of the Automatistes and participated in all exhibitions featuring the group and signed its manifesto, Total Refusal. Some art historians consider that he was, and remains, the group’s most innovative artist. He was also a junior member of Montréal Society of Contemporary Art with which he exhibited between 1945 and 1948. In 1963, he received the Zack Purchase Prize from the Royal Canadian Academy and in 1973 he was given a LynchStaunton Foundation Grant by Canada Council. He was awarded the sculpture purchase award of the McDonald Canada Art Competition in 1985 and was then invited to join the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in August 1992. His works are in many private, public and corporate collections in Canada, the United States and Europe among which are: the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the British Museum, London, UK; the Lyon Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon, France; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Montréal Museum of Contemporary Art, Montréal; Quebec National Fine Arts Museum, Quebec; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Robert bateman

Robert Bateman, born May 1930, in Toronto, Ontario, is a Canadian naturalist and painter. It wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t until the mid1960s that he changed to his present style, realism. In 1954, he graduated with a degree in geography from Victoria College in the University of Toronto and afterwards, he attended Ontario College of Education. It wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t until the 1970s and 1980s that his work started to receive major recognition and his show in 1987, at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC, drew a significant crowd. Bateman also has approximately six books devoted solely to his paintings. He decided, in 1977, to produce reproductions of his paintings through Mill Pond Press and the reproductions are extremely popular items, being sold in print galleries across Canada and more internatio-ally. In addition to his art, in 1999, the Audubon Society of Canada declared Bateman one of the top 100 environmental proponents of the 20th century. Bateman began the Get to Know program, in 2000, in British Columbia to educate young people about nature and to inspire youth to connect to the natural world. Royal Roads is currently fundraising to build the Robert Bateman Centre with the goal of the center is to be an education centre with a range of accessible and relevant programming that showcases green building methods.

Mike bayne Mike Bayne, a well-known Canadian painter, has a gift for creating hyper-realistic renderings in oil that capture familiar and iconic North American scenes. Bayne attended Queen`s University and received a B.A.H. and a B.F.A. in 2001. In 2004, he received an M.F.A. from Concordia University. At first, many mistake his paintings as photographs, yet they seem to capture a certain aspect of reality that photographs are unable to. His accomplishment is all the more impressive by the fact that his medium is usually a 4 by 6 inch panel. So tiny and precise, his works capture the â&#x20AC;&#x153;exquisite banalâ&#x20AC;?, such as strip malls, and worn out suburbs. The way that they are framed gives his audience the feeling of a disinterested glance, a sort of just passing through, and a real sense of ambivalence. His tiny paintings showcase modest suburban houses, motels, and churches that are dusted with thin layers of grimy snow, while others are shown with patchy brown lawns that are all too familiar in the lifeless suburban areas of Canada for many months out of every year. He captures the feelings of isolation and stillness, while still being able to accurately portray the quality of light. He has had several solo exhibitions with Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in Toronto and has participated in a number of group exhibitions in Chicago, New York, Vancouver and Toronto.

Tony bennett Tony Bennett, born August 1926, is an American singer and visual artist. He is an accomplished painter and creates works under the name of Benedetto. He is the founder of Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in New York City. Tony followed up his childhood interest with serious training, work, and museum visits throughout his life and he sketches or paints every day, even of views out of hotel windows when he is on tour. He has exhibited his work in numerous galleries around the world. He was chosen as the official artist for the 2001 Kentucky Derby, and was commissioned by the United Nations to do two paintings, including one for their 50th anniversary. His Boy on Sailboat, Sydney Bay is in the permanent collection at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park in New York, as is his Central Park at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. His paintings and drawings have been featured in ART-news and other magazines. Many of his works were published in the art book Tony Bennett: What My Heart Has Seen in 1996. In 2007, another book involving his paintings, Tony Bennett in the Studio: A Life of Art & Music, became a best-seller.

Bill bissett bill bissett, his name purposefully de-capitalized like fellow poet e.e. cummings, was born and raised in the confines of Halifax in the post-swing, pre-beat era. At 17 he ran away from home and eventually landed in the underground arts scene of Vancouver, for which he became a sort of political, social, and literary figurehead, even serving a short stint as the poetic focal point for a ragtag assemblage of avant-garde rockers who tagged themselves â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Mandan Massacreâ&#x20AC;?. Settling in Kitsilano, he became a main player in the counter-cultural scene that would soon explode in the city during the early years of the1960s. In 1964 he had founded a publishing company, blewointment press, and had begun putting out a mimeographed but influential experimental magazine, which lasted until his first book of poetry appeared in 1967. bissett had soon earned a relatively immense amount of acclaim in the underground art communities of Canada and the United Kingdom, not only for his wildly inventive poetry, which took its cues from Dada, the Beats, and modernists like cummings and Charles Olson, but also for his acrylic paintings. bissett has remained a major figure on the Canadian and alternative poetry and arts circuits, publishing more than 60 books by the end of the century and winning the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize at the 1993 British Columbia Book Prizes.

Bruno bobak Bruno Bobak was born in Wawelowska, Poland in 1923 and immigrated to Canada in 1927 where at the age of 13 he began art classes in Toronto under the artist Arthur Lismer, and later at the Central Technical School. In 1942, he joined the army and was selected to be an official war artist, being in his early twenties, he was Canadaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s youngest. He married fellow war artist Molly Lamb in 1945. Both artists settled briefly in Ottawa after the war and then moved to Vancouver where Bruno taught at the Vancouver School of Art starting in 1947. After gaining critical acclaim and working as an artist and instructor for a decade on the west coast, he moved his family to New Brunswick to work as a resident artist at the University of New Brunswick. In 1962, he took the role of Director at the University and then retired in 1986 and devoted his time to painting and other hobbies such as fishing and gardening. He was a member of the Canada Group of Painters, Society of Canadian Painter -Etchers and Engravers, Canadian Society of Graphic Art, Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour, British Columbia Society of Artists, and the Royal Canadian Academy. He participated in more than two hundred and fifty group exhibitions and has had more than eighty one-man shows, both in Canada and abroad. He continued painting until his death in September 2012.

Molly bobak Molly Lamb Bobak was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1920 and began her formal art training in 1938 at the Vancouver School of Art under Jack Shadbolt and remained until 1941. She joined the Canadian Women's Army Corps (C.W.A.C.) in 1942 and rose to lieutenant where she became the first official female War Artist with the Canadian Army in Europe, 1945-46. She married fellow war artist Bruno Bobak in 1945 and settled briefly in Ottawa returning to Vancouver in 1947 where she worked as an instructor for painting at the Vancouver School of Art. Molly received a Canada Council Fellowship to study in Europe. In 1960, Molly was studying in Norway when Bruno was offered the position of Artist-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick. In 1962, the couple moved to Fredericton, where Molly taught workshops at UNB and also did live art lessons on television. Mollyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body of work mainly divides into two streams; her elegant watercolors and her expressionist oil paintings. Molly has served on several boards, including the National Gallery Advisory Board. She has received honorary degrees from UNB, Mount Allison University and Saint Thomas University. Molly Bobak was one of the first generation of Canadian women who were able to earn a living as a professional artist.

