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Gerald Squires
Gerald Squires , an art-career retrospective of the Newfoundland artist Gerald Squires, who died in October 2015, examines lesser-known aspects of this beloved artist's creative journey. The book is set to be released in May 2017 during the opening of a Squires retrospective at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St John's. Featuring full colour reproductions of some of Squires' most renowned works as well as lesser-known illustrations of exemplary works, plus a complete chronology of his career, including a selected list of solo and group exhibitions, the book is augmented with a long essay by acclaimed Canadian literary critic Stan Dragland, and an appreciation by writer and poet Michael Crummey.
240 pages, Hardcover
Published May 10, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 29, 2017
I love this book. In the present tense. I've read it from cover to cover but I'm by no means done with it. Like David Silcox’s great David Milne retrospective book, "The Painting Place," reading and seeing and discovering this book is like living in a house (or, perhaps, a decommissioned lighthouse) for a time, one you want to revisit even when you no longer live there.
Much of Squires work here is new to me, though I thought myself to be somewhat familiar with it before hand, and the man himself is a complete revelation, painted so well in Stan Dragland’s wonderful essay. This is exactly what I want to read about an artist, one I love or one I'm discovering: not just biography, but what they are working for and what they are working against, what they know about they're doing and what are their blind spots that only can be seen from outside, and how do all these elements play in the evolution and changes in their work.
Dragland’s essay draws these salient questions out wonderfully, how does a thing get made? How does the maker begin? Where do intention and impulse--or insight and vision--branch? Which tributaries get followed or rejected? How does the painting, the work, become itself and not any of the other things it could've easily been? I particular enjoyed the exploration of this "without knowing" manner of proceeding in the Uprooted chapter, as this is manner is of interest to me. I often suspect my own better writing and much of the art I admire, proceeds in this way. The work is definitive only as a single roll of the dice or a day's mood of weather can be: of itself, in that moment. Other eyes and light have their way with it, but it's the maker's relation to the making and the made that fascinate me, and your essay sheds generous light--and necessary shadow--on these questions and contexts in terms of Squires work but also of the creative act itself. This is further illuminated by the inclusion of so many sketches and preparatory studies as well as excerpts from his own notebook and diaries on his process--material so full of sparks and insights. The detail of Dragland’s exploration of this material, too, is intimate and confiding in a way that it draws me in and along in a process as fascinating as a finished painting.
Squires himself seems a compellingly intelligent and articulate speaker on his own craft and place in the context of the cultural history of Newfoundland, of which I learned a great deal. He also seems like a complex and difficult character, with the kind of Mosaic force of will to follow his singular vision and create a body of work out of his own skill and instinct. Reading this portrait makes gives him the form and energy of someone I might've known, but regret never having met.
Squires’ portraits, particularly his sketches, are really wonderful, but it's his unpeopled views--detailed, long looked at views--that move me most and illicit the longest looks and squinting consideration from me. The rocks and roots and trees are not landscapes or even characters, but native faces of a long considered and complicatedly loved place. The beautiful double page reproductions of "Where Genesis Begins" and the spread of "The Intruder to "Cabot Tower, Signal Hill" bares this and bears it out for me.
Michael Crummey’s very personal “triptych” that closes the book is touching in its close reading not of Squires’ work but of Squires the man--husband, father and friend—in warm kitchens, in his final illness and in the memory of those that loved him or his work and Newfoundland, the land he loved and changed, visually, for so many people, home and away.
The design of the whole book and reproduction of the paintings and sketches is superbly and sensitively done--dancing as they do with Dragland’s essay. I'm know this was, as always, a team effort and I admire the determined and careful vision of Pedlar publisher, Beth Follett, and designer Beth Oberholzer for their work here. It's a stunning book.
This is a remarkable tribute to Gerald Squires and the affection and friendship that both Dargland and Crummey had and have for the man are evident in and through the insight and intelligence of this reading of his work and the warmth of language and reflection they bring to it. It's a rich, complex and detailed landscape that rewards long and repeated viewing. I can only imagine Squires himself would be very pleased.
Much of Squires work here is new to me, though I thought myself to be somewhat familiar with it before hand, and the man himself is a complete revelation, painted so well in Stan Dragland’s wonderful essay. This is exactly what I want to read about an artist, one I love or one I'm discovering: not just biography, but what they are working for and what they are working against, what they know about they're doing and what are their blind spots that only can be seen from outside, and how do all these elements play in the evolution and changes in their work.
Dragland’s essay draws these salient questions out wonderfully, how does a thing get made? How does the maker begin? Where do intention and impulse--or insight and vision--branch? Which tributaries get followed or rejected? How does the painting, the work, become itself and not any of the other things it could've easily been? I particular enjoyed the exploration of this "without knowing" manner of proceeding in the Uprooted chapter, as this is manner is of interest to me. I often suspect my own better writing and much of the art I admire, proceeds in this way. The work is definitive only as a single roll of the dice or a day's mood of weather can be: of itself, in that moment. Other eyes and light have their way with it, but it's the maker's relation to the making and the made that fascinate me, and your essay sheds generous light--and necessary shadow--on these questions and contexts in terms of Squires work but also of the creative act itself. This is further illuminated by the inclusion of so many sketches and preparatory studies as well as excerpts from his own notebook and diaries on his process--material so full of sparks and insights. The detail of Dragland’s exploration of this material, too, is intimate and confiding in a way that it draws me in and along in a process as fascinating as a finished painting.
Squires himself seems a compellingly intelligent and articulate speaker on his own craft and place in the context of the cultural history of Newfoundland, of which I learned a great deal. He also seems like a complex and difficult character, with the kind of Mosaic force of will to follow his singular vision and create a body of work out of his own skill and instinct. Reading this portrait makes gives him the form and energy of someone I might've known, but regret never having met.
Squires’ portraits, particularly his sketches, are really wonderful, but it's his unpeopled views--detailed, long looked at views--that move me most and illicit the longest looks and squinting consideration from me. The rocks and roots and trees are not landscapes or even characters, but native faces of a long considered and complicatedly loved place. The beautiful double page reproductions of "Where Genesis Begins" and the spread of "The Intruder to "Cabot Tower, Signal Hill" bares this and bears it out for me.
Michael Crummey’s very personal “triptych” that closes the book is touching in its close reading not of Squires’ work but of Squires the man--husband, father and friend—in warm kitchens, in his final illness and in the memory of those that loved him or his work and Newfoundland, the land he loved and changed, visually, for so many people, home and away.
The design of the whole book and reproduction of the paintings and sketches is superbly and sensitively done--dancing as they do with Dragland’s essay. I'm know this was, as always, a team effort and I admire the determined and careful vision of Pedlar publisher, Beth Follett, and designer Beth Oberholzer for their work here. It's a stunning book.
This is a remarkable tribute to Gerald Squires and the affection and friendship that both Dargland and Crummey had and have for the man are evident in and through the insight and intelligence of this reading of his work and the warmth of language and reflection they bring to it. It's a rich, complex and detailed landscape that rewards long and repeated viewing. I can only imagine Squires himself would be very pleased.
October 3, 2018
Happy addition to my library. Great bio of Gerald and his lifetime of work.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews