The Long Lost Lyricism of Walter Joseph Phillips

My dear printmaking colleagues, there are times when you discover a rare treat, and such is the case of Canada’s son Walter Joseph Phillips. I embrace the lyricism of this man’s work and admire greatly his ability to bring light and breath to an inked up piece of paper. Truly, these images sing with life and profess Phillip’s love of his adopted homeland. There is much to see and immerse oneself into his landscapes. They are simultaneously subtle and vibrant, but one feels in his prints the rapture of a sunset or a gentle rain. I hope you enjoy these pieces and share them with your colleagues. They are worth a good, long look…..

Walter Joseph Phillips was an English-born, Canadian artist. He was born in 1884 in Barton-on-Humber, Lincolnshire, England. He first studied art at the Birmingham School of Art, then went to study art in South Africa and Paris. He eventually went to work as a commercial artist in Manchester and London, then from 1908 to 1911 served as art master at the Bishop Woodworth School in Salisbury, England.

In 1913, he and his wife, Gladys(Pitcher), emigrated to Winnipeg, Manitoba, where they lived for nearly thirty years. From 1915-18 he began to produce small prints and during the summers he taught art at University of Wisconsin.

During the Great Depression he was one of a handful of artists who made a living off of his work. During 1925-1935 his subject matter mainly dealt with life on the Canadian prairies Manitoba and Northwest Ontario, but in the mid 1940s he switched to making images of the Rocky Mountains.(He asked that his ashes be spread over the Rocky mountains because he loved them so.)

In 1940 he was asked to become Artist in residence at the Banff School of Fine Arts. He moved to Calgary the next year and taught art at the Institute of Technology & Art. In the late 1950s his eyesight began to fail, and he moved to Victoria in 1960 where he dies three years later at the age of 78.

Phillips is famous for his Japanese-style woodcuts. His work was not considered avant garde. In fact, far from it. He was sensitive to his environment and portrayed it with a gentle and poetic vision. There is a calm and peaceful feeling when one looks at his work. His work exemplified the British influence which prevailed in Western Canada at that time. Yet, the Japanese printmaking influence of the 1800s is present with his compositions and a reverence of natural environs, but moreso, a feeling of the work of James McNeill Whistler is deeply felt. The mood is delicately handled. His places are dreamy, sweet and quiet. One can feel at peace in this work, and you can understand how one is drawn to the light as it caresses the land, the trees and water. Phillips has given us city-dwellers, and those unfamiliar with the beauty of Canada, a taste for its tranquility, its majesty.

Permanent Collections:
National Gallery of Canada
The Winnipeg Art Gallery
Glenbow Museum – have an extensive collection and a research archive
Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies
Vancouver Art Gallery
The Pavilion Gallery in Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park – have the most extensive collection, The Crabb Collection, comprising nearly 850 pieces.
His work was also collected in London, Washington D.C., New Jersey and Japan.

He was also a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Sybil Andrews: Prints in HyperDrive!

Sybil Andrews (1898 –1992) was a British-Canadian printmaker best known for her modernist prints. She has become known for her multi-colored images which break with printmaking traditions. Her compositions gyrate and flip the viewer back and forth like riding a Brahma bull. Shapes and figures are used to help propel the viewer through her compositions much in the same way Cezanne does, only Andrews’ compositions have us on an unending whirly-gig or carousel and we can’t quite figure out where to get off.

Andrews’ works also reflect her society’s growing interest in the modern age, its concern with speed and with technological developments. She chose to portray rhythms of life with the human figure, through images of urban travel and sporting events.

Born in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England, Andrews was the third of five children born to Charles and Beatrice Andrews. After completing her high school education, Andrews wanted to study art, but her family couldn’t afford to send her to college. She went and apprenticed as a welder in an airplane factory during WWI, taking art correspondence courses on the side. When the war ended, she returned to her hometown and took up teaching at the Portland House School.

In 1922, Andrews moved to London to attend the Heatherley’s School of Fine Arts. She later took a secretarial position at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art to help pay for more classes. It was there she learned about printmaking. Her first subjects were the farming working class from her hometown, depicting agricultural life and sporting activities.

