Rewind: Tony Urquhart
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Organized by Museum London and the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador and curated by Terrence Heath, this career survey of Tony Urquhart's intimate poetic drawings dating from 1949 to 2001 captures a passion for the medium that has remained an obsession throughout his life. In Urquhart's own words: "I take the art of drawing seriously." Those who know Tony Urquhart's work will remember his three-dimensional box sculptures, which, when opened, became landscape reliefs. Several drawings, such as Box Fantasy/Landscape (1972) and 4 Studies for La Scala di Santa Regina (ca. 1974), relate to these sculptures.
Themes that constantly surface are the mythic and symbolic, particularly as they relate to nature. Urquhart's style of drawing is sensitive, like Edward Gorey's, though these drawings are not illustrations but complete artworks. Few Canadian artists have so consistently pursued drawing as an art form, and while most of these works are small-scale, they present a complex layering of imaginative subject and very real details drawn from life.
What makes this exhibition, titled "Power of Invention," interesting is that Urquhart consistently references life, death and regeneration with the simplest of details: a tree root, a wall or an archway. Many works have a classic notebook feel, and the most pleasing aspect of Urquhart's drawing as oeuvre is precisely that he leaves them open in places so they look intentionally incomplete. This absence, which accompanies the fragmentary clues done with fine lines and shading, generates an aura of mystery. Beyond the process of drawing, he achieves a balance between the subject he depicts and the invisible elements intuited. The 118 pieces in the show reveal both the stronger and the weaker periods in Urquhart's development. Some of the most exciting drawings are pure, refined pen-and-ink work from the early period of the 1950s. There is a lot of subtlety to some of them, and they confirm our belief that drawing truly is an art form unto itself.
Tony Urquhart's consistency in working with the medium of drawing becomes most evident in the "idea book" drawings that are not even on the exhibition walls. They excite us with their frenetic, delicate, febrile mimesis. Wine labels, tickets and all manner of ephemera, even children's drawings, are included among these fine sketchbook pages. They record Urquhart's travels in France and Ireland by car, train, airplane and boat, and include churches, palaces, cemeteries, cafés, living-room interiors, porches, ancient roads, old ruinous bridges and gates. While Urquhart's artworks can be seen in numerous private and museum collections across Canada, seldom have they been brought into public view en masse as they have now. His drawings are testament to a unique and inventive spirit.
Winter 2003
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