Chris Dolan was born in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. After her studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Corcoran College of Art in Washington she moved to France where she continued studying at Les Beaux Arts in Grenoble and finished at Les Beaux Arts de aix-en-Provence. She has lived and exhibited her work in France for the past twenty years.

Description:
The works of Chris Dolan offer a metaphor for human angst in an era of painterly exploration and frustration. As spectacles of meaningful figuration struggling to come into being through formal disruptions and a limited palette of earth tones, her brashly intent paintings display richly textured surfaces laden with emotional content. These expressive abstractions are described in various tones of browns, blacks and terra cottas that make reference to primitive cave paintings and the sepia drawings of the great masters. Colors as thick as tar vie with fluid and loose brushwork and instinctive drawing and scratching to imbue the surfaces with a neo-expressionist energy. In paintings that explore the human figure as a vehicle for visual interaction, she studies anatomical structure before endowing their images with an ambiguity of content and distorted reality.

The figures she defines tend to fray and bleed, invade and become one another in every imaginable way as they are subsumed by the immediacy of the thickly layered surface textures and vigorous markings. As if the substance of inscrutable walls, they range from the boldly defined to mere linear suggestions and have an innate vitality that seems to emerge from the depths of the paint. There is a pervasive energy in her gestural abstractions and saturated expressionist brush. The freedom and spontaneity of Chris Dolan’s painting techniques allow the richly textured imagery to dominate the canvas with an arresting presence that is as provocative as it is mysterious.

– Carol Damian

Dr. Carol Damian is Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Art History and former Director and Chief Curator of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University.

http://www.skotforeman.com/Chrissy-Dolan-Terrasi.cfm

Contributing Artist in These Exhibits

From the artist:  Philosophy and travel have been constants in my pictorial research but it was during a long séjour in rural France that I learned the exotic character of everyday life. Painting and drawing have become a means of attaining a quality of attention that seems to go underneath language and ground it.

One elects oneself to do this work and then it must be assumed. Certain works (“Bangkok”, “Entre Montréal et Québec”) name the places that are at once the landmarks of a permanent exile and the subject itself; others (“Champ aux marmottes”, “Hillsborough River”) wrestle with the desire to approach or even get inside the subject.

Against formulas and like violence, I propose with Paul Klee an endless study of the nature of nature …
Select images:  HERE          Books with Dominique Cruchet on Blurb:   HERE       Cullen+Cruchet Blog:  HERE

It was not only when I first started to travel that photography was of prime importance. In my Parisien teenage years I used to spend time at the Cinémathèque du Palais de Chaillot and take photographs in the streets of Paris with friends.

Later travelling lent itself to this practice and because of this travelling some people have seen in the work the eye of a “flâneur”. It was only in 1982 that the desire to study Visual Arts came to me; first at the University of Ottawa and then at the Sorbonne in Paris in Art History. Those years of study confirm the documentary orientation already taken earlier.

In a village in the west of France where I lived for nine years it was possible to do a photographic study of the surrounding rural area in its pre-industrial agriculture state, and the book “Repères Quotidens” was published. While on short trips, some small projects came to light: Totem on Elgin Street, Ferry tail, Constructions Ephémères, and a long series of images on mail boxes.

Sabbatical years from teaching have allowed me to complete some themes and take images of new ones in many different places such as Tunisia, South-East Asia, China, Yemen and the south of France. More recently I have started to use digital photography to work on projection inside and outside on different material.

georges.cruchet@laposte.net

—

More on the exhibit “Crossing the Great Waters” by Dominique Cruchet and Joan Cullen is HERE.  The book “Crossing the Great Waters” can be seen HERE.

See bottom for more information, images and video on other websites.

 

Exhibitions

“Crossing the great waters,Traverser les grandes eaux”, Gallery Arcturus Toronto, May 3 to June 14, 2014.

“Le temps soustrait la vérité aux atteintes de l’envie et de la discorde”, Médiathèque de Gignac, February 14 to March 22, 2014.

FAVA (Visual Arts Festival), Caraquet, June 2013.

“Traverser les grandes eaux, Crossing the Great Waters”, Confédération Centre Gallery, Charlottetown, PEI, June 12 to October 10, 2012.

“Ferry Tail” part of “Minding the Light” organised by the Museum and Heritage Foundation at the Confederation Centre, October 2011 to March 2012.

Participation in “Art in the Open“, August 27th in Charlottetown and “Nocturne“, October 15th in Halifax with a digital projection “Sculpture in the Park“, images of sculptures from Parisian parks.