Ron bolt Ron Bolt was born in Toronto in 1938 and his career spans close to forty years. As a painter, he has held over 70 solo exhibitions in Public and Commercial galleries in Canada and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the United States, Mexico, England, Japan and China. Commissions include two Government murals, three books and numerous corporate and private installations. His paintings, prints and limited edition books are in the collections of museums, public galleries and major libraries in Canada and abroad. Bolt has continued the powerful tradition of landscape painting in Canada by focusing on the coastal and river waterways that fascinate him. In the early years, the artist was profoundly influenced by abstraction and adopted a minimal approach to his subject matter. Gradually, with a return to oil, a subtle change occurred leading to very complex compositions, richer colour and expressive brush work. Two remote residencies in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland and in the Mohave Desert helped to promote this change. In 2003, a Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society sponsored an expedition down the Snake River in the Yukon for fourteen days. The ultimate effect of this experience on his painting has been to rein-force Bolt as a “northerner” and a “romantic” following but reinventing a Canadian tradition. Ron is also the cofounder of ART magazine and a founding member of Visual Arts Ontario.

Jeff bridges Jeff Bridges was born in Los Angeles, California in December 1949, and graduated from the University High School in Los Angeles, California, in 1967. After graduating from high school, Bridges journeyed to New York City where he studied acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio. Also, after turning 18, Bridges joined the United States Coast Guard Reserve, where he served for eight years. As a dedicated artist across various mediums, he has been praised for his eclectic work of fine art, photography, and music in addition to his highly acclaimed film career. A cartoonist, some of his doodles have appeared in films including K-PAX and The Door in the Floor. In 1984, Bridges and other entertainment industry leaders founded the End Hunger Network aimed at encouraging, stimulating and supporting action to end childhood hunger. He has teamed up with the Zen Peacemakers who operate a non-traditional soup kitchen that builds a cross-class community and provides food and wellness offerings with dignity. In November 2010, Bridges became spokesman for the No Kid Hungry Campaign of the organization Share our Strength, whose goal is to present and undertake a state-by-state strategy to end childhood hunger in the United States by 2015.

Kate bright Kate Bright, an English artist, is a graduate of Gold-smiths College in London, where she attended from 1994-96, and is currently a lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, England. Born in Suffolk, UK, she also attended the Camberwell School of Art in Lon-don from 1985-88. Kate Bright has had solo exhibitions at the Centro Internacional de Arte de Salamanca, Spain, The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK, Vitamin Contemporary Art, Turin, Italy, and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, UK. She has attained critical acclaim for her most recent paintings, a series of canvases that depict snow and are about denial of depth through the repeated use of line abutted against flatter planes of colour. The white of the snow (the white of the paint since it is an illusion) contributes to this effect. She also disregards a certain pictorial by choosing to apply glitter to her works. The modernist purity of the white and the driven snow is sullied by this coating; they are white without being innocent. Her decorativeness and illusion, as well her use of surface is entirely functional as she presents radiant images to her viewers. She provides intrigue and allows her audience to take away a real experience.

Eric cameron Eric Cameron, born in 1935, is a conceptual artist that studied painting under Lawrence Gowing at Durham University in England and art history at the Courtauld Institute. In 1969, he came to Canada where he taught at the University of Guelph, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the University of Calgary. Cameron is best known for a series of conceptual objects he calls "Thick Paintings," which he began in 1979 and has subsequently made his life's work. These paintings consist of ordinary house-hold objects that Cameron has since painted with many thousands of layers of gesso. He has continued to work on each object, refusing to consider a painting finished until it is sold. Cameron originally anticipated that the result of this procedure would be a painting that gradually grew in size while maintaining the contours of the buried object, but something quite different happened. With the mounting layers of gesso, the objects not only grew, but changed their shapes radically as a result of the chemical processes of drying and the mechanical processes of brushing on the paint. His work has been shown extensively in Canada, notably by the National Gallery of Canada and the Winnipeg Art Gallery. In 2004, he received a Governor Generalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Eric Cameron is represented by Trepanier Baer Gallery in Calgary.

Michael cartellone Michael Cartellone was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1962. He attended the Cleveland Institute of Art at age four, with his focus already set on the Visual Arts until he began drumming at the age of 9. He completely threw himself into drumming, playing his first gig when he was just 11 years of age. Michael then continued a side by side study of drumming and painting, throughout his grade school and high school years. By the time he graduated high school, he was per-forming four nights a week, earning his living as a musician- yet at the same time, had already begun selling paintings. At age 22, Michael moved to New York City to further his career. He worked in the garment industry, in the Art department of a children's clothing company by day- and played drums by night. During this time, he had his first Gallery Show in the Washington D.C. area at King Street Gallery. In 1998, Michael joined the legendary Southern Rock band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, where he currently can be seen on tour throughout the world. Michael's Art has received strong media attention over the years and he has had gallery shows in New York City, Los Angeles, CA, Phoenix, AZ, Long Island, NY, Ft. Collins, CO, and Las Vegas, NV. He is happily married to his ac-tress/singer wife, Nancy Meyer, and resides in New York City.

Chuck close Chuck Close, born Charles Thomas Close on July 5, 1940, is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. He is noted for his highly inventive techniques used to paint the human face. An accomplished print maker and photographer, he has participated in over 800 group exhibitions, with his work being the subject of over 200 solo exhibitions in more than 20 countries. In 1962, Close received his B.A. from the University of Washington and then attended graduate school at Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1964. Upon returning to the United States, he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts. Closeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first one-man show was in 1970 and in early 1973 his work was first exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art. His later paintings differ in method from his earlier canvases, but the preliminary process remains the same. Close puts a grid on the photo and on the can-vas and copies it cell by cell. His later work branched into using topographical map style regions of similar colors, and using larger grids to make the cell by cell nature of his work obvious even in small reproductions. Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors. Close is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has served on the board of many arts organizations and was recently appointed by President Obama to serve on The Presidentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

David a colville David Alexander Colville, born August 24, 1920 in Toronto, Ontario, is a wellknown Canadian painter that has exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally including at the Tate Gallery in London and the Beijing Exhibition Center in Beijing. He attended Mount Allison University from 19381942 and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. After receiving his degree he en-listed in the Canadian Army under the War Artist Program. During his four year deployment to the European Theatre, he famously painted troops landing at Juno Beach on D-Day. After the war he became a faculty member with the Fine Arts Department at Mount Allison University where he taught until 1963. Colville left teaching to devote himself to painting and printmaking full-time from a studio in his home on York Street; this building is now named Colville House. In 1973, he moved his family to his wifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hometown of Wolfville, Nova Scotia. In 1983, an international touring retrospective of his work was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Alexâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paintings walk the line between realism and surrealism. They are realistic without being naturalist yet also surreal without the spectacle. A unique blend that he has created over the years. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Colville aligned himself with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and was a card carrying member for numerous years. Colville still continues to produce provocative pieces that have a very public appeal.

