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Hotspur Studio
The Ottawa Citizen, Critic's Pick
Saturday, May 10, 2008
by Arts Editor, Peter
Simpson
Victoria Ward's subjects
and materials can change - watercolours or rural France in 2004, mixed-media
images of a scarred Ontario mining town (Cobalt) this weekend at Artguise - but
one thing doesn't change. Always, the viewer gets the deep,
disquieting sense that whatever humans build onto nature is vulnerable, to
nature's dominance, and perhaps even its wrath. man's homes and buildings seem
to tip, swirl, or other wise appear unstable and transitory. The
murky colours in her new exhibition 'rockets & gallows', draw you beneath
your feet. The show contiues to May 28 at Artguise Gallery, 590 Bank St.,
across from the Clocktower.
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
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
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)
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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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