Residency at the Théâtre de la Fonderie au Mans and exhibition at Galerie Municipale de la Mairie du Mans, “Quatre vents”, February to August, 2011. (Guest of Honour at Puls’art Visual Art Festival).

Farmer’s Bank, Acadian Museum, Rustico, Gallery 18 and Farmer’s Market, été 2010.

“Berlin to Brackley Beach via Beijing and Crete”, Howes Hall Gallery, Brackley Beach, August 2009

“Attendant Spirits”, Galerie F92, Berlin, Germany, August to October 2008.

“Photographie 101: Push the Button“, 130 photographs by 58 Canadian and international artists over the last 140 years. Confederation Centre gallery. May to September 2008

“Mayday, Mayday, Islanders at Work“, Municipal Gallery, Summerside, June, 2007, “The Construction of Islandness”, Kier Gallery, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, July, 2007.“Que défendirent-ils?” Galerie phot’eil, Fabrezan, visual projection for the Commemoration of the 1907 wine producer revolt.

“Murs, Murs”, A projection exhibition at the Confederation Centre, Charlottetown (Toronto, Sana’a, Charlottetown and Paris) November to December 2005

“Errance“, Gallery Arcturus, April to June, 2005; “Sauta Roc” Galerie municipale de St-Guilhem-le-Désert, France, June 2005.

“World Enough, and Time”, Annex Art Centre, Toronto, December, 2004.

“Livre d’ heures “, FAVA (Visual Arts Festival), Caraquet, New Brunswick, Canada, July, 2002.

“État des Lieux”, Art Gallery of the University of Moncton, New Brunswick; “Illuminations, Enluminures” Library of the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, January, 2002.

“Illuminations”, Lunenburg Gallery, Nova Scotia, Canada, September 2001.

“Sud-est, Est”  (Southeast, East); Fondation Avicenne, Paris, November, 2000.

“Trees and Hedges“, Exhibition to present a Land Art Project.; Gallery in the Guild, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Proposition to plant a twelve kilometer hedge; (three levels of vegetation with trees from the primitive Acadian forest) along the periphery of Charlottetown. May, 2000.

“Points Cardinaux“, (Cardinal Points), Institute of Fine Arts, Sfax Museum of Mahdia, Tunisia, March-April, 1998. Municipal Gallery, La Chapelle-des-Marais and Pornichet Municipal Gallery, Pornichet, France, June to September, 1998.

“Repères Quotidiens”, Exhibition at the Médiathèque of Le Mans, France on the occasion of the publication by the Médiathèque of a book of photographs from the exhibition. It documents the village of Villaines-la-Gonais where Cruchet and Cullen lived and worked for nine years. June to September, 1998.

“Ferry Tail“, Gallery in the Guild, Charlottetown, Canada, September, 1997.

“Repères Quotidiens“, University of Maine, France, February, 1996, Priory of Vivoin, France,May-June, 1995, Exhibition at Canada House, Cité universitaire, Paris ,1995.

“Totem sur la rue Elgin”, Gallery am Weissensee, Berlin, June, 1994.

“Constructions Ephémères”, Le Mans, France 1993, Angers, France

“Champs animaliers“, Angers, France.

Solo and group exhibitions in Bogotá, Charlottetown, Paris and Toronto, 1982-1985.

 

Education   Licence and Maitrise in Art History, University of Paris 1, La Sorbonne, Paris; Bachelor of Visual Arts, University of Ottawa, Canada.

 

Work in public collections   National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Art Bank of Prince Edward Island; Museum of the Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; Foundation for the Study of Objective Art: Gallery Arcturus, Toronto; Museum of the Post, Paris; Canadian Museum of Civilisation, Quebec; Historical Library of the City of Paris (BHVP) and the Médiathèque of the city of Le Mans.