Ken DanBy Ken Danby was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario in 1940. His parents were very supportive when Ken's artistic skills expanded throughout his elementary years at Cody Public School, where he became known as "the school artist", and they soon became aware of the serious degree of his interest. It was actually Ken’s older brother’s interest in art, one that was eventually abandoned, that inspired Ken’s artistic side at an early age. When he was ten years old, in Grade Six, he informed them that he wanted to become an artist, and eight years later, in 1958, he enrolled in the Ontario College of Art. In 1964, Gallery Moos presented Danby's first one-man show, which promptly sold out and set an example that was repeated and surpassed over many years. Over the years, Danby and Moos have presented many one-man exhibitions and the artist has participated in numerous group shows internationally. Major collectors, including private, corporate and museum collections, responded enthusiastically and the artist is today recognized internationally as one of the world's foremost realist painters - as well as being one of Canada's best known artists. Ken Danby has lived and worked in the countryside near Guelph, since 1967. The recipient of many awards and honours, such as the Queen’s Silver and Golden Jubilee medal, member of the Order of Canada and he was even nominated for Canada’s Walk of Fame.

Duncan de kergommeaux Duncan de Kergommeaux is a Canadian painter whose artistic career has spanned almost 6 decades. Born in 1927, in Premier, Northern British Columbia, he attended the Banff School of Fine Arts in 1951. Since then he has had more than 50 solo exhibitions across Canada, including an exhibition circulated by the National Gallery of Canada, and many more national group-shows. He has lived and worked in New York City, and in Paris in the Canada Council Studio. Duncan taught as a professor of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario from 1970 until 1993, and went on to work as a Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. Kergommeaux is an artist with an interest in process, form, abstraction and perception. His paintings have evolved throughout the decades as he experimented with different styles. In the 1950s his paintings mostly entailed linear abstractions, and into the 1960s he went on to produce some of his cube paintings. During the 1970s, Kergommeaux became more process-oriented with his grid paintings and support-specific drawings. Both the material presence of the paint on the canvas and his method of application situate his work as a collection of his thoughts, feelings, and the things he experiences. The artist currently lives and works in Chelsea, Quebec.

Louis de niverville Louis de Niverville was born 1933 in Andover, England and came to Canada with his parents in 1934. He lived in Montreal before moving to Ottawa in 1953. He settled for the next thirty years in Toronto where he established himself as a nationally recognized artist. Louis received considerable encouragement from his brother Georges, a trained artist, to pursue a career in art. Niverville acknowledged wide-ranging influences on his work, from the American cartoonists Saul Steinberg and James Thurber to the French painters Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. His first solo show was at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1957, followed by exhibitions at the Here and Now Gallery in Toronto in 1959 and 1967. He specialized in illustrations, working for Mayfair magazine and the CBC graphics department besides exploring venues for his own work. In the 1970s, he exhibited paintings dealing with dreams and nightmares at the Jerrold Morris Gallery with Sol Littman. As well, his paintings were included in the 4th, 5th, and 6th Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Painting. Louis current works are primarily painted collages created out of images made on hand-painted papers which are then cut, composed and glued to wood panels. His work is in numerous private and corporate collections as well as museums in Canada and the United States.

Robert genn Robert Genn was born May 1936 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He is a well-known Canadian artist, who has gained recognition for his style, which is in the tradition of Canadian landscape painting. Genn particularly identifies with the Canadian Group of Seven and has been compared to them throughout his career. He runs the Painter's Keys web site, a worldwide artists' community, with his staff and volunteers. This sends out an erudite, a free twice-weekly newsletter, that is sent to 135,000 artists in over 100 countries, and claims the largest collection of art quotes online with over 5,382 authors quoted. In 2005, Genn campaigned against the Chinese website, archworld.com, which was selling thousands of high-resolution images of around 2,800 artists' work illegally, without permission. After failing to gain support from the Canadian government or the Chinese embassy in Ottawa, Genn used his web site to enlist subscribers' support to email objections to arch-world, resulting within days in over 1,000 online complaints from artists, dealers and politicians to the company and governments. Genn has been a member of the Board of Directors at Emily Carr College of Art & Design and continues to be an active community member in the Canadian and British Columbia art scene.

April gornik April Gornik, born in 1953 in Cleveland, Ohio, is an American artist known for her beautiful landscape paintings. Gornik received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1976 and currently lives in New York City where she has been a resident since 1978. Gornik has stated that she creates art that makes her question, and derives its power from being vulnerable to interpretation. In 2003, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Guild Hall Museum and was the Neuberger Museum of Art Annual Honoree in 2004. As well, in 2007, The Smithsonian Art Collectors Program commissioned Gornik to produce a print to benefit the educational and cultural programs of the Smithsonian Associates. Her work is exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Cincinnati Museum, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Modern Art Museum of Art of Fort Worth, the Orlando Museum of Art, and other major public and private collections. She has shown extensively, in one-person and group shows, in the United States and abroad.

Libby hague Libby Hague is a Toronto-based visual artist who works primarily in print installation. Her installations, done with paper, thematically deal with disaster and hope, and with the idea of the un-certainty of everything of importance and consequence in the world. She uses paper to express these concepts because it is a fragile and impressionable material. She advocates the pleasures and benefits of travel and has done installations in two international conferences and the International Paper Art Exhibition and Symposium, at the Chung Shan National Gallery, in Taiwan, as well as My one and only life so far, as part of Miner for a heart, in Melbourne, Australia. Hague is featured in the British book, Installations & Experimental Printmaking, by Alexia Tala, and won the 2009 Open Studio National Printmaking Award. She is represented in many public collections including the Donovan Collection at the University of Toronto. Her recent exhibitions have been shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, La Centrale, Montreal, Quebec, Durham Art Gallery, Durham, Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario.

John hall

John Hall did his training in art at the Alberta College of Art, Calgary and the Instituto Allende, Mexico in the 1960s. Since completing his studies in 1966, he has lived and worked in Calgary, Alberta; Delaware, Ohio; New York, New York; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and, most recently, West Kelowna, British Columbia. Hall has held teaching positions in art at Ohio Wesleyan University, the Alberta College of Art and Design, the University of Calgary, where in 1998 he retired from a full professorship in painting and drawing, and the Okanagan University College. Currently he holds a professorship emeritus at the University of Calgary. He now lives and works in West Kelowna, British Columbia. John Hall was elected to membership in the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1975. Represented in many public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Canada Council Art Bank, John Hall has also been commissioned to do paintings for Calgaryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Foothills Hospital, the Royal Bank of Canada, and Cineplex Odeon. He has been the subject of many solo exhibitions and has participated in group exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Europe and Japan. Likened to an urban archaeologist, Hall produces still life paintings that mine the rich complexity of contemporary urban life.

joice m hall Joice M. Hall is a realist painter known for her large-scale landscapes that depict, in precise detail, the panoramic sweep of British Columbia’s beautiful Okanagan Valley. With a career that spans over 40 years, Hall’s work goes beyond realism, and pairs the “real” with certain aspects of the “surreal”, while using the “ideal” as her organizing principle. Hall spent most of her career based in Calgary, before moving to Kelowna in 1999. Working in a representational style, her landscape subjects have been drawn from these diverse locations. Enchanted by the natural beauty of Western Canada, Joice has looked to nature for an immediate and inexhaustible fund of visual riches. In her landscapes she has created a sense of wonder, a sacred and transcendental view of the world. Joice studied at the Alberta College of Art. She has had solo exhibitions in Canada and Mexico including the Art Gallery of Hamilton; the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; and Casa Verde Galeria, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; and has been included in many group exhibitions across Canada.

