ART REVIEW; A Backup Plan With Refined Results
By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO
Published: May 30, 2004
"The painters Calvin Siebert, Jennifer Coates and Medrie MacPhee cover the walls with fantastic, brightly colored landscapes and architectural mazes. Surrealism, again, is an obvious inspiration, as those with even a cursory knowledge of art history will quickly determine. Lest you have forgotten your college art history classes, the paintings of Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy come to mind. There is also a little Max Ernst mixed in as well." Read more
Gallery exhibit boasts rarely seen drawings
Never-seen-before Group of Seven sketches and pieces from contemporary artists make latest McMichael installment unique, curators say
By Charlene Callaghan
Posted: 2008-03-03
"Curators at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection hope their new exhibit will draw visitors into the world of Canadian art.
"Drawing Conclusions", which debuted Feb. 23, displays freehand drawings by the Group of Seven and well-known Canadian contemporary artists.
Freehand drawing — one of the oldest and most primal of art techniques — depends heavily on an artist’s own skill to draw and sketch something, says curator and art historian Terrence Heath.
Never-before-seen freehand drawings by the Group of Seven are what make this particular exhibit unique, he says.
"The Group of Seven were more highly trained in the human figure than they were in drawing trees, lakes, and mountains," Heath said at the gallery last week. "Drawing was their skill before anything else."
Having examined the more than 70 selected pieces of freehand artwork from the Group on display, Heath says the artists’ skill was a natural quality.
"(Drawing) was almost a reflex action for them," Heath said. "In the same way we have a tendency to take a photograph of something, if they saw something, they drew it."
In an adjoining room, 25 pieces of artwork by nine Canadian contemporary artists hang on display. These artists — Allan Mackay, Sheila Butler, Nobuo Kubota, John Ward, Brian Gable, Ann Kipling, Charles Pachter, Tony Scherman and Medrie MacPhee — represent a new range of drawing, says director and senior curator Shelley Falconer.
"The idea was to extend the practice of drawing (and look at) how and where it's gone today," she said.
"Images of a Displaced Past", 1996
By: Johanna Drucker
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