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gary blundell
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Hotspur Studio

 

media - e.g. blundell

The Brantford Expositor
July 2008

Steve Menhinick

FOUR APPROACHES TO LANDSCAPE

The abstract relief painting of Gary Blundell appears initially to have nothing in common with the pristine realism of Doherty or Watts and , although his expressive technique and style are far removed from painterly realism, his attention to the detail of the natural world in its most physical sense brings us closer to a geological representation of the world.  A strong sense of composition, colour and form - build up by his thoughtful manipulation of plywood, plaster, and paint - enables the viewer to step into Blundell's world, where man intervenes to change nature.  

The Sudbury Star, On the Arts
October 2006

Marek Krasuski

FINDING BEAUTY IN THE ROCK

Gary Blundell is a geologist by training, but a cartographer by artistic impulse. His attempt to chart the vast geological diversity of the Sudbury region in an untraditional abstract series of works is on display at the Art Gallery of Sudbury. These are intriguing pieces that incorporate a surprising range of colours, presenting an unusual beauty in their idiosyncratic features.

Blundell's works are threaded together by geometric patterns partly shaped by horizontal and vertical lines routered into the surface of plywood panels. There is a tendency for interest to wane quickly as a result of the apparent sameness of these mainly abstract interpretations, most of which follow a prescribed pattern of blocks accumulating upon and around each other like cells in an organic structure. But this is a superficial perception that fades after a more considered contemplation of their individual characteristics, many of which envision the vitality of a subject mistakenly seen as inert and lifeless - rock!

Crow flight Minerals, for example, is an oil-on-wood interpretation of a rock surface that blazes with colour diversity and unique geometric configuration. A series of long, thin rocks stand perpendicular to each other, dominating the centre. Larger rocks, each uniquely shaped, appear to move out from this clustered periphery, illuminated by firey reds in some and shades of gold in others.

Rational materialists would scoff at the idea of rock imbued with a life force. Others might hold a different view. Theosophists and others sharing similar metaphysical viewpoints consider the mineral kingdom to have consciousness, a decidedly controversial, but intriguing, and even inflammatory notion in an area where we depend so much on the extraction and manipulation of minerals. There is no evidence that Blundell shares this view, but his animated interpretations of this regions crustaceans, each stamped with his unique imprimaturs, do bring to mind alternative ideas about Sudbury's rock - inescapable , beautiful and integral to our history. Indeed, the relationship between its eternal presence and human activity is never from out attention in these works.

Connection to the literal bedrock of our existence is an interpretive exercise that Blundell conveys with an ambiguity mirroring his own ambivalence about Sudbury's mining history and the huge consequences for the lay of the land.

In Edge, a shuddering reaction is evoked by a forbidding image of what looks like the cold dominion of an industrial landscape. There are the characteristic geometric lines that divide the image into rows of rectangular shapes. But then there is the horizon line, a deathly black streak above which blood red strokes fill the sky. It has the power to evoke images or a hellish order as well as awe. The power of human industry to create and simultaneously destroy is never far from the horizon of our awareness. In yet another work, Embarkation invites us to linger on the details of place and movement. This visually charged image is a layered, subterranean illustration that dances with rich contrasts. Daring brushstrokes of strong reds and yellows streak across the surface of geological formations separated by much darker tones, their shapes indeterminate, yet fully alive in their appearance of motion that flows across the display.
 



The Thunder Bay Source
November 25, 2005

by Kathryn Lyzun

On Saturday Nov. 26, two of Ontario's most interesting landscape artists are giving local artists the chance to challenge traditional ideas of landscape paintings and discover new and rugged contemporary practices. E. G. Blundell, born in England but a longtime resident of Ontario, and partner in artistry Victoria Ward of Oshawa, ON, will spend the day helping people develop new ideas about landscape painting and environmentalism at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. Their exhibition is already in place, showcasing Blundell's enormous, bold and "virile" gouged-wood paintings and Ward's smaller, softer wood and paper acrylics.

Curator Glenn Allison said the pair's style is a really hands-on, return to the earth concept that is the modern face of landscape painting. "In the 60's and 70's, landscape atrophied as an art form... the Group of Seven is now three generations gone. Blundell and Ward represent a new group of talent that is re-examining landscape, and it's coming up very differently, perhaps fortunately."



