SELECTED WORKS

at WINCHESTER GALLERIES MODERN
758 Humboldt Street (beside the Marriott)
March 5 – 27, 2011

OPENING RECEPTION
Saturday March 5, 2011   2 – 4 pm

Glenn Howarth was a prominent visual artist and a highly respected art teacher.  His main domicile was Victoria and area.  Howarth is represented in many public and private collections including The Canada Council Art Bank, The Glenbow Museum in Calgary, The University of Victoria and The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Howarth graduated with a BFA from the University of Victoria in 1970.  There he established what became a life-long affinity for mid-European expressionism as introduced to him by Professor Peter Kahn.  It was probably through Kahn that Howarth also developed a keen interest in the work of Francis Bacon.  Howarth took the Bacon idiom in the direction of both a blurring of blacks and whites to achieve simplified greys and a telescoping of images within a tondo format to create a sense of focus or of focusing…

The appeal of non-colour was lent credence by the view – one he had encountered as a student - that colour interferes with tonal dominance of peripheral vision. (A lot of astronomers look out from the side of their eyes to see dark and light differences.)

His sometime nostalgic sequences recall Eric Fischl’s work - Howard was a fan - and his periodic fantasy and surreal elements owe in part to the influence of his University of Victoria teacher Joan Cook from San Francisco.  Others whom Howarth singled out as influences were Don Harvey (for third year), Tony Urquart (for a summer course) and Toni Onley (for fourth year).

For someone as adept at monochromatic drawing as Howarth, he did not eschew colour. In many of his depictions of West Coast environs, colour is bold and varied, a powerful complement to the drawing elements which deliver the colour.

In 1978 Howarth was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy.   He lectured at the University of Victoria and the University of Saskatchewan, and was a faculty member at the Victoria College of Art, Acadia University and the Banff School of Fine Arts.  In 1983 he represented Canada at the XII Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil. For many years he was an Artist in Residence at Painters at Painter’s, Painter’s Lodge, Campbell River.

This exhibition is indebted to the generosity of Glenn Howarth’s partner Deborah Russell who - for the exhibition – has made available many remarkable works.