 

More on previous exhibitions by Dominique Cruchet:

Exhibition catalogue for “Traverser les grandes eaux, Crossing the Great Waters”:

http://www.blurb.com/b/3502750    A book review is HERE

Previous installation of the exhibit:

http://www.confederationcentre.com/en/exhibitions-archive-read-more.php?exhibition=50

and    http://thistownissmall.com/2012/06/15/you-are-cordially-invited/

 

“Le temps soustrait la vérité aux atteintes de l’envie et de la discorde”, Médiathèque de Gignac, 2014: http://georgescruchet.wix.com/cullencruchet-gignac

http://www.blurb.ca/books/5395616-le-temps-soustrait-la-verite-aux-atteintes-de-l-en

Interview for “Quatre vents,” a 2011 exhibit in Le Mans, France on local TV on YouTube

“Errance”  at Gallery Arcturus, April to June, 2005:

http://arcturus.ca/display.php?g=1&s=2005-04-30-errance

“État des Lieux”, Art Gallery of the University of Moncton, New Brunswick, 2002:

http://139.103.17.11/Cruchet_Cullen/communique_etat_des_lieux.html

More information plus slideshows of Dominique’s work:

http://139.103.17.11/Cruchet_Cullen/dominique_cruchet.html

Banque des oeuvres d’art de l’Ile du Prince Edouard – Island Art Collection

http://www.gov.pe.ca/tourism/index.php3?number=1018519&lang=E

http://www.gov.pe.ca/tourism/index.php3?number=1018520&lang=E

A photo essay by Cruchet on the ferries that formerly crossed the Northumberland Strait, via YouTube:  http://youtu.be/igj10xjkpjY

“Ferry Tail”  book  http://www.blurb.ca/b/3237894-f-e-r-r-y-t-a-i-l-1-9-9-6

http://www.blurb.ca/books/3215572-charlottetown-moncton

Contributing Artist in These Exhibits

No biography is available at this time.

Contributing Artist in These Exhibits

Carol Currie and Stuart Leggett — “Claustro”

The collaboration between Carol Currie and Stuart Leggett is a celebration between an artist and a sculptor and their shared love of nature. They hold the intent to create tactile living paintings that invite interactive and intimate experience with the viewing.

Their passion for adventurous trekking and nature offers them an insightful interpretation of nature, which has become the seal of their shared art. Carol provides sketches that are made from a collection of reference photos taken while on trips and together they choose the style of the piece. Stuart starts the wood working process by creating a solid wood panel through a long method of laminating small strips of wood. He develops natural wood grain textures to bring an organic essence to his pieces and compliments this textural components by relief carving and sculpting shifts in planes that cast shadows within the painting. Stuart then carefully protects all surfaces to ensure the panel is of archival quality. This process ensures a stable and permanent foundation for Carol’s paints. Carol then applies up to seven translucent layers of fluid acrylics to build illusionary depths in the painting, bringing the sculpture to life.

See a slideshow of the work process here: http://www.claustro.ca/claustro_piece_075/

Their artistic mission is to remove the industrial noises and provide a bond between the seeing and the nature being depicted in the art.

http://www.claustro.ca/

http://peterchungart.com/

Born and educated in Hong Kong, Peter has been working as a full-time artist in Toronto since 1996. He was one of the founding members and former instructor at the Hong Kong Institute of Visual Art In Hong Kong. Peter has won numerous awards for his works in advertising and oil painting. A strong background in graphic design has led him to develop a style of painting that is rich in color and reveals a strong balance of form and composition.

Peter’s previous work’s subject matter ranged widely from traditional still-lifes to various landscapes and figuratives. Now Peter paints houses to represent people. The houses always have small windows as eyes and without doors to signify modern man’s need for privacy.

The paintings with two houses represent lovers; with big and small houses as families and many houses as relatives and friends to suggest people living in harmony with one another. As lovers, one house is shadowing -protecting- the other as sign of wellingness to sacrifice for love. The paintings sometimes have dark and disturbed backgrounds to suggest turmoil in life that we have to face in order to grow stronger, or peaceful backgrounds with graphics telling stories of the houses, such as: squares are like photo-frames now framing memories of the houses;circles or stripes are flashes of memories or timeline and sparkles are energies their positive happy mode generated.

A rewarding light shines on the houses to represent a blessing for their love and celebration of a happy life!

William Caldwell

1928 – 1998

William (Bill) Caldwell, called Mack by his wife, was born in Mimico, then a small community west of Toronto. Both his parents came from old established families in Oshawa, and during the 1920s moved to Mimico where David William Caldwell opened pharmacies.

The Second World War took the family to Ottawa, where his father was seconded to Defense Headquarters to head the Tri-Medical Services. As a child, and then later as a youth, Bill was never comfortable in a regular classroom. He left the prestigious University of Toronto Schools after Grade 9, attended the Western Technical School in Toronto for one year, and then went to Ottawa Technical High School where he spent one semester.

He joined the army in 1948, rising from the position of sapper in the Engineers to 2nd lieutenant in Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, although his favorite position was sergeant. After a few years he resigned his commission at London, Ontario, and with no formal training opened a design studio for home and office furniture and interiors, and commercial graphics work.

