Artist CV:BIOGRAPHYJohn Gould was born in Toronto on August 14th, 1929 and was the rare artist that committed his entire artistic career to the art of drawing. Attending the Ontario College of Art from 1948 to 1952, his early style was to be directly impacted by instructors such as Jack Nichols, and the viewing of mid-century abstract paintings at Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, and in particular the work of Willem de Kooning. He took part in his first group exhibition Greenwich (Isaacs) Gallery in Toronto and, in 1960, won the Elizabeth T. Greenshield’s Fellowship for figurative painting. The fellowship helped fund a voyage to Spain (the first of many international travels), and his first one-man show at the famed Dorothy Cameron Gallery in 1961 was comprised largely of work done during that trip. Championed early on by Alan Jarvis (director of the National Gallery of Canada from 195-1960), Jarivs said, “Gould’s major work goes far beyond drawing as we commonly understand it.” (Canadian Art Magazine, 1961). During the early 1960’s he would participate in large exhibitions at University of Toronto’s Hart House and a group exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) in 1965. It was also during this period that he began another important element of his practice, guided visual tours of his work eventually know as “Drawn Films”. The first of these films, “Little Monday”, would be screened at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966 representing Canada in the category “Films About Art”. That same year, he began exhibiting at Roberts Gallery of Toronto where he would go on to be represented for more than 40 years. Drawings displayed at Roberts Gallery produced on a 1969 trip to Japan were viewed by famed mime Marcel Marceau, resulting in Marceau’s commissioning of Gould to draw him during his performances in New York in the spring of 1970. Around that time Gould moved to a cottage in the small community of Waubaushene in Northern Ontario, where he began to undertake the most complex and ambitious drawings of his career. The “Ancestor Series” -- large-scale, densely crosshatched drawings made up of autobiographical elements, dream imagery and references from film history and literature were to be some of the most expressive and technically masterful work he was to produce. Four of these compositions and his films based on them were to be included in a group exhibition entitled “The Work of Art” in November of 1978 at the Art Gallery of Toronto. Central to his work was his need for spontaneity and improvisation, and his drawings from the 80’s and 90’s incorporated greater elements of collage and “ink-blotting” to provide a randomness he felt important to the vitality of his work. In 1996 Gould suffered a stroke that affected the right side of his body, and his skills as a draughtsman had to be re-learned (although, surprisingly, his abilities as a jazz clarinetist were unaffected), resulting in a technically simplified but expressively intense final period to his work. He passed away in Barrie, Ontario in January of 2010. FILMS While noticing a camera move across some of his drawings during an episode of Alan Jarvis’ television program “Things We See” in 1961, Gould was inspired to make the first of his “Drawn Films”. These films, shot on 16mm with an Arriflex camera, were to be guided visual tour of Gould’s artwork using the common visual grammar of film. His first film, “Little Monday” (1966), based on drawing done in Mexico in 1965, was purchased by the CBC and screened at the 33rd Venice Biennale as the only Canadian Film accepted in the category “Films on Art”. This led to a commission from the National Film Board of Canada who produced the film “Pikangikum” which was released as a theatrical short in Odeon theatres in 1968. He went on to create over 30 films, the majority of them based on his drawings, but they also included a handful of cartoons and a few examples of pure studies of time and movement. To create these films, Gould worked with a group of individuals eventually known as “Gesture Films”. In addition to Gould, this group was made up of Roger Pyke (editor), John Griffin (camera) and Andrew Duesbury (music editor). Of these films Gould noted, “Camera scanning of still photos and paintings is not new. Historical and documentary film had used the devise, but, to my knowledge, our group has pioneered the technique of original drawings and paintings made by an artist specifically for the camera.” (The Drawn Image, Roberts Gallery Press, 1980). Gould’s films have screened at the Art Gallery of Ontario, film festivals around the world, including Vancouver, San Francisco, and New York and as a part of a special selection of films for the 1976 Montreal Olympic Winter Games. by Daniel Gallay for Roberts Gallery PRESS John Gould BY DAVID BALZER -- September 02, 2009 for Eye Weekly The work of Toronto-born John Gould, one of Canada’s best draughtsmen, is not in the AGO’s permanent collection, but you can currently get a decent view of it at Roberts Gallery, in a patchy but must-see survey entitled “The Drawn Film.” Born in 1929, Gould attained success in the ’60s and ’70s as part of a generation of artists who pushed for more internationalism in Canadian art. (“Nobody exhibited your work unless you painted orange leaves,” writes Gould of mid-century Toronto in his journals.) And, in his commitment to the representational and the expressive, Gould is arguably more outward-looking than his more famous peer, Michael Snow: rather than a theoretical and austere one, Gould wanted a warm practice concerned with the relationship between acts of looking and moving. He understood the ancient, unalterable purposes of drawing. The title of this exhibit indicates another interest he shared with Snow, always in relation to this drawing: Gould made a series of films, a few of them two-minute fillers for the CBC, in which he gave guided tours of his works using the language of cinema. Most of these play on a monitor in Roberts Gallery’s basement, with corresponding drawings on display on the main floor. Both are utterly captivating. The films (which, granted, now have a retro quality enjoyable in and of itself) don’t bring the drawings to life so much as augment an experience of them: quaint they may be, but they are also sharp — the best kind of show-and-tell lesson on the draughtsman’s art, delighting equally in the intentional and accidental