Johnnene Maddison &
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August 31 - September 18, 2021
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ARTISTS
JOHNNENE MADDISON seeks to understand concepts of individuality and the experience of women as both powerful and vulnerable. "Through active, almost chaotic line and brilliant colour, I confronts the complexity of identity, gender and a need to re‐invent myself after 40 years as a wife and mother," says Maddison. "My current challenge is to navigate life as an artist and find my place among the female artists who have preceded me. After much initial self‐doubt, I have come to know and trust my inner self and personal growth. I found a source for making art that allows me to reveal that which is private in a way that resounds as a universal truth. This public exposure becomes an on-going motivation. These are not dark paintings. They are about the moment, intensely personal and immediate."
ERIC ATKINSON is a major Canadian abstract landscape painter, whose extensive career as an artist and art educator straddles both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. A visual poet of the landscape, his paintings are created on the studio floor by working from all four sides of a canvas. He disrupts the picture plane, an amalgam of sand and glue, with incised calligraphic markings that suggest the natural rhythms of wind and water, of sculpted landforms created over the course of thousands of years from geological erosion – a layering of time and ancient memory.
Born in Hartlepool, England, in 1928, Atkinson was the assistant to Harry Thubron at Leeds College of Art from 1955 to 1961 before he succeeded him as Head of Fine Art. He emigrated to Canada in 1969 and became Dean of Applied Arts at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. The Basic Course at Leeds is now recognized as one of the most innovative post-Bauhaus education programs in Europe, a radical change in art educational thinking that values self-expression and the creative process over the transfer of technical skills and a permanent set of artistic values that also became part of Atkinson’s legacy at Fanshawe College.
Born in Hartlepool, England, in 1928, Atkinson was the assistant to Harry Thubron at Leeds College of Art from 1955 to 1961 before he succeeded him as Head of Fine Art. He emigrated to Canada in 1969 and became Dean of Applied Arts at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. The Basic Course at Leeds is now recognized as one of the most innovative post-Bauhaus education programs in Europe, a radical change in art educational thinking that values self-expression and the creative process over the transfer of technical skills and a permanent set of artistic values that also became part of Atkinson’s legacy at Fanshawe College.