Roly Fenwick “Reflection” February 12 – March 1, 2025

In celebration of Roly Fenwick’s recent 93rd birthday, we have curated an exhibition focused on key paintings created over the past 35 years.  From portraits to swamps, landscapes and fossils, Fenwick’s lush paintings are inspired by the landscape of the Bruce Peninsula, which Fenwick refers to as his “ancestral bloodroots”.  He is not interested in merely painting a “pretty picture”, rather, is interested in landscapes that reveal an inner life source, which exposes a rhythm to the natural world often overlooked.  His paintings of trees become metaphors for humanity, a temple of the spirit and body, whereas his paintings of musty, dark and buggy swamps become regenerative places filled with beauty and solitude.

Also included is a small series of watercolours hanging in the middle gallery.  Often created plein-air, Fenwick’s watercolours are some the liveliest of his works because of the immediate medium.  Travelling with his paint set, Fenwick would sit and observe moments that were of his upmost interest – a rock lodged in a crevasse in the Bruce Trail, portraits of tree stumps and familiar landscapes or a memory of ships docked in the Owen Sound Harbour.

Fenwick wrote in 2001: “To make a painting from landscape requires a biological faith; desire, intuition and attention.  I try to approach landscape with a sense of danger; to risk the slipping from the universal of making a painting, into nostalgic making of scenery.”  We thank Fenwick for enriching our visual lives and warmly wish him an exciting year ahead.

Roly Fenwick was born in 1932 in Owen Sound, ON.  After studying art under Alex Colville at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB, Fenwick moved to Toronto where he was the Art Director for Simpson’s/Sears.  In 1968 Tony Urquhart was seeking professors for the University of Western Ontario’s visual arts department and hired Fenwick to be a painting & drawing professor.  Fenwick remained at UWO until he retired in 1989, teaching countless students along with Paterson Ewen and Duncan de Kergommeaux.  Since retiring, Fenwick has maintained a steady studio practice in London, ON and at his cottage in Big Bay, ON.

Fenwick received his first retrospective in 1978 at the London Regional Art Gallery, which focused on his realist, surrealist artworks that he was making at that time.  Again in 2001, Museum London organized a retrospective of his landscapes, which travelled to the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound, ON.  More recently in 2023, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery welcomed Fenwick home to Owen Sound, combining both landscapes and portraits in “Roly Fenwick: Lifelines in Light and Shadow”.

His paintings are in the permanent public collections of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Tom Thomson Art Gallery, McIntosh Art Gallery and Museum London.

Link to Roly Fenwick’s Artist Page HERE