During WWII, she returned to welding warships. There she met her future husband, Walter Morgan, and in 1947 they got married and moved to Campbell River, British Columbia. Here she achieved a large following which lasted well into the 1950’s. Her work was rediscovered in the 1970’s and she enjoyed a growing and appreciative audience. She died in 1992 leaving a body of nearly 80 prints.

England has a large collection of her work at St. Edmundsbury Borough Council Heritage Service, Bury St Edmunds. This collection includes a number of early pieces produced while she lived in Suffolk. The Glenbow Museum has a major collection (over 1000 works) of Andrews' art, including all her prints, original blocks, sketchbooks, and personal archives.

Honors:
Andrews was elected to the Society of Canadian Painters, Etchers and Engravers in 1951. In 1975 she completed The Banner of St Edmund - a hand embroidered silk on linen, begun in 1930. It is found in the Treasury of St James Cathedral, in Bury St. Edmunds, the town of her birth.

Public Collections:
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
The Bank of New York Mellon Collection, USA (Private Collection)
British Museum, London, UK
Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, USA
Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Moyse's Hall Museum, Suffolk, UK
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand
Virtual Museum of Canada

This bit of news was sent from fellow inkster Laura Widmer after my initial post…..Sybil Andrews published a book titled "Artist's Kitchen" ISBN: 0 9512047 0 X. It was first published in
the UK in 1985 by RK Hudson with 2nd and 3rd runs in 1990 and 1992
respectively. It is a gem of a book of no-nonsense advice to
artists...sometimes amusing, sometimes harsh, but most often true. On the
title page it reads:

"This is the Kitchen where the ingredients of the cakes and pastries are
being assembled. It is NOT the display counter. It is a meditation on the
When, the How, the Where and the Why of Art and Artists."

Andrews compiled it from her years of private teaching and while it can be
tricky to find, it is well worth the search. The Campbell River Arts Council may still have a few copies of Andrews’ book available for sale. They discovered a box of books in 2009 and they sell them as a fundraising item(See attached newsletter).
http://www.crarts.ca

Raymond Verdaguer's Smack-down Prints

Raymond Verdaguer, b.1947 in the French Pyrenees, is of Catalan descent but claims Canadian citizenship. He is a popular printmaker and illustrator, currently living in New York. What struck me about Verdaguer’s prints was their bold, direct statement; even if the image was simply executed. They pack a wallop, and some of them can knock you out of the proverbial park.

I like this work, and respond equally to his black/white and color pieces. They sing with a similar bravado of a Fernand Leger, an 20thc. French artist known for his vibrant Cubist compositions. The smack-you-in-the-face message of Verdaguer’s images is what makes him such a breath of fresh air in a medium often challenged by an audience who are ignorant of the technical hurdles we printmakers face when making an image, or lack patience deciphering subject and content. Verdaguer gets right to it, doesn’t mince words and communicates more directly than anyone I’ve seen for some time.

Since 1976, Verdaguer has made prints which have been published in numerous books, newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, Harper 's Magazine, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Magazine, Libération, International Herald Tribune, Le Point, Le Monde diplomatique, amongst others . As a book illustrator, Verdaguer works for a number of major publishers in the U.S. and Europe ( Hachette Livre , Random House, Viking Penguin , etc.)

His images utilize strong compositions of shapes and contrasts. He usually deals with social-political-ethical issues. His illustrations show the disillusioned and suffering from an anthropological perspective. He presents to us the man suffering today as the one eternally suffering. Some of the subjects shown here deal with AIDS, mental illness, the human guinea pigs of medical genetic innovations, religion, human torture, fighting ignorance through education and man’s survival in war-ravaged areas. His work is candid and effective, which is the best thing I can say about anyone’s work, and so often cannot.

Verdaguer has shown his work in galleries throughout Canada, Croatia, France and New York City.

More of this printmaker’s highly desirable prints may be found at www.rverdaguer.com. Start collecting these now, folks.....

Joscelyn Gardner Dares Explore the Secret Lives of 18thc. Creole Women

My fellow printmakers, you know there come some instances when you look at a person’s artwork and it either bores you, or it blows you out of the room. The latter is the case with the work of Caribbean artist Joscelyn Gardner. The discovery of this person’s powerful and thought-provoking work has been nothing less than a revelation and reinforces the idea that the printed image can communicate an informative message, but also transcend to a level of enlightenment.

