TONY URQUHART  

Leading Canadian artist, Tony Urquhart (b.1934) is well-known for his drawings, paintings, sculptures and “boxes.” (The latter, unique inventions, described by the artist as “paintings continued into the third dimension,” include, as well, the fourth-dimension since the boxes and their secret interior places require the discovery of the work over time.) Between 2001 and 2003, three retrospective exhibitions, focusing on Urquhart’s drawings, paintings and boxes respectively circulated throughout Canada -- recognition of the importance of his work to the Canadian art scene. Articulate, eloquent and knowledgeable, he has been a teacher for most of his life, inspiring several generations of artists.

Urquhart defined the principals of his art early in his career. In 1960, he wrote: “I feel that a painting, while being complete in itself design wise, should have a certain ambiguity. It should provoke thought and act rather like an open-ended question. It may puzzle but it must not bore.” Five years later, he wrote “Whether old master or contemporary, all of the works of art I most admire seem to have one thing in common -- an ‘after image’ …something about the painting that lingers in the mind and makes one want to come back to it.” That compelling quality has become a hallmark of Urquhart’s own paintings and sculptures. His work is engaged with visual ambiguity and the tension between the prose of representation and the problems of artistic poetry.

Concerned with the relationship between the land and human experience, Urquhart has written of his art, “Everything is subservient to the landscape vision.” But it is remnants of the cultivated, built and inhabited landscape that has most engaged him. Though his drawings and watercolours are inspired by the countryside of Ireland and France as much as his native south-western Ontario, Urquhart’s painted landscapes represent imagined places, shaped by aesthetic demands and by memory – the memory of the artist offers his viewers access into the landscapes of his imagination, a world that nature and culture share, sometimes uneasily. Infused with longing and desire, Urquhart’s imagined places are informed by memories of place and people, by an intuitive understanding of the power of archetypal symbols and by a deep longing for oneness with and wholeness in the world of nature.