E. G. Blundell and Victoria Ward are two of Canada's best known landscape artists

Blundell and Ward the make the environment a direct part of their work, using the plywood canvas as a carving board before it's painted. They use heat guns, blow torches, hammers and gouging tools to carve out and illustrate their stories. Blundell, in fact, is not artistically trained: he has a background in Earth Sciences.

"You see in Blundell a real mining of the wood," Allison said, "It's a shift from objective representation, as seen in the old landscape style , to direct engagement. As environmentalism both artists call for a greater depth of identification with the forces of nature."

Blundell's mesmerizing pieces look geological, like flowing lava or alien terrain of rock and earth. Ward's are more ethereal , story telling pieces, like the strangely beautiful "lunar shack" which features a huge glowing moon painted above a tiny stuck-on photograph of a little shack, dwarfed against the massive sky.

The pair both strongly believe in their art, and Allison said the workshop will be wonderful for anyone willing to open his or her mind. "It's a chance to experiment and explore new ways to discover the earth."

 



Ottawa Xpress Magazine

April 14th, 2005
Artswatch
Anita Euteneier





Turkey, by Victoria Ward: inspired by a Chaim Soutine painting in the Louvre


INSIDE THE ARTIST'S STUDIO: VICTORIA WARD
I met Victoria Ward at her studio near the hamlet of Gooderham, roughly half way between Toronto and Ottawa. Surrounded by the rugged Canadian Shield and spectacular waterfalls, it's easy to see where Ward gets the inspiration for her paintings. The studio is a former woodshed that she and her partner, landscape artist E.G. Blundell, designed, converted and now share.

The walls of Ward's studio display postcards of works by favourite artists Tom Thomson and Anselm Kiefer, a collection of images of the Northern Lights, and Ward's own poetry. Ward is comfortable with words, having worked for 10 years as a professional playwright in Toronto. "I learned to write in metaphors, so images come easily," she told me.

In 1997 she looked around for a new direction and fell into painting-and in love-when she met Blundell at an art opening. "We started going sketching together and he was very encouraging," she said. Since then the couple have painted and exhibited together, most recently in a touring show from the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa.

Ward's early desire to become an artist was encouraged by her mother, a hobbyist painter who took her to museums and galleries. "I tend to think that people who step out and decide to take a creative avocation and turn it into a vocation become aware of their mortality. We don't feel like we have a lot of time, so it's about leaving our mark."

Ward's works on wood and paper reflect her observations of the natural world. "I am attracted to human interaction with the land," she said of her paintings that show barns and houses and hydro poles, but never people. "People get in the way of the scenery," she said.

Ward fuses text (often poems) with visual images, creating narratives with universal themes. They are less about a place than a place in time, where even Icelandic lava fields seem familiar. "Some artists like to be wilfully obscure. It just doesn't interest me. I think it's the height of arrogance when an artist says it all comes from the imagination... it's all out there, somewhere."

Ward is not a spontaneous painter. Much of what comes out gestates during long walks on the country roads near Gooderham and in travels in Canada and abroad. "Before I put a piece of metal on board, I've drawn it 740 times in my brain," she explained.

Outside the studio, a large picnic table serves as a work space for some of Ward's more hazardous artistic techniques. She often alters wood surfaces with a router, blowtorch and heat gun to add and remove paint.

Her upcoming exhibition at the Manx Pub in May is called Gamey. The idea came from a visit to the Louvre where she spent time with paintings by 18th century genre painters. Ward was struck by still-life paintings of splayed oxen and dead partridges displayed next to portraits of monarchs.

"Gamey" also refers to Ward's experience of finding roadkill and extricated deer limbs (left over from hunters) while out walking near her studio. The exhibit runs May 11 to 31 at the Manx Pub, 370 Elgin Street.

