Off the Wall - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889843023 ISBN 13: 9780889843028

Publisher: Porcupine's Quill, 2008

Synopsis

Before the Canadian Government ended the jet interceptor project Urquhart, then a young artist, was consumed by a wish to design a hood ornament for the new fighter aircraft. He was hard to console when he first learned that the plane would not have a hood and his melancholy deepened when the entire project was stopped.

Hypnosis has brought Urquhart to an new understanding that the Arrow calamity drove him from the medium of titanium alloys and back into the embrace of your more basic wood.

About this title

From the Author

I have at various times made paintings, at other times sculptures and even prints, but I have always made drawings, even as a child. In 2002 I was honoured with a drawing retrospective, organized by Museum London and the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador. It also toured to the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and was hung at the National Gallery of Canada in the summer of 2003.

Terrance Heath, who guest curated the exhibition, decided, with my blessing, to include all types of my drawings except those concerning my opening box sculptures, which he felt were already well known (the boxes, not the drawings for them).

In order to facilitate the building of these sculptures I needed working drawings, idea drawings and even drawings of the stands upon which the sculptures would sit. These works were not ends in themselves, but nevertheless I always tried to make them as complete, interesting and exciting as I could. After all, one of my `Artistic Heros' is Leonardo da Vinci.

I like these drawings but a book full of them, without explanation would be confusing and ultimately boring. A book with an explanation of the end result of each drawing would be even more tedious. It was a problem.

The solution appeared in the form of a friend of mine, The Honourable Michael Phillips. A career diplomat, Canada's Ambassador to Sweden and Ireland, he also served a term as Consul General in New York. On his retirement he has become a humourist. I am not sure whether his long service in Canada's diplomatic corps is directly related to this or not, nevertheless he is a very witty man. The box sculptures themselves are somewhat strange, surreal objects, in some ways almost absurd. The drawings can often be even more so, particularly if you are not familiar with the sculptures. Michael Phillips has written the comments as if he has happened across a batch of artistic drawings without knowing what they were for. He has hypothesized an artist/designer and tried to divine what might have been his purpose in designing these objects, and what happened to the various projects the artist had been attempting to realise or had been commissioned to do.

I think you will find the relationship of text to drawings, as well as the overall layout by Tim Inkster of Porcupine's Quill, quite amusing.

(Tony Urquhart)

About the Author

Tony Urquhart is a painter, a sculptor and draughtsman. In the early sixties Urquhart was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy, the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour and the Canadian Society of Graphic Arts. He later resigned from these organizations to found CAR (Canadian Artists Representation) with Jack Chambers and Kim Ondaatje. He has taught in the art departments of McMaster, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Waterloo. `Worlds Apart: The Symbolic Landscapes of Tony Urquhart', a major retrospective curated by Joan Vastokas toured Canada in 1988-89.

Tony has been involved in the illustration of works by his wife, the writer Jane Urquhart, as well as those of Michael Ondaatje, Matt Cohen, Louis Dudek, and Rohinton Mistry. Named to the Order of Canada in in 1995, Tony Urquhart was named to the Order of Canada in 1995, he divides his time between Stratford, Ontario and Ireland.

About this edition

• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0889843023
• ISBN 13: 9780889843028
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224