Ted harrison Ted Harrison is one of Canada’s most popular artists. His distinctive style of painting is colourful, sophisticated and completely unique. Harrison was born August 1926 in the village of Win-gate in County Durham, England. In 1943, he enrolled in Hartlepole College of Art and began to study art and design in earnest, but the Second World War interrupted his education. Following military service, he returned to art school and in 1950 received a Diploma in Design. The following year he received a teaching certificate from the University of Durham and began a twenty-eight year career in education. In 1987, he received the Order of Canada for his contribution to Canadian culture and was awarded an honorary doctorate from The University of Athabasca in 1991, an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from The University of Victoria in 1998 and a distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Alberta in 2002. His paintings can be found in private and public collections throughout Canada, and in New Zealand, Japan, Germany and the United States. In addition to his work as a painter, Ted has written and illustrated several children’s books. His other projects include his design of the Yukon Pavilion, for Vancouver Expo’ 86, and the design of a Canada Post Christmas Stamp in 1996.

Patrick hughes Patrick Hughes, born October 1939, is a British artist working in London. He is the creator of â&#x20AC;&#x153;reverse perspectiveâ&#x20AC;? or "reverspective", an optical illusion on a 3-dimensional surface where the parts of the picture which seem farthest away are actually physically the nearest. Hughes was born in Birmingham where he went to school in Hull, and then continued on at the James Graham Day College in Leeds in 1959. Later he taught at the Leeds College of Art be-fore becoming an independent artist. His first "reverspective" was Sticking Out Room, in 1964, which was a life-size room for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1970. He returned to explore the possibilities of reverspective in 1990 with Up the Line and Down the Road, in 1991. Since then, his reverspectives have been shown in London, New York, Santa Monica, Seoul, Chicago, Munich and Toronto. He has written four books investigating themes that parallel his art. His latest is Paradoxymoron: Foolish Wisdom in Words and Pictures, which was published in 2011. He has written for The Observer, The Guardian, and the ICA Magazine, among others. In July 2011, Hughes celebrated 'Fifty Years in Showbusiness' with two exhibitions, a retrospective at Flowers East, and current works in Flowers Cork Street. Hughes has been represented by Angela Flowers for more than forty years.

Everett kinstler Everett Kinstler was born in New York in 1926 and started his career at age 16, drawing comic books, paperback book covers and book and magazine illustrations. He studied at the Art Students League of New York and later taught there from 1969 until 1974. Kinstler's pulp illustrations number in the hundreds, and cover many different genres including western, romance, crime, mystery and war. In comic books, he worked extensively for Avon Periodicals, as well as Ziff-Davis Publishing Co., Dell/Western Printing, National/DC, St. John Publishing Co., Marvel/Atlas Comics Group and Gilberton. He worked on well-known comic books as either cover artist, interior inker or both. Some of his work includes Flash Comics, The Black Terror, The Black Hood, AllAmerican Comics, Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, Thrilling Comics and Sheriff Bob Dixon's Chuck Wagon. Kinstler ultimately made the transition to portraitist, and soon established himself as one of the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s foremost portrait painters. He has paint-ed over 1200 portraits of leading figures in business, entertainment and government, including official portraits of Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. In 1999, Kinstler received the Copley Medal from the Smithsonian, National Portrait Gallery, which is its highest honor. He is rep-resented by the Metropolitan Muse-um of Art, Butler Institute of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum as well as many others.

Ruth kligman Ruth Kligman, an abstract painter was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1930. She said she had wanted to live the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life since reading a biography of Beethoven at 7. She was the lone survivor of the 1956 car crash that killed Jackson Pollock, who was her lover at the time. She is mostly known for her role as a muse, lover, friend and subject of an impressive number of American artists. Ruth moved to New York when she was young and began to paint seriously in 1958, studying at the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research and New York University. She was 26 and working as an assistant at a small gallery when she met Pollock, who was 44, estranged from his wife, Lee Krasner, and losing his battle with alcoholism. She was married for seven years to a Spanish painter, Carlos Sansegundo, and lived briefly in Ibiza and later, off and on, in Santa Fe, N.M., though her life remained centered on the New York art world. Her works include Joan of Arc and the Light and Demon series. During different stages in her career she experimented with iconography, gilding, curved canvases, bright primary shapes, and sunset-inspired gradations. In 1974, Kligman published a memoir, Love Affair â&#x20AC;&#x201D; A Memoir of Jackson Pollack about her relationship with Pollock.

Harold klunder Harold Klunder was born in the Netherlands in 1943 and immigrated to Cana-da with his parents in 1952. Primarily a painter and a printmaker, he has exhibited his work throughout Canada, Europe, the Unit-ed States, Australia, Japan, and China. His work is included in public and private collections such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the MusĂŠe d'art contemporain de MontrĂŠal. Klunder, a full-time painter and a part-time teacher, is principally known for his abstract paintings which are based on a non-traditional notion of "the self-portrait". They often feature an abundant use of paint, and take years to complete. His paintings are layered, crusted and rich with globs of paint. Klunder's recent paintings are layered, crusty, variegated and rich. He scumbles copious amounts of paint over paint until the work is full of active organic forms. At first the completed works look spontaneous, as if the paint has been furiously slathered on, but a deeper look reveals the complexity and variety of the improvisational marks that allow the viewer to look through the top layers. Klunder has exhibited constantly for more than three decades since his first solo show at Sable-Castelli Gallery in 1976, and currently lives in Montreal.

John koerner John Koerner is a painter, printmaker, etcher, muralist, educator, and author who was born in 1913 in Novy Jicin, Moravia, a province of Czechoslovakia, in what is now in the eastern part of the Czech Republic. He settled in Vancouver in 1939 and obtained a Canadian citizenship in 1944. He took law at the University of Prague, where he studied with Fritz Kausek, and Philosophy and the History of Art at Sorbonne in Paris, with Victor Tischler, Othon Friesz and Paul Collin. John taught drawing and painting at the Vancouver School of Art from 1953-1958, and at the University of British Columbia, from 1959-1971. The artist states that early on in his career he decided what the general direction of his work should be and that it would celebrate all positive values of the world. He uses many different varieties of medium such as acrylic, water-colour, casein, crayon, ink, collage, lithograph, and etching. He focuses on still life and chooses to depict the Canadian West Coast landscape in his works and showcases different aspects of nature such as flowers, the shoreline and seascape. Koerner now in his 99th year is currently the oldest acting member of the Vancouver school of painters. At present he still lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia.