 



Marks & Concessions Catalogue, Robert McLaughlin Gallery 2005

essays by David Aurandt, Executive Director and R. M. Vaughan

available upon request
 



Express Magazine
Ottawa, June 12 - 18, 2003

Precambrian Shield foundation for artists

Sometimes a place leaves such an indelible impression that it must be revisited. Some two years after an artist residency in Iceland, Gary Blundell and Victoria Ward have done just that, revisiting Iceland's mystical landscape in drawings and paintings.

But while their new paintings and drawings incorporate elements of Iceland's gritty black lava fields, the rocky Precambrian Shield that surround their isolated studio in Gooderham, Ontario, chiefly informs the work.

Blundell and Ward, who are also life partners, moved to the rural area because of the landscape and because it's half way between their families in Ottawa and Orillia. Blundell first visited Gooderham to collect minerals while and earth sciences student at the University of Waterloo. But Iceland challenged his notions of landscape.

"In Iceland, the land is very young geologically, " he said in a telephone interview. "The lava comes out of the volcanoes and flows down over the surface of the land. When it cools, it forms a surface that's very broken and almost cellular." It does not look at all like the scraped, old and metamorphically reorganized Precambrian Shield.

In Waterline, Blundell gouges the wood with a router into small square forms that take on a pixilated quality. Oil paint is applied with layers of gradated colours, with green and grays becoming oranges and reds, creating a textured large-scale work that takes a full week to complete.

"There's a pivot in each painting, when I'm working on it for a few sessions and it starts to become more about the piece than the information I've selected to make the piece. It's a natural progression, very expressionistic. Blundell's exhibition Rock Show opens at Artguise June 13 at 7pm.

Gooderham is an unlikely place to live, , especially for a visual artist with a a theatre background and big city sensibility, but it's been the fuel for Victoria Ward's art.

"Living up here it's a funny cliché but you really start noticing nature and how it changes," she said. In Field and Steam, opening this week at the Manx Pub, Ward's small, framed paper works with acrylic and pen "are based on the kinds of things I see from my passenger window in the truck near my home: bulrushes, wetlands, hydro lines and litter."

Ward also reads form her poetry chapbook, notes from a log cabin, ,published by Ottawa's Camenae Press at Gallery 101, Nepean Street, on July 10 at 7:30pm.

- Anita Euteneier
 



Cornwall Standard-Freeholder

Artist has feel for Canadian landscape, August 29, 2002

By Kathleen Hay

It’s time to rock on at the Cornwall Regional Art Gallery. A new exhibit by E. G. Blundell, who actually has a degree in Earth Sciences, is a collection fo unique paintings with a three-dimensional touch – literally.

The collection, 40 Years of Rock – opens today and runs until Sept. 21 at the Gallery, 168 Pitt Street. A reception, with the artist in attendance, will take place at the gallery today at 7 p.m. The general public is welcome to attend.

“I love the texture of his paintings,” said Sylive Lizotte, gallery director. “The carving on the wood adds a great dimension, and the colours are the actual colours of the rock. He’s more interested in the pattern of them than he is in the landscape.”

Blundell sculpts large sheets of plywood, then uses rich oil paints to create his works. Rejecting a traditional approach to landscape painting, he believes high realism and abstraction are one and the same.

He was born in England, but immigrated with his family to Canada in 1962. A graduate of the University of Waterloo, the self taught artist began painting as a way of expressing his feelings of the Canadian landscape. He spends a part of each year traveling throughout the country, making sketch and visual records of his journey. Back in the studio, he words them into large, vivid art works. Instead of depicting a site visually, he expresses his impression of a particular place through textures and colours.

Blundell has been artist in residence for educational institutions in both Newfoundland and Iceland. “Half of his show is inspired by these scenes of Iceland and Newfoundland,” said Lizotte.

This is Blundell’s first exhibit at the city gallery , however his list of credentials includes the McMichael Collection of Art, the V. Macdonnell Gallery, BUSgallery and Joseph D. Carrier Gallery’s in Toronto.
 



From Eye Weekly

The Year in Pictures, December 2001

"The most surprising thing about the last 12 months of art? Not one Stanley Kubrick or the HAL the Evil Computer Tribute show -- no kaleidoscopic tunnel rides, no big black slabs, no shiny white rooms and only a handful of psychotic primates (mostly gallery dealers). What a waste.