On the tiny island of Barbados, from whence Gardner hales, this artist has sought some acknowledgement of her culture’s ancestry and ultimately has disclosed the darker side of women’s existence and survival in the 18th and 19th century when slavery and brutality against women were as common as drinking one’s afternoon tea.

A self-professed feminist, Gardner looks back at the women from this island’s past and recreates personages of African descent through iconic and symbolic representations of women’s braided hair, slave ‘collars’ (shackles and instruments of torture) and botanical plants indigenous to the island. That may seem a strange combination of symbols but they are intertwined into the consciousness of this culture and its descendants’ legacies. In her Bleeding & Breeding series, and her Creole Portraits III suite, Gardner exhibits a body of work which focuses on Creole women’s secret use of exotic tropical plants on 18th century Caribbean plantations to induce abortion, the iron slave ‘collars’ were used to punish women slaves when they conducted abortions.

Each image’s braided hair takes on a woven design and pattern. We see them from the back of the woman’s head as though it is laid out before us like a curious specimen on display. They hover above the circular collar devices; their prickly, metallic edges visible, and below these collars are plants, hanging downward. The plants are the only colored part of these prints. Gardner’s rendering of these images is tightly analytic. They look like botanical prints from a distance until you get closer and realize there are other components that carry the proverbial wallop.

In another project, White Skin, Black Kin, Gardner addresses the Caribbean’s history of varying shades of blackness and whiteness as their Creole ancestry has intermingled since the 18th c. She seeks to address the history of black and white Creole women’s lives from the time of the Great Plantations. She “re-creates” her own vision of the past to expose shared realities of Creole women and Caribbean culture.

These works are strong and speak to a period of time most would like to brush past, but Gardner, holds our attention, commands it, and expects us to confront it. Like the messy slavery heritage the 18thc .and 19thc. United States would like to ‘move forward and forget’, this work directly confronts our past and makes is deal with the seriousness of it, the pathos, albeit through cold, clinical analyzation. The scale of these prints are life-sized which also sends a slightly uncomfortable ‘twinge’ up the back of our spines. How this all could happen is not the point. It did happen, and we can’t ignore it any longer.

What is assured is that Gardner’s prints are sparking dialogue and discussions about women from this period and show that they were masters of their own domain, so to speak, in that they refused to be enslaved further to care for children that were a product of rape, or driving up the slave population, nor would they let their bodies be used as slave birthing machines. It was a difficult period, but it was also a period where women still made choices in the face of an existence with no visible freedoms. I applaud Gardner’s honesty in bringing these works to the world. We need more artists who have the guts and conviction to tell the truth. We need more artists like Joscelyn Gardner.

Bio:
Gardner is recognized internationally as a Caribbean artist.Born in Barbados in 1961 to a family that has been resident on the island since the 17thc., Gardner also spent time in South America and West Africa. She taught art at the Barbados Community College (1987-1999), founded and directed the Art Foundry galleries (1996-1999), and worked actively on many committees. She moved to Canada in 2000 and currently teaches in the School of Contemporary Media at Fanshawe College, London, Ontario.

Exhibitions:
Spain, USA, Canada, and the Caribbean. Europe and Latin America
22nd and 23rd Sao Paulo Biennials
XXXI Biennial de Pontevedra, Spain
Art Basel, Miami, FL
museums in France and Puerto Rico
Brooklyn Museum, New York
Canadian Impressions, Washington, DC
Harrington Art Center, Kolkata, India


Awards:
Grand Prize - 7th International Contemporary Printmaking Biennial, Trois-Rivieres, Quebec (2011)
PUMA Creative Mobility Award (2010)
Canada Council for the Arts international residency grant at Caribbean Contemporary Arts, Trinidad (2005)


Education:
MFA - University of Western Ontario
BFA (Printmaking) & BA (Film) - Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

Permanent Collections:
Museum of Contemporary Art in Puerto Rico,
the Barbados National Gallery,
US Embassies Collection,
Museo TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica,
Fondacion Clemente in Dominican Republic,
and numerous corporate and private collections

Gardner’s work can be viewed at www.joscelyngardner.com