George littlechild George Littlechild is of Plains Cree descent, born August 16, 1958 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Known for creating culturally rich imagery and his use of bold colours, George Littlechild is recognized as one of the foremost First Nations artists working in Canada today. He is also the author/illustrator of three children's books including the award winning publication, This Land is My Land. His post-secondary educational achievements include a diploma in Art and Design from Red Deer College and in 1988 he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. In recent years, George Littlechild's interest in his heritage has led him to relearn his past and explore many sociopolitical issues related to his people including the Reserve system and Residential schooling. His art is directed to those who do not under-stand First Nations culture in an attempt to alleviate prejudice. More importantly, he hopes his work contributes to stopping racism which he feels is one of the most destructive forces of our modern society. Since 1988, his art work has been exhibited in numerous solo group exhibitions in commercial and public galleries and museums in Canada, the United States, Japan and Germany. His work is also included in numerous public, corporate and private collections including the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec, the Edmonton Art Gallery, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery and the Dunlop Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Landon mackenzie Landon Mackenzie has been a practicing artist for thirty years. Starting as a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1972, Mackenzie has built an impressive body of work and is probably best known for her large format paintings which combine layers of information often from history and science while still being grounded in a reference to landscape. Her work has been collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musee d â&#x20AC;&#x2122;art Contemporain de Montreal among many others. Mackenzie received her Masters of Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montreal where she also began her teaching career. She was also the first to receive the rank of full professor, when Emily Carr be-came a University in 2008. In 2009, she was awarded the inaugural Ian Wallace Excellence in Teaching Award for her passionate contribution to the school and art in Vancouver. Mackenzie is also the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal for her service to Canada in Visual Art. She is particularly interested in current research on the brain and neural mapping in relationship to the mapping of our physical environment which has led to her recent series 'Neurocity' and 'The Structures'. Her work has been written about extensively and she continues to exhibit in Canada and internationally.

Ron martin Ron Martin was born in London, Ontario, in 1943. He attended Beal Tech between 1960 and 1964 and shared his first studio with fellow Beal Tech graduate, Murray Favro. He became influenced by Greg Curnoe, Marcel Du-champ and Kurt Schwitters for his own work with painting and collage. Martinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first solo show, of 'Pop Collages', was mounted at Toronto's Pollock Gallery in February of 1966. Martinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s art deals with the investigation and manipulation of ideas with paints and watercolours. Seeking to investigate that nature more closely, he developed a conceptual system of painting where he divided a canvas of fixed dimensions into one-inch squares, and filling each with three simple strokes of acrylic paint in the shape of an N, alternating the direction of the strokes be-tween horizontal and vertical, and choosing the colour of each stroke from eight basic hues, according to a predetermined pattern. The "meaning" of these World Paintings, as he called them, resides in the viewer's experience of the perceptual phenomena they display. Each is a highly individualistic shimmer of optically blended colour that relaxes and contracts, shifts and ripples, as we attempt to isolate parts or absorb larger areas. Martin has exhibited widely in Canada, the United States and Europe, and participated in the Venice Biennale in 1978.

Tom miller Tom Miller was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1943. He studied art at the University of Redlands, California, and received his B.A. in 1965 and received his M.F.A. in painting from the University of Iowa in 1969. As well, in 1969, he moved to Nova Scotia and became an Art Consultant to the Kings County School Board. Later on he became a Canadian citizen. Although Miller was born in and grew up in the United States, he considers himself to be a Canadian artist. He has worked as an art teacher, designer of theatrical productions and as a painter. In 1972, he co-founded the Mermaid Theatre in Nova Scotia which specializes in puppet and mask productions. Miller worked as a resident designer for Mermaid until 1987. After Mermaid, he began to paint full time, exhibiting regularly in commercial and public art galleries. Miller has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria, as well as galleries in Florida and California. His paintings are part of private and corporate collections in Canada, the United States and Tai-wan. Tom maintains that it is the interplay of object, color and light which motivates him to create his paintings.

Kristine moran Kristine Moran is a Canadian born painter who lives and works in Brooklyn. Moran's lushly painted surfaces focus on rituals and fantasies connected to weddings, carnivals and other culturally significant events. She uses her brushwork to alert the viewer to the subtle psychological undertones in her works. In 1997, she received her diploma in Landscape Architecture from Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto, Ontario and in 2004 majored in Painting and Drawing where she graduated with an Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Ontario. After moving to New York she attended Hunter College, CUNY where she received her Master of Fine Arts in 2008. In an excerpt from the artist’s website she stated that she’ll often start with a loosely constructed narrative at the beginning of a painting series. This sets the direction and tone of the work. But once a painting gets under way, the work really takes on its own form, and the narrative recedes back. Many paintings begin with the idea of a figure or space undergoing a sort of metamorphosis. As the figure goes from being recognizable—or representational, into something irrational—or abstract, notions of self are deconstructed, and ideas about one’s identity become much more openended.

Daphne odjig Daphne Odjig was born in 1919 in the village of Wikwemikong on the Manitoulin Island Indian Re-serve. Daphne was interested in art since childhood but rheumatic fever forced her to quit her formal education at age 13. Her biggest influence was her paternal grandfather, Jonas, a tombstone carver, who played a huge role in the development of her creative spirit. She began to fuse together elements of aboriginal pictographs and First Nation art with European styles and techniques. She gained critical acclaim in the 1960â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s for her pen and ink drawings of the Cree people from Northern Manitoba. She was also recognized for her rare exploration of erotic themes in some of her paintings. In 1973, Odjig became a founding member of the Professional Native Indian Artists Association and in 1974 she opened the first Canadian gallery exclusively representing First Nations art in Winnipeg. As well as being elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Art and receiving the Canadian Silver Jubilee Medal, her artwork has been shown on a series of Canadian stamps and she was one of only four artists in the world selected to paint a memorial to Picasso by the Picasso Museum in France. She currently lives in Penticton, British Columbia, where she continues to focus on her love of art, despite announcing her official retirement in 1999.

Charles pachter Charles Pachter is known for his iconic representations of the Canadian flag, the Queen, Margaret Atwood, Pierre Trudeau and other cultural icons throughout Canadian history. Over his 50 year career he has come to define his own vision of Canadian culture through his boldly graphic works and his unmistakable patriotism that proves completely unique from any other. A painter, printmaker, sculptor, designer, historian and lecturer, he was born in Toronto and holds degrees from the University of Toronto, The Sorbonne, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He received his doctorate from Brock University, the Ontario College of Art and Design, and the University of Toronto. An Officer of the Order of Canada, he is a recipient of the Queenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Jubilee medal and a Chevalier of Franceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His sculptures are in-stalled across Canada and his paintings hang in public and private collections around the world. Pachter lives and works in Toronto where his work is on permanent display at the Moose Factory Gallery.

Ross penhall

Ross Penhall, a Canadian painter, is renowned for his many landscape paintings. His technique of disassembling and reshaping natural and fabricated elements through a variety of mediums results in very unexpected and unconventional compositions. His works have been compared to masters of the past, such as Grant Wood, and as well to members of the Group of Seven. Penhall has attended several institutions including Capilano College in North Vancouver, Emily Carr Institute of Art and De-sign, and Malaspina Printmakers Society, in Vancouver, BC. Drawing upon the influences of such notable painters as Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O’Keefe, Grant Wood and Emily Carr, Penhall flattens, stylizes and simplifies forms, embellishes colors and exaggerates contrasts. Penhall’s manicured landscapes reveal mankind’s inherent desire to modify and shape their surroundings. He shows his audience nature that has been shaped and redefined by humans while eliminating the presence of man altogether. His work depicts urban landscapes – groomed lawns, shaped shrubbery, pruned trees – all arranged in eye-pleasing symmetry that speaks of a serene, orderly world. Penhall is represented by several galleries such as Caldwell Snyder Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Caldwell Snyder Gallery in St. Helena, CA, and Campton Gallery in New York. His works are found in numerous corporate and private collections worldwide.

