Artist

Country:  Canada
City:  Vancouver , BC
https://davidmacwilliam.com

I am an artist, art educator, writer and curator, born in Halifax, in 1951. I  grew up in Victoria, and then returned to the east coast to study at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where I received a BFA  in 1976.  I then moved back to the west coast to make art and teach. Later, I received a MA in Visual Arts (2009)  from University of the Arts London.

Over forty years, from 1975 through to 2015, I made  more than 200 paintings and drawings. Here are a selection (with comments) of forty or so of my favourite paintings from over those years. 

My early paintings mainly featured simple figure/ground relationships with centralized shapes on flat colour field backgrounds. I started on paper and then onto canvas. They were often small, fragile and perhaps hid their complexity within a somewhat casual appearance. In 1984, Greg Bellerby curated a mid-career exhibition of my paintings for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, that was followed in 1990, with an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, curated by Ian Thom. From the mid-1990s on, my work became more diverse and varied.

I  have exhibited my paintings in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the past forty years including the Paris Biennale (1982), Vancouver Art Gallery’s Art and Artists 1939–83 (1983), and more recently the VAG’s PAINT exhibition (2006/07) and Geometry of Knowing at the Audain Gallery, SFU (2015). I have had one person exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1984), and the Vancouver Art Gallery (1990), the Galleria Panorama, Barcelona (1997), the Musee Regional de Rimouski in Quebec (1998) and more recently in 2018 at ENIA’s Barra de Fero in Barcelona and at Plan Z in the Miguel Hernandez University in Elche, Spain.

I'm an active member of the Vancouver art community and in 2017, I co-curated: Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting with Bruce Grenville for the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2018, Doug Kirton and I organized: Robin Peck: Crania at Or Gallery, Vancouver, that then toured across Canada. I co-curated Garry Neill Kennedy’s Remembering Names with Jonathan Middleton at CSA Space. and in 2020. Lisa Baldissera, and I co-curated: Now Bulletin: Artworks, Letters and Printed Matter from the Garry Neill Kennedy Collection for Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver. I am a Professor Emeritus in the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where I taught from 1988 to 2017.

This photograph is from a print made from a black and white film negative taken by Henri Robideau in his backyard.