Opening reception in Calgary on Saturday, June 27 from 1:00 to 4:00 pm
Join us for the opening reception of our new Walter J. Phillips exhibition, and enjoy a selection of wine, cheese and charcuterie from Richmond Hill Wines and Unfiltered Wine Bar.
It is a privilege to present this exhibition of thirty-one works by Walter Joseph Phillips (1884 – 1963), an artist whose name has become inseparable from the Canadian landscape. Gathered here are wood engravings, colour woodcuts, and watercolours that together span the better part of his working life—from the still waters of Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, and the inlets of the British Columbia coast.
Walter J. Phillips is best remembered for the colour woodcut, a painstaking technique of Japanese origin that he adopted in 1917 and made entirely his own. Having begun in etching—producing some thirty plates within two years and earning early recognition from the National Gallery of Canada—he abandoned that medium almost entirely once he discovered the woodcut’s capacity for colour, light, and atmosphere. In 1926 he set down his methods in The Technique of the Color Woodcut, a book that remains a standard