Joseph plaskett Joseph Plaskett, born July 1918, in New Westminster, British Columbia, is mainly known for being one of Canadaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most established painters. A pupil of Hans Hofmann, he studied in New York and Provincetown in 1947 and 1948. Plaskett studied art in Banff, San Francisco, New York, London and Paris, where in the 1950â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s he focused on etching and engraving. He taught intermittently in Canada until 1957 and afterwards settled definitely in Paris where his studio became an informal salon for Canadian painters, writers, poets and filmmakers, interfacing with artists from other countries. Since the 1940s, he has had over 65 solo and group exhibitions, with work in major public, private and corporate collections, including the National Gallery of Canada. His chosen subjects have always been intimate expressions of everyday life â&#x20AC;&#x201C; interiors, still life, and portraits of friends and models. There is a warm humanity to his work, a love of light and form and colour that is evident in every painting he produces. In the spring of 2001, he received the Order of Canada for his excellence in the field of visual art. In 2004, he set up The Joe Plaskett Foundation, which makes an annual award to a Canadian artist to enable them to travel to Europe to grow and study. Plaskett continues to paint daily and his work is held in many collections worldwide.

Chris pratt

Christopher Pratt, born in Newfoundland on December 9, 1935, is one of Canadaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most prominent painters and printmakers. His Newfoundland lineage roots itself deep on both sides of his family. His motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s side were among the first settlers to arrive on the island in 1595. His interest in painting was encouraged by his grandfather who took up painting as a hobby when he was 65. Pratt also finds expression through his prose and poetry which are inspired by the same ideas as his visual art. His work and life have always been deeply affected by his love for Newfoundland. He uses his work as a way of under-standing himself as a Newfoundlander, his life as a Canadian and the place Newfound-land occupies in the world. In his twenties Pratt dropped out of pre-med at Mount Allison and in 1956 traveled to New York where he visited many of the major galleries and art schools. The deep connection that he shares with his province and the people in it is the source of his most profound inspiration. His paintings and prints express the emotional state of his inspiration and through this capacity he is able to connect with his viewers in Newfoundland, Canada, and abroad.

Mary pratt Mary Pratt was born in 1935 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. In 1957 she married Christopher Pratt a well-known painter and printmaker and they settled in Salmonier, Newfoundland, in 1963. Although she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1961, Pratt only began to seriously paint once her children reached school age. The first solo exhibition or her work was staged at Memorial University Art Gallery and since then she has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions. She has received honorary degrees from Memorial University and other universities across Canada. She was also named Companion of the Order of Canada in 1996 and in May 1998, Pratt was the recipient of the 1997 Molson Prize in the Arts awarded annually to two distinguished Canadians by the Canada Council for the Arts. Known for her perceptive use of light, Pratt's subject matter are mainly still life paintings of domestic objects and the female figure. The images in her paintings take on a realistic dimension and resemble a photograph. Her work is inspired by her own experience of managing a home and raising children. Much of her work expresses delight in the sensual qualities of everyday objects. Mary Pratt is represented in art galleries and many university and corporate collections; such as the National Gallery of Canada.

Mel ramos Mel Ramos, a figurative painter from the United States, was born in 1935. He specializes most often in the nude figure, with his work incorporating elements of realist and abstract art. Born in Sacramento, California, he gained his popularity as part of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Ramos is best known for his paintings of superheroes and voluptuous female nudes. He attended Sacramento Junior College and where he received his B.A. and his M.A., finishing his education in 1958. Ramos taught art at Elk Grove High School and Mira Loma High School in Sacramento from 1958 to 1966. After two brief college teaching assignments, he began a long career at California State University, East Bay in Hayward, California which lasted from 1966 to 1997, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He received his first important recognition in the early 1960s and since 1959 he has participated in more than 120 group shows. Like his contemporaries, Ramos produced art works that celebrated aspects of popular culture as represented in mass media. His paintings have been shown in major exhibitions of Pop art in the U.S. and in Europe, and reproduced in books, catalogs, and periodicals throughout the world. Ramos has been represented by the Louis K. Meisel Gallery since 1971.

Philippe raphanel Philippe Raphanel was born in Paris, France, and immigrated to Canada in 1981. He graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Appliques, in Paris, France where he received his diploma in Fine Arts. A well respected artist with international recognition he has since exhibited his work across Canada, the United States, Australia, and South Korea. With countless solo and group exhibitions under his belt he has received numerous Canada Council grants and the VIVA award in 1996. As a teacher he has taught at Simon Fraser University and at Emily Carr University of Art and Design for the last eight years. Raphanel is currently represented by the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver. He continues to live and work in Vancouver as well as Brazil.

Charles rea Charles Rea has been an important figure in the Vancouver painting scene for more than twenty years. Rea graduated from the Vancouver School of Art in 1979 and has exhibited extensively throughout Canada. His work, first introduced in the Vancouver Art Gallery group show “The Young Romantics” in 1985, makes use of varying and often unconventional materials. He has placed a labyrinth on the surface of the con-vex mirrors in the Mirror Maze series, re-created Rorschach-like patterning in the Diptych series, and worked with abstracted symbols that are articulated on reflective ground in Silver Screens. Rea’s use of materials and iconography don’t necessarily appear to have a common thread but on a more fundamental level his body of work can be interpreted as explorations of space and structure. Each series of work derives from the artists thoughts on a distinct perspective. Compositionally a feeling of disorientation can be attained from the way he chooses to represent depth, distance, and positive and negative space. The visual response to each piece provides the viewer with a need to maintain equilibrium. His work is included in many private and corporate collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank.

Milly ristvedt Milly Ristvedt was born in Kimberly, British Columbia in 1942. She studied at the Vancouver School of Art, now Emily Carr Institute, from 1961-1964 and graduated in 2008 with a B.A. Honours in Art History at Queenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s University. Milly lives in Tamworth, Ontario and has a lengthy exhibition record in Canada and around the globe. A teacher, com-munity activist, gardener, tai-chi practitioner, former vice-president of Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, and a member (beyond redemption) of the modernist project, she is in many corporate and private collections and has had numerous solo and group shows across Canada, the USA and in France. Like many other artists in her field, Ristvedt utilizes ready-made materials, most recently, paint chips from popular brand names, such as in the Ralph Lauren Lifestyles series. Each square canvas, constructed as large paint chips with hokey brand monikers, such as Sport and Thorough-bred, labeled on the bottom or center, present various grid formations of actual paint chips balanced against one another. Ristvedt has utilized the blocks of commercial domestic colour and design, branded and retailed as high culture to present works that are both humorous and compelling in their inter-play of contrasting colour and tone.

