Winchester Galleries is pleased to announce a new art collection at Bellewood Park Presentation Centre. This collection is a selection of abstract and still-life works by well-known Canadian artists, Joseph Plaskett, Mitchel Smith, and Greg Murdock. Joseph Plaskett became known for painting intimate, everyday scenes such as interiors, still lifes, and portraits of friends and models. Mitchel Smith is best known for his colour-field works that rely on vibrant colours and simplicity. Greg Murdock is known for his fresco-like mixed-media works that elegantly explore surface, space, and form with references to both external and internal worlds.

JOSEPH PLASKETT
Born 1918, New Westminster, British Columbia
Died 2014, Suffolk, England
Joseph Plaskett received a BA in history and a teaching certificate from the University of British Columbia in 1939. He went on to study with Jack Shadbolt and B.C.
Binning at the Vancouver School of Art and with A.Y. Jackson at the Banff Summer School. In 1946 he was awarded the first Emily Carr scholarship. Canada’s most
beloved painter now has his own foundation which awards similar scholarships. Known for his figurative and still-life paintings, Plaskett is highly collectable. Prior to
his death in 2014, Plaskett was still painting, exhibiting on two continents, and collecting awards including Officer of the Order of Canada and several honourary doctorates. Plaskett exhibited extensively in Canada as well as in London and Paris. His work is included in every major museum collection in Canada from Victoria to Charlottetown.

MITCHEL SMITH
Mitchel Smith is an abstract painter living in Canada. His work expresses the belief that the surfaces of pictures, the facture of the things, are what is integral
to the esthetic experience of painting. Large blocks and lozenges of rich textured colour jostle and abut against each other in a struggle which creates an intense and satisfying pictorial unity. Mitchel Smith was born in Liverpool, England. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Alberta in 1982. Smith’s pictures require the viewer to apply attention and discrimination, but then all art does when you get right down to it. Their originality often lies in their colour which tends to be layered and seems to float in an atmospheric way that contrasts oddly with the frank physicality of their surfaces. Textural incidents – surface ridges and passages of sweeping brushstrokes – sit behind the colour, evidence of an accumulative process that is apparently part of a long struggle. This seems part of their character, too – this sense that they’ve been wrestled with and with great effort brought to life.

GREG MURDOCK
Greg Murdock was born in 1954 in Saskatoon. He credits a trip to Europe following high school for kindling his passion to become an artist. When he returned from Europe, he enrolled in the faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Saskatchewan. Studying ceramics, sculpture, and drawing. He then travelled to Mexico to study bronze at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel Allende. In 1979 he moved to Vancouver to study at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design. There, he expanded his architectural vision and imagery, created installations, and discovered the potential of “spackle” as a medium and surface to explore in both his two- and three-dimensional works. He is known for his fresco-like mixed-media works that elegantly explore surface, space, and form with references to both external and internal worlds. His work can be found in the Vancouver Art Gallery, Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal, and the Art Institute of Chicago.