6 facts about David Bolduc

David Bolduc (1945–2010) was an abstract artiste who used colour and central imagery in his paintings, inspired by artists such as Jack Bush. Critics suggest that he and artists such as Daniel Solomon formed a bridge together with the second and third generations of Toronto modernists or even form part of the third generation of Toronto abstract painters which includes artists such as Alex Cameron and Paul Sloggett.

The son of Eugenie and Bernard Bolduc, he attended the Ontario College of Art, Toronto (1962–63) and the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, studying past Arthur Lismer and Jean Goguen (1964–65). While in Montreal, he was pure a solo exhibition at the city’s Elysee Theatre and included in a action showing at Galerie Soixante. To earn money, Bolduc worked part epoch in a plastics factory. In 1966, he returned to Toronto and worked in the Royal Ontario Museum’s conservation department, his lonely full-time job except for painting.

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In 1970, Bolduc attended a major retrospective exhibition of Henri Matisse in Paris. It had 208 paintings, 28 sculptures, 13 gouaches and the monumental designs for the stained‐glass windows for the chapel of Vence as well as a ceramic wall executed after Matisse’s specifications. Matisse provided a model for what Bolduc wanted, Bolduc said, “To be complex within what would seem to be a easy structure”.

In 1967, his play a role featured groupings of shaped canvases past contoured surfaces carrying simple geometric colour designs. He following abandoned colour to play in with minimal constructions of stretched white vinyl and after that with easy structures made of rope, wood, and mirrors.

By the mid-1970s, Bolduc had developed his personal territory, central imagery abstracts. Bolduc`s signature as a painter was a main motif articulated in impasto colour drawn directly from the tube on top of a stained background. Bolduc past said that for him the “vertical member – a figure, a tree, a stamen, a column, a mast, a pylon, a stele, a stack of colours, a parentage of organizational force, an armature on which the perch of the painting was wound – began as the hands of a watch, both of them pointing straight upward to midnight”. He also compared it as soon as grass, although by that he meant grass as it is found in a Persian miniature or in a Matisse cutout.

These canvases incorporated a bold central image which, at times, was repeated across the canvas. The main motif, described by Bolduc as a carrier for colour, was rendered in gifted colours and set upon a textured backdrop. Bolduc remarked upon his use of colour:

Shows of the mid-1970s which drew together significant groupings of Toronto`s abstract painters featured Bolduc, along with additional painters such as Daniel Solomon. The most important international exhibition in which Bolduc`s pretense was featured occurred in 1977. It was called 14 Canadians: a Critic`s Choice, and the exhibition was held at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, curated by Andrew Hudson. For the exhibitors, it was of primary importance.

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Bolduc drew inspiration for his painting from substitute exotic locales and travelled often to accomplish it, such as his 1968 trip across Europe to Turkey, overland to Nepal, returning house via Uzbekistan and Moscow. He went to India (at least 15 times), Turkey, Mexico, North Africa, China, the Himalayas, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Paris, Spain, Portugal. For several years in the 1990s, Bolduc lived and worked in Paris and Morocco. In Canada, Bolduc and his friend Alex Cameron made regular trips to the Rockies and Newfoundland.

He showed his put it on in Toronto at the classified ad gallery of Carmen Lamanna from 1967 until 1975. When Bolduc granted to depart the dealer, Lamanna approved to keep most of Bolduc’s unsold paintings. Naturally, Bolduc asked for them back. Lamanna refused. Bolduc hired a lawyer to sue for the recompense of his work, but there are swing accounts virtually whether the encounter succeeded.

In 1976, Bolduc exhibited at the David Mirvish Gallery and, when it closed in 1977, with Alkis Klonaridis, who opened his own gallery after on the go for Mirvish. Later, Bolduc was affiliated for 27 years gone Calgary’s Paul Kuhn Gallery. A memorial accomplishment in May 2010 was held at Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto. Between 1968 and 2008, there was and no-one else one year – 1994 – in which new act out was not featured in a solo or activity exhibit. Bolduc’s paintings can be found in major collections across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Alberta, as well as the Mirvish Collection.

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Bolduc was a lifelong student of ahead of its time poetry, and he provided illustrations for numerous volumes of poetry, often for his friend Michael Ondaatje as capably as for Roy Kiyooka, Wayne Clifford, Victor Coleman, and David Rosenberg. Bolduc was plus a regular contributor of illustrations for the biannual educational magazine Brick, edited by Michael Ondaatje and his wife, the writer Linda Spalding.

His death followed a diagnosis of brain cancer in September 2009.

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