James rosenquist James Rosenquist, born in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1933, settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1942. His mother, also a painter, encouraged Rosenquists artistic interest. In 1948, he won a junior high school scholarship to study art at the Minneapolis School of Art at the Minneapolis Art Institute and subsequently studied painting at the University of Minnesota until 1954. At the age of 21, he moved to New York City on a scholarship to study at the Art Students League. He at-tended drawing classes organized by Jack Youngerman and Robert Indiana, and at the same time in 1957 became a member of the Sign, Pictorial and Display Union, in Brooklyn, New York, where he painted billboards in the Times Square area and other locations around New York. His commercial experience allowed him to develop his own very particular style of pop art. His most famous paintings share many of the characteristics of billboards, with his most well-known piece, F-III, at 86 feet long. Rosenquist has made a number of screen prints and etchings, but most of his graphics are lithographs. His prints have frequently been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally and can be found in many permanent collections including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Edward ruscha Edward Ruscha, born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska and was raised in Oklahoma City, where his family moved in 1941. In 1956 he attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, and had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery. Ruscha achieved recognition for paintings incorporating words and phrases and for his many photographic books, all influenced by the Pop Art movement. His textual, flat paintings have been linked with both the Pop Art movement and the beat generation. Ed Ruschaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s artistic training was rooted in commercial art. His interest in words and typography ultimately provided the primary subject of his paintings, prints and photographs. The very first of Ruscha's word paintings were created as oil paintings on paper in Paris in 1961. Since 1964, Ruscha has been experimenting regularly with painting and drawing words and phrases, often oddly comic and satirical sayings alluding to popular culture and life in LA. He has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives that have traveled internationally, and in 2001, Ruscha was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art. Leave Any Information at the Signal, and the first comprehensive monograph on the artist, Richard Marshall's Ed Ruscha, was published by Phaidon in 2003. He continues to live and work in Los Angeles, and currently shows with Gagosian Gallery.

Tony scherman Tony Scherman is a leading Canadian painter who was born in 1950 in Toronto, Canada and graduated from the Royal College of Art in London, England, with his Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree in 1974. Scherman has had solo shows in galleries and regional museums throughout Canada and the Unit-ed States. His expressive work often depicts historical figures and is held in public collections worldwide. He is particularly known for a monumental cycle of Napoleon portraits and French Revolution paintings collected in the 2002 art book, Chasing Napoleon: Forensic Portraits. He is one of the most successful contemporary practitioners of encaustic painting. This style of painting, which is also known as wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. His pieces look realistic yet unsettling because in actuality they are not as familiar as they first seem. The use of wax paint gives Tonyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work a much different presence than a painted portrait might; they are much more visceral. He has a tendency to paint well known faces in a way that the viewer isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t used to seeing them. No heroic poses or perfect makeup; he humanizes these celebrated faces and makes them relatable. Since his first showing he has exhibit-ed his works in solo and group exhibitions in North America and Europe. He has also been a visiting critic and lecturer at universities, art colleges and art galleries in North America and around Europe.

Sean scully Sean Scully was born in Dublin in 1945, but grew up in London, where his family moved when he was still a child. An American citizen since 1983, Scully lives and works in New York, London, and Barcelona. He studied at Croydon College of Art and Newcastle University. He was a recipient of a graduate fellowship at Harvard in the early 1970s and subsequently settled in New York. Scully's paintings are often made up of a number of panels and are abstract. His paintings typically involve architectural constructions of abutting walls and panels of painted stripes. In recent years he has augmented his trademark stripes by also deploying a mode of compositional patterning more reminiscent of a checkerboard. He has stated that this style represents the way in which Ireland has moved towards a more chequered society. Scully was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1989 and 1993, an incredible honour for such a young artist. Seanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States. He is represented in the permanent collections of a number of museums and public galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Gallery, London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and many other private and public collections worldwide.

Jane seymour Jane Seymour is a multiple Emmy and Golden Globe winner, recipient of the Officer of the British Empire, and has proven her talents in virtually all media; the Broadway stage, motion pictures and television. Her love of art and color has led to her great success as a painter in watercolors and oils and as a designer. Awarded a Golden Globe for her role as “Dr. Quinn,” Seymour made history with her six season “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” series. Jane was born in Hillingdon, England and raised in Wimbledon. Actively involved in numerous charitable causes, Jane is a member of the American Red Cross National Celebrity Cabinet and works for Childhelp, as an International Ambassador. When she is not acting, writing or designing, Seymour can be found in her painting studio. Seymour began painting over a decade ago, and today, Seymour sketches and paints at her Malibu studio, on movie sets and on her travels. She has been asked to create costume and set designs for the Houston Ballet’s production of “Five Poems”, and the mounting of her first one woman museum exhibition in 2004 at the Butler Institute of American Art. As well, she was selected as one of the official painters of the 2005 Torino Winter Olympics, and the official artist of the 2006 Naples Winter Wine Festival, the 2008 Beijing Olympics and most recently the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Seymour continues to raise much needed funds and gives through donations of her artwork to numerous local and national charities.

Gordon A Smith Gordon Appelbe Smith, born June 18, 1919 in East Brighton, England, is a Canadian painter, printmaker, sculptor, and teacher living in West Vancouver, British Columbia. Gordonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s father was an amateur watercolor painter and instilled a love of art in his sons, of-ten taking them to galleries and encouraging their painting. Gordon and his brother attended the Harrow County School for boys where they received four years of formal art training. Gordon came to Canada in 1933 and attended the Winnipeg School of Art from 1937-1940. After serving in World War II, Smith taught at the Vancouver School of Art for ten years, and then spent 26 years at the University of British Columbia before retiring in 1982 to paint full time. An accomplished internationally recognized artist, Smith won the "Structure with Red Sun Award" in 1995. He was named a member of the Order of Canada in 1996. He is an Education Professor Emeritus at the University Of British Columbia. In 2007, he received the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts. In March 2009, at The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, he was named a laureate and presented with the Governor General's Award in the Visual and Media Arts. His works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, as well as the Vancouver Art Gallery. Smith continues to be involved in the contemporary art scene and he has exhibitions regularly at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver.

Jeffrey spalding Jeffrey Spalding is an artist, educator and art museum professional that was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1951. In November 2002, he was appointed Director and Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Atlantic Canada's largest art museum. Previously he served as Professor of Art, at Florida State University and Director of the Appleton Museum of Art, at Ocala, Florida. Spalding has taught at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; York University; The Banff Centre; and The University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. He has been an invited artist and guest speaker internationally, and has delivered lectures at the majority of art institutions in Canada. His exhibition record as an artist, like that of the list of public and corporate collections, is diverse. His paintings have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Spalding obtained his BA from the University of Guelph, MA from Ohio State and MFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Spalding has organized over 150 exhibitions for dis-play primarily in North America and has been a perennial curatorial contributor to: Calgary's Artweek/Art Walk Festivals; Art 97 and Art 98 International Art Exposition and Fair, Vancouver; Toronto International Art Fair 2000, as well as Edmonton's The Works, art festival. In October 2003, Spalding accompanied the Governor General of Canada upon Canada's State Visit to Finland and Iceland. Recently, he has completed a monograph upon fifties abstractionist Oscar Cahen, and is at work on numerous publication projects including: Painters Eleven, Les Automatistes, and solo artist books accompanying exhibitions including: Tony Scherman, Jacques Hurtubise and Mary Pratt among others.