A family request to return to Oshawa began the next phase of his life. He continued his designing career but in 1966 became increasingly aware of the need for an art gallery in that city. He therefore closed his office to further requests, completing only what work he had in progress, and devoted the next  year to the establishment of the Art Gallery of Oshawa (presently the Robert McLaughlin Gallery) in 1967.

By 1970 the urge became overwhelming to leave designing and begin a new life as an artist in his own right. He and his wife Lorraine loaded a van and left for Newfoundland, the farthest place in Canada from the old centres of his past.

They settled in the outport of Rocky Harbour, but their four and a half years there was not idyllic. The cruelty of the climate and place was intertwined with Bill’s struggle to establish his drawing and painting skills. As local residents became his subjects, they revealed their own problems, stimulating the empathy that continued to mark the rest of his career.

Again, a variety of needs outgrew place and Lorraine was sent to find a suitable site for Bill to build another studio. She found a small house and adjoining blacksmith’s shop in Watson’s Corners in Lanark County. Before they left Newfoundland, he destroyed thousands of drawings as inadequate. But he discovered in Newfoundland that he was truly an artist.

After a year of construction in Watson’s Corners, he began to paint the large canvases that drew on his social concerns. These he developed from preliminary portrait studies, which he would fan out on the studio floor. He invited many people to sit as subjects, as he was always alert for fresh visual and psychological material. Not everyone was comfortable under his scrutiny, but many later admitted that their experience in the studio had changed their lives. From this period there are thousands of large and small drawings, dated and filed in envelopes and boxes.

He always searched for truth and moral fortitude both in himself and through his art. He confronted bureaucrats over substandard housing in Rocky Harbour; in the modern sales space of the Balderson Cheese factory in Lanark County, he placed beams from the barns and milk-houses of the original farmer-owners of the cheese cooperative; he planned a road bypass to divert heavy mining trucks around the heart of Lanark Village. He kept on with these efforts, even as he involved himself in debates and correspondence about social responsibility, with both government departments and leaders in the private sector. Sadly, despite his own best efforts and those of others, it was always difficult for him to find a way of affecting the issues he held most dear.

Exhibitions, 1970s-1990s

Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa

Edward Monagham, Ottawa

Sedun/Kanerva Architects, Toronto

Gallerie l’Autre Equivoc, Ottawa

Delaplaine Visual Arts Center, Frederick, Maryland

Private Collections

Canada, United States of America, United Kingdom

Publication Work

Cover, The Canadian Medical Association Journal (January 1, 1985)

Cover, One Night at the Indigo Hotel, Robert Allen (1986)

See more work by Eron Boyd on Instagram

http://giseleboulianne.com/

Born in Jonquiere, Quebec, Gisele Boulianne currently lives near Quebec City. Gisele has taught painting for twenty years. In order to deepen her knowledge and explore new career paths, she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Laval University in Quebec City and received the second prize of the public during the exhibition of graduation. Her contemporary, colorful and expressive style reflects the intensity of urban life. Gisele’s work uses photography, painting, collage, and painting to create a dynamic composition of lines and forms of energy of the 21st century. Determined and bold gestures that traverse the canvas, she depicts an act of theater not far from the dream world. In 2005, Gisele received an honorable mention award from the jury at the Montreal International Festival of Arts. In 2008, the International Festival of Plastic Arts of Monastir in Tunisia awarded Gisele the first Excellence Award from the Governor of Tunisia. Most recently, she participated in the National Salon of Fine Arts at the Carousel du Louvre in Paris. A professional member of RAAV, Consolidation of visual artists from Quebec, Gisele Boulianne is listed in various collections of Quebec Transport Commission of Quebec, Emco Building Products, Alcoa, Toyota and others. She is also represented in several art galleries in Quebec, including Emeraude (Montreal), Crescent Hill (Mississauga), Gallery C2 (Trois-Rivieres), C. Genest (Cap-Sante). Gisele has also participated in national and international exhibitions in Toronto, New York, Puerto Rico, Portland (Oregon), Monastir (Tunisia), Montreux (Swisserland), Paris…

Artist Statement

I think, I memorize and I structure compositions that proposes a link to time and space. Deep into the act of painting, I free my inner pulsions on the canvas and I create a gesture that paints rythm and make the scenes vibrate under color. I then add calligraphy to the artwork that shares my deepest intimate reflexions.

No biography is available at this time.