Onley's Arctic

Fülszöveg

ONLEY'S ARCTIC
Diaries and Paintings of the High Arctic
TONI ONLEY
Internationally known landscape painter
Toni Onley made his first trip to the High
Arctic in 1974 aboard a Canadian Coast Guard
icebreaker, the CCGS Louis S. St. Laurent.
He returned the following year, this time
piloting his small flying boat on a 10 000 kilo-
metre odyssey into the eastern Arctic from
Vancouver, B.C. Eleven years later, he and poet
Claude Peloquin boarded another coast guard
vessel on a voyage to confirm Canada's
cultural sovereignty in northern waters.
During each of these trips, Onley kept a diary
of his daily observations: the unexpected
colour, the mysterious quality of the light, the
meteoric changes in the weather, the way land
and sea and sky converge to tease the eye. The
diaries also make many allusions to historical
events and environmental concerns, and
provide a lively commentary on life aboard
ship and in the air.
As an artist, Onley found his paintings ready-... Tovább

Fülszöveg

ONLEY'S ARCTIC
Diaries and Paintings of the High Arctic
TONI ONLEY
Internationally known landscape painter
Toni Onley made his first trip to the High
Arctic in 1974 aboard a Canadian Coast Guard
icebreaker, the CCGS Louis S. St. Laurent.
He returned the following year, this time
piloting his small flying boat on a 10 000 kilo-
metre odyssey into the eastern Arctic from
Vancouver, B.C. Eleven years later, he and poet
Claude Peloquin boarded another coast guard
vessel on a voyage to confirm Canada's
cultural sovereignty in northern waters.
During each of these trips, Onley kept a diary
of his daily observations: the unexpected
colour, the mysterious quality of the light, the
meteoric changes in the weather, the way land
and sea and sky converge to tease the eye. The
diaries also make many allusions to historical
events and environmental concerns, and
provide a lively commentary on life aboard
ship and in the air.
As an artist, Onley found his paintings ready-
made in a landscape stripped to its bare
essentials. His three trips inspired more than
200 watercolours, prints, oils and pencil
drawings, of which 122 are represented here.
In these stunning works, Onley exhibits his
characteristic skill with a watercolour brush,
capturing the fleeting light and shadow and
the fragile, vulnerable beauty of the far north.
The diaries and paintings from his arctic
journeys document Toni Onley's ongoing
love affair with the region. Onley's Arctic is
not stark or forbidding. It is a world both
ephemeral and real—an immense, mystical,
constantly shifting landscape of ice and cloud
and light. Vissza