Joanne tod

Joanne Tod, born in Montreal in 1953, was educated as a painter at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, studying there from 1970 until 1974. Joanne had an early interest in Pop art and documentary photography eventually evolving to the highly realistic painting style she is known for. Tod first gained critical attention in 1982 with her participation in the artist-organized Toronto exhibition Monumenta. In an era when many art-world insiders considered the practice of painting to be ethically unjustifiable, Joanne Tod's work tackled important social issues such as identity, power, racism and cultural imperialism. Tod typically paints representational images in a virtuoso style, focusing on the "re-presentation" of an appropriated image from advertising or the popular media. As one of Canada's most noteworthy contemporary artists, Tod brings a critical edge and sharp wit to the practice of representational painting. Between the years 2007 and 2011 Joanne painted a portrait of every solider that fell in the Afghan war, naming the project O Canada â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A Lament. Her paintings have been widely exhibited across Canada and the United States, including solo exhibitions at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Power Plant, Toronto / Mendel Gallery, Saskatoon, the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University, MontrĂŠal, and abroad in France, Germany, Turkey, Mexico and Italy. Her work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Robert McLauhlin Gallery and many other public, private and corporate collections in Canada.

Renee van halm Renée Van Halm was born in the Nether-lands in 1949 and immigrated to Canada with her family as a young child in 1954. She now lives and works in Vancouver after many years in Toronto, Montréal and Berlin, Germany. Her undergraduate work was completed at the Vancouver School of Art in 1975 and she received an MFA from Concordia University in Montréal. After moving to Toronto in 1978 she worked to set up the artistrun center Mercer Union also working as the director and curator. In addition to over 30 solo exhibitions her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions such as: This is Paradise, in Toronto; Architypes, in Sydney, and Tokyo, as well as Enacting Abstraction, and weak thought at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada. Her solo exhibition Dream Home originated at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and toured Western Canada in the early 2000’s. Her work is collected publicly and privately in Canada and elsewhere around the world. In addition, she taught for over a decade at York University before joining the faculty of Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 1992. Since her retirement in 2010 she has held the position of Emeritus Professor. Her work is represented by Birch Libralato in Toronto and the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver.

Peter von tiesenhausen Peter Von Tiesenhausen, an Albertan artist, has a deep connection to the land which is present in all of his work. The artist utilizes what is immediate to his artistic practice, whether it is painting a canvas, doing an installation, using mixed media, or creating a sculpture made of willow branches, granite, bronze, or wood. Born in British Columbia in 1959, he moved with his family to Demmitt, Alberta, outside of Grande Prairie. He has had a strong attachment to his family homestead since he was young and still lives there with his own family. Peter graduated from the Alberta College of Art + Design in Calgary and is known for his large-scale outdoor installations. Much of Tiesenhausenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s art deals with the ideas of transformation and transience. His refusal to take on the parameters of any one medium sets him apart from his contemporaries, and he often chooses unique places to do his installations, such as high up in trees, in the middle of the brush, or in wide open fields. He lets nature take its course with his very non-traditional methods as he burns, carves and transforms environments into art spaces. Much of his work deals with humanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s impact on the environment. He gained attention from the media in 2003 when he claimed that a piece of land near his home was his art and therefore protected by copyright in order to protect it from an oil well being drilled. One of his most notable series, The Watchers, incorporated five huge wooden figures that he traveled across Canada with. He documented the figures in various landscapes across Canada. The artist sees himself as a Canadian working on the idea of expanding Canadian Culture.

Chris woods Chris Woods, born in New Brunswick, Canada in 1970, currently lives in Chiliwack where he is represented by Gallery Jones in Vancouver. His work showcases the effects of consumer culture on the individual. The images he creates are filled with both irony and sincerity as he chooses to paint his friends against a contemporary landscape of popular culture. He uses belligerent branding and advertising to portray his views on consumerism. In 1995, he was commissioned to paint The Stations of the Cross for St. David’s Anglican Church in Vancouver and in June of 2004 he premiered the first part of a two part series called The Magic Hour. The exhibit dealt with the effects of car advertisements on the physical and mental terrain of the 21st century. Part Two followed in April of 2007, and was the completion of a five year project. His show Dream-land, in 2000, looked at advertising through the scope of magazines and billboards. Using himself and his friends as models he brought to attention the blurring lines between stardom, self, and selfish desire. In 1998, he was awarded a B.C. Arts Council grant for the production of his series McTopia. He mixes sculpture and painting to create an entirely unique vision of a globalized future. He has been featured in Maclean’s Magazine and earned the 2000 Gold Award for Illustration at the National Magazine Awards in 2001. Wood’s best known painting, McDonald’s Nation, 1996, has become iconic in the anti-corporate movement.

Michael yahgulanass Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, born in 1954, from Delkatla in Masset on Haida Gwaii, is a very active player in the world of Canada's iconic First Nations' art. After a career that spanned three decades of involvement in high-profile Haida political successes, Yahgulanaas decided to finally apply his formal training in classic Haida design to create accessible and socially relevant art. Yahgulanaas invented a new genre of graphic narrative called Haida Manga which is part Haida, and part Asian influence. Michael takes traditional Haida stories and illustrates them using the Japanese comic style called Manga. Social and environmental issues have continued to play a big role in his works. Yahgulanaas also works in metal and his commissions include The British Museum, The City of Vancouver, and the Winter 2010 Olympics organizing committee. His work is exhibited internationally in Japan, Korea, England, and Canada. In addition to works on paper, mulberry bark, canvases and metal sculptures, Yahgulanaas continues to publish books. Of the numerous books he has published Flight of the Hummingbird, first published in North America and now available in five languages, is a best seller and includes essays contributed by the Dalai Lama and Nobel Peace prize winner Wangari Maathai. Not to mention, the "Declaration of Interdependence" written by Dr David Suzuki, was illustrated by Yahgulanaas. Over the last twenty years Michael has also fought to protect the Haida peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s homeland, Haida Gwaii, from being logged. He currently lives on Bowen Island in British Columbia.

Robert young Robert Young, born in 1933 in British Columbia, Canada, is known for being a figurative and abstract painter and printmaker, renowned for his collage aesthetic. Young grew up in Burnaby and in 1956, he enrolled at the University of British Columbia where he studied art history and graduated with a Bachelorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree in 1962. In the same year, he travelled to London, England, where he studied etching and engraving with Henry Wilkinson at the City and Guilds of London School of Art. Returning to Vancouver in 1964, he enrolled at the Vancouver School of Art, where in 1966 he completed an Advanced Diploma in Graphics. In the same year, he went to London where he would continue to work and exhibit until 1976. Young, throughout the 1970s, painted large photo-based works focusing primarily on the subject of women and in the early 1980s, Young developed a series of works inspired by the "accidental collage" that he discovered while peeling away layers of old wallpaper during some home renovations. This led to works such as A Persona for the Prince, 1981, in which flatly painted shapes are combined with delicately drawn lines and the outlines of a hand and a pair of eyes, evoking the early Cubist collages of Picasso. Young continues to produce paintings and prints rooted in his personal experience and his love of art history.

Tomas zahor

Tomas Zahor was born in the Czech Republic in 1963 and lives in Prague with his wife Jane, with whom he shares his profession, and his son James. Zahor studied painting and restoration and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Since his graduation, he has been involved and participated in several incredibly remarkable restoration projects, some which include: St. Wenceslas chapel, the Pride of St. Vitus Cathedral, St. George Basilica, The National Theatre, the Wallenstein Palace, and other monuments in the Czech Republic and all around Central Europe.