Here, then are my 10 Best Art Moments for 2001. Just because I care.

7. Gary Blundell and Victoria Ward at the BUSGallery. The most joyous, straight out-of-the-tube paintings of the year. Imagine a Pucci pantsuit crafted out of wood and metal by rural Ontario eco-activists and you're halfway there."

R. M. Vaughan
 



From The Globe and Mail

For the article

Partners in Art and Life, July 17, 2002 by R.M. Vaughan (click here)


From Gallery Going, September 2000, Gary Blundell at V. MacDonnell Gallery

Like his predecessor Paul Walde at V. MacDonnell, Gary Blundell – who is trained as a geologist – takes a router to plywood and gouges his way into his paintings. But where Walde also employed porcupines and beavers as assistants in the wood-rendering process, Blundell, who lives in the Haliburton region of Ontario, depends on his camera for assistance. He is attracted, he says, to the rich and subtle colouration of the rock outcroppings of his neck of the woods (the show is called Metamorphic Goss, goss being short for gossen, “the rusting of an ore-carrying rock body at the surface”). The artist turns his colour photos into highly textured paintings, their raw and robust colour rubbed into the distressed wood in a manner that lands them somewhere between abstraction and the ways things really are out there on the Canadian Shield. –Gary Michael Dault
 



From The Broken Fence Society
Newsletter, summer 1999

The focus of Toronto artist, Gary Blundell, is to promote an interest in the natural world through his uniquely textured art. Blundell uses sheets of plywood, oil paint and a router to create large, extra-dimensional works of art that express his deep love and appreciation for nature.

By using the special technique of gouging, Blundell’s art takes trees, rocks and land forms into a realm beyond the two dimensional, His pieces range from semi-abstract interpretations of Canada’s rugged wilderness, to the subtlety of the microcosm: barnacles, fungi and lichens.

Blundell believes that people often appreciate the wonder of grand landscapes while ignoring the intricate beauty of nature at their feet. It is this abstract quality of nature that he endeavours to capture in his work.

Gary moved from England to Canada, with his family, in 1962. It was this early introduction to the Canadian wilderness which kindled his passion for nature.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Earth Sciences in 1983, he began painting. Initially his focus was on landscapes, but his travels across Canada engendered a deep appreciation for the beauty and rugged texture of the land.

Blundell’s sense of protection for the environment continued to grow and he ultimately became an Environmental Consultant, his chosen profession for the last four years. He has also worked for eco-friendly groups such as The Sierra Club of Canada, The World Wildlife Fund and The Endangered Species Coalition.
 


From Arts Watch –Ottawa’s art news and notes
‘Gary Blundell aims for eco-art’

Toronto landscape painter Gary Blundell knows a thing or two about rocks.

In describing his work he marries geological buzz words – like fissures, fractures, glacial deposits, deltaic features – with an artist’s vernacular.

This fusion of art and science dominates his bold and vivid paintings that grace the pages of recent issues of Canadian art mag Vie Des Art and the cover of eco-zine Wildflower. No surprise Blundell’s business card bills him as Environmental Consultant/Artist.

From childhood rock collecting Blundell moved easily to a degree in geological engineering from the University of Waterloo.

“I was much more interested in the aesthetics of what I was learning rather than the practical applications,” he says. Blundell returns briefly to his hometown for a showing of his work at Gamma Ray Productions Gallery (494 ½ Somerset West), on view until May 2.

Studying landscape painting under Ottawa artist Ian Hobson, Blundell took weekend trips to Lake Superior, Algoma with Gamma Ray colleagues and later with Toronto-based Bay Woodyard and pals. To expand his geographical horizons, Blundell journeyed to the Maritimes on sketching trips.

His most recent – a two month trek last summer – fueled (sic) eight months of studio painting and a half dozen gallery shows.

His large (3’x 4’) landscape painting incorporate a modified version of a technique pioneered by Canadian landscape painter Paterson Ewen – a supporter of Blundell’s work.

Using rough-textured plywood boards, Blundell gouges out areas of wood with a router. The defined space is transformed into images of the earth, sea and sky in a manner.

In his Bay of Fundy series, terracotta rock faces rise form the swirling blue waters of the Bay of Fundy’s tide-land drainage area paintings.