aspects of his craft. Films on Japan (Japanese Market Street, a drawing in one of these, is pictured) and Mexico (especially Little Monday, a film which showed at the 1966 Venice Biennale, the only Canadian entry that year) objectify people and places fascinatingly, both as pure forms and as allegories for the most elastic, intricate aspects of the collective mind. It’s like a drawer’s version of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. “I’m not trying to represent reality with a drawing,” notes Gould in one of the films, in what can be understood as a manifesto. “I’m trying to get people to look at drawings as drawings.” CURRICULUM VITAE BORN: Toronto, ON, 1929 DIED: Barrie, ON, 2010 STUDIED: Forest Hill Collegiate Ontario College of Art, 1948-52 Academie Julian, Paris, France, 1953 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS: Greenwich Gallery (Became Isaacs Gallery), Toronto, 1956 Dorothy Cameron Gallery, Toronto, 1961,63 Agnes Lefort Gallery, Montreal, 1962 Arwin Gallery, Detroit Michigan, 1963,64,66,68,70,72 Retrospective - Hart House, University of Toronto, 1965 Focus on Drawing, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1965 Flint Institute of Arts, Flint Michigan, 1966 Roberts Gallery, Toronto 1966,68,70,72,74,76,78,81,84,86,88,90,92,94,96,01,03,05,06,09,10 Sherbrooke Gallery, Montreal, 1969 Retrospective Show, Tom Thomson Gallery, Owen Sound, 1971 Artists and Their Work Program, Organized by A.G.O., 1974-76 -travelled to Whitby, Owen Sound, Sault Ste. Marie, Art Gallery of Brant. Inaugural exhibit at Lynnwood Arts Centre, Simcoe The Figure, A Sensual Response-Art Gallery of Brant, 1975 Don Quixote, Arwin Gallery, Detroit, 1975 Masters Gallery, Calgary, 1986,93,98 Retrospective Show-Performers-at Stratford Gallery, 1992 Featured Artist in Annual Sketches Exhibition, Roberts Gallery, 2007, 2008 SELECTED FILMS: Little Monday (screened at 1966 Venice Biennale) John Gould on Drawing Ancestors (Series) Japan (Series – for CBC) The Spain of John Gould Pikangikum (for the National Film Board of Canada) SELECTED COMMISSIONS: Official Portrait for National Gallery, 1962 (Alan Jarvis) National Film Board of Canada, Drawn Film, 1967 Performance Drawings of Marcel Marceau, 1972 PUBLICATIONS: The Drawn Image, Roberts Gallery Press Journals, Moonstone Press COLLECTIONS: London Regional Art Gallery Agnes Etherington Gallery, Kingston Art Gallery of Windsor National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Sir George Williams University McMaster University Art Gallery, Kingston Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Queen's University, Kingston The Gallery, Stratford Beaver Brook Art Gallery, Fredericton Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, Kitchener Concordia University Art Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa Sarnia Art Gallery, Sarnia MacLaren Art Center, Barrie Lynnwood Arts Center, Simcoe Hamilton Art Gallery, Hamilton Alan King Marcel Marceau Alex Trebek Robert Goulet J.D. Eaton Percy Waxer Numerous private collections in Canada, U.S., England & Mexico GOULD, John Howard Born in Toronto, Ontario, he enjoyed a creative family background. (His mother published several volumes of her poetry and his father has directed and acted in theatrical productions). He entered the Ontario College of Art in 1948 where he studied drawing and painting and graduated in 1952. In his painting he has been influenced by Frederick Varley and Jock MacDonald. Gould, in the company of other students would meet Varley every day in a pub where they would stand and listen to him talk on form - fifteen minutes of which Gould felt equalled a year of study (on the same matter) in art school. After graduation from the Ontario College of Art he went to France and studied at the Académie Julian and then travelled in Europe. When he returned home he went hitchhiking to Mexico, Vancouver and back to Toronto. Between these periods of travel, he did odd jobs and was careful not to be lured into the field of commercial art which he found confining. He worked for some time in the paint shops of the CBC's Television studios. By 1960 he had established himself as a promising artist and won the Elizabeth T. Greenshield Foundation Award which made possible his trip to Spain in the company of his wife and year old daughter. There he was able to work freely at his art and produced a fine collection of sketches on which Alan Jarvis made the following comments, In his sketch-books from Spain, Gould reveals himself . . . as a sensitive observer and a very talented documentor, and from these notes he has produced a good number of important works, such as 'Quandrilla'. This work which Jarvis referred to, was an effective oil painting depicting a group of banderilleros waiting to play their part in the bullfight. Jarvis made the deft comparison between Gould and Degas as follows, Gould, however, brought a fresh eye to the bullring and, in some of his strongest works, captured the quieter and less obvious moments of the drama: the moments of silence and waiting, the moments of intense concentration for the professionals involved - as Degas drew the dancers waiting in the wings . . . In portraiture, Gould has been thought of as a budding Varley, a high commendation indeed - not purely by an emulation of Varley but in his own natural abilities in draftsmanship and originality. He won the Hadassah First Prize Award in 1961 and in the same year (autumn) he held his first one man show at the Here and Now Art Gallery in Toronto. He then exhibited at the Dorothy Cameron Gallery (his disrobing series) in the winter of 1963. Gould appeared on Elwood Glover's Luncheon Date (CBC-TV) when he was interviewed about his recent one man show (1968) at the Roberts Gallery, Toronto, entitled Indian and our Country. This exhibition included his conte drawings of Indians. He has taught drawing (evenings) at the Ontario College of Art and at the Artists' Workshop. He is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy (A.R.C.A.), the Ontario Society of Artists and the Canadian Society of Graphic Art. He is represented in the collections of Dr. G.A. Pengelley, Mr. & Mrs. Percy Waxer, Mrs. T.P. Lownsbrough and many others. Colin S. MacDonald A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, volumes 1-8 by Colin S. MacDonald, and volume 9 (online only), by Anne Newlands and Judith Parker National Gallery of Canada / Musée des beaux-arts du Canada |
