Opening Reception: Thursday, June 23, 6-8pm
Artist Talk: with John Hartman at 6:30 pm
Nicholas Metivier Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and prints by Ann MacIntosh Duff. The exhibition will open on June 23rd and run until July 16 with an opening reception on Thursday, June 23rd. A talk with John Hartman will commence at 6:30 pm on June 23rd. This is MacIntosh Duff’s first exhibition at the gallery.
Ann MacIntosh Duff is relentless and devoted when it comes to her practice of painting and printmaking. Now in her 91st year, she continues to make the annual summer trip to her studio in Pointe Au Baril, Georgian Bay. Here there are few distractions from her daily painting ritual.
The remainder of the year she can be found painting in the studio of her Toronto home. In each of these locations, MacIntosh Duff finds inspiration in the simplest of things and transforms them into something extraordinary.
MacIntosh Duff is one of Canada’s premier watercolourists, working in the genres of landscape and still-life. Her charming and naïve style is evocative of both historical and contemporary artists including David Milne, Peter Doig and Annie Pootoogook. MacIntosh Duff embraces the spontaneity and unruly nature of the characteristically difficult medium of watercolour. She paints her immediate surroundings, capturing the world as she sees it.
This exhibition features a selection of MacIntosh Duff’s watercolours and wood engravings created over the last six decades. Some of the watercolours in this exhibition were also part of her 2007 retrospective, To Love and To Cherish, at the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery. MacIntosh Duff’s wood engravings are hand-carved and hand-printed at her Toronto studio.
I have always loved Ann’s paintings. They are remarkably succinct, formed by an emotionalintelligence that is focused and practiced. She has described her work as ‘ landscapes of themind’. They are paintings of the world around Ann, made not while looking at the world, butrather from the memory of seeing.
-John Hartman
MacIntosh Duff began her career in the 1940s, after completing her studies at Central Technical School. In 1952, she gained membership to the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour (CSPWC) where she remained an active member for thirty years. In 1959, shestarted working with Douglas Duncan at the Picture Loan Society. She exhibited there until Duncan’s death in 1968. In 2007, the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery held a retrospective for MacIntosh Duff’s watercolours and it received great acclaim.