‘The tides come in and out twice every day with12-foot-high changes in water level,” he says. “The land is very scoured and scraped and these beautiful patterns appear.”

Blundell’s powerful palette is also infused with light. Acid-green lichen covers the red-orange rock of the Cape Breton Highlands. The cold waters off Newfoundland’s North Peninsula are all brooding blues and blacks, capped in white.

Shying away from brushes, Blundell applies paint with putty knives and removes it with rags. The works are textured and substantial. -Anita Euteneier


From Fragile Embrace – Reflections on the Environment

Burlington Art Centre, June 4 – July 23, 2000

Blundell has worked as an artist and an Environmental Consultant since the mid 1990’s. Although he has his degree in Geotechnical Earth Sciences, he shares a love for art, splitting his time between these two passions. As an artist he is self taught yet his works, much like the layering of the earth’s surfaces, are as close to a relief painting as is the rock faces he depicts.

Blundell admits: “I was much more interested in the aesthetics of what I was learning than the practical applications.” He has a fondness for the work of Paterson Ewen and has adapted a technique reminiscent of his painting style. Blundell uses rough textured plywood boards and with a router, gouges out the layers of laminate to create images of the earth, sea and sky. He then paints these panels, not with brushes, but with putty knives and removes the excess with rags. The paintings are moulded as much as painted. His colours are vivid and the final works emanate a presence that seems to be cut from the very surfaces they depict.

Blundell is an avid outdoorsman and a keen observes of nature. This love comes from a youth spent collecting rocks and exploring. He often visited abandoned mines in the Gatineau Hills near his hometown of Ottawa:

“I think painting is probably the best way to express the power and tranquility of nature. Nature is big and powerful but also so easy to destroy. Ever since I was a kid I’ve been attracted to natural places and animals…If you look closely in nature you will see many abstract paintings just waiting to be painted and those are the things I am trying to depict in my art. I let nature dictate to me, not the other way around.”

It is in painting close observations of nature’s abstract images, where Blundell is most successful. Initially created like traditional artworks, with a preliminary sketch and rough drawing, the creating process then takes over and Blundell gouges, pushes and manipulates his panels until the desire resulted is obtained.

The Serpent Rock Face is the most abstract of the three works on display. The gouged surface and repetition of shapes form undulating patterns across the painting surface. Not only does he record this rock face, he actually renders it, mirroring the intricate marking of a snake. We can see the interdependent nature of the environment resonated in this image.

Blundell’s work is not easy to absorb or interpret. His painting are raw and his technique primitive, a contrast to the refined, precise application of paint by Bateman, Danby, Ross and even the tranquility of the pastels of Kozowyk. Blundell, on the other hand, is crude and deliberate in his process. The geologist come painter is most at home unearthing his nature paintings instead of merely recording them, paint to canvas.
 


From Lola
Volume 8, Winter 2000 - 2001



Gary Blundell - Metamorphic Goss at V. MacDonnell Gallery 1340 Queen St. West

Sept. 9 – Oct. 7, 2000

Gary Blundell is Toronto’s butchest artist. A real man’s man. He chops wood, lives in the forest, can grow a really bushy beard, and likes chicks and beer. In other words, he’s great! His paintings are big, highly coloured blowups of minute lichen growths and rock formations. They look like abstracts, but so does most of the natural world, and that’s Blundell’s point. “Hey!” his work says, “Look around, look down, look close!” The undersides of rocks are pretty! Nature Art (such an awful term) is not exclusively about finding the perfect titanium white for the fur on the mountain goat’s arse. Blundell is part of a new gang of eco-artists who are taking the preciousness out of the form and replacing it with intellectual vigour. And such a manly vigour, too. R.M. Vaughan
 



Excerpted from The Hamilton Spectator
June 10, 2000

“Environment embraced – Landscape art featured in BAC exhibit”

Fragile Embrace: Reflections on the Environment is the rather fuzzy title of the Burlington Art Centre’s blockbuster summer show. Te exhibition purports to ‘celebrate the wonders of nature, reflect on the fragile condition of the earth’s ecology and examine the relationship between man, society and the natural world.” And it includes works by Robert Bateman, Gary Blundell, Ken Danby, Martha Henrickson, Akira Komoto, Patricia Kozowyk, Stephen Scott Patterson, E. Robert Ross, Alan Sonfist and Lorne Wagman.

The most abstracted images in the show are Blundell’s evocations of rock faces and roots. Blundell is a geologist/artist who was inspired by the paintings of Paterson Ewen. Like Ewen, he uses the router on plywood, but instead of Ewen’s views of the heavens, Blundell likes to look down and get up close to nature. The results are strongly expressionistic, rugged, almost visceral evocations of nature’s earthiness. Blundell’s relief-like images make an interesting comparison to the rhythmic, expressive paintings of Wagman, an artist who describes his work as a ‘rabbit’s eye view of meadows, and lichen covered rocks.’
 



Xpress Magazine
Ottawa, April 5, 2001

United colours of Gary Blundell,

the Canadian landscape on wood and paper

by Molly Amoli K. Shinhat

Some may see Gary Blundell's landscapes as un-Canadian. But it's not because they are not suitably deferential - Blundell is certainly all reverence when it comes to the craggy mysteries of the Canadian landscape. Rather, the blasphemy comes in his rejection of what has become the typical perspective of Canadien when it comes to landscape painting.

Blundell does not produce the usual broad Canadian vistas being taken in from a distance by an imaginary master of the land. Instead, the artist plunges right into the scene, embracing the perspective of a lover - he is up close and very personal. It's as if he hovers inches away from the subject of his observations.

A cursory glance at the 18 works on wood and on paper underscores the radical departure this alone makes from what we have come to expect to see when we look at paintings of the Canadian landscape.

Blundells' background as a geologist makes itself felt in his work, especially in the works on wood. Using routers of various kinds to gouge, carve and score plywood boards before painting them. Blundell manages to create an extraordinary sense of volume. Seen from a distance and up close from various angles, the textures reproduce the roughness and rawness of the natural world.

These large wood pieces ma well have been easier to create because Blundell did not have to create multi-layered three-dimensional spaces on two-dimensional surfaces. On this level, the works on paper are far less successful. Blundell is still mastering the art of creating volume on paper. While it is understandable he would use sheets of plexi-glass to cover the works for their protection, these glossy, smooth visual barriers definitely detract from Blundell's cause. Shroud-like, the plastic wipes out all the textures and illusions of depth Blundell may have created. Hanging them on the wall opposite the wood pieces further underscores this difference.

Perhaps it is the change in medium that led to the works on wood becoming truly abstractions (i.e. entirely non-representative of any recognizable natural form); whereas, in many of the works on paper, Blundell uses the same style but the resulting subject is identifiable.

Interestingly, each medium appears to have generated a markedly different palette, Blundell's investigations and experiments with colour take flight in the paper works. In the wood pieces , he sticks mostly to what most would typify as "natural colours" - oranges, browns, greys, blues, yellows and grey-turquoise colours as well as white and black. On paper, suddenly Blundell's imagination gets "coloured in" - does he realize finally almost every colour we can possibly imagine exists already somewhere in the natural world? Perhaps, for instance, this is what inspired his bright fuchsia shadows, which spill back around the edge of a group of rocks. The ease of executing colour transitions on a smoother surface may well form the underpinnings to this distinction.

Blundell is a former arstist-in-residence at the Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland. This summer he will head for what should be an engaging experience - a summer residency in Iceland.


 

Hotspur Studio

 
upcoming events:


Victoria Ward  2008

'rockets and gallows'new work

Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, DECADE, September

Pentimento Fine Art Gallery    Toronto, 
October 2 - 26

Art Gallery of Peterborough, March 13 - May 10, 2009

'shining or something electric', poetry & imagery book, hand bound by Don Taylor.
Email us if you want one!


Gary Blundell  2008

Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, DECADE, September

Art Gallery of Northumberland  Cobourg, October 18 - 
November 29

Artguise Ottawa, October 24 - 
November 12

Art Gallery of Peterborough, March 13 - May 10, 2009

Pentimento Fine Art Gallery   Toronto,  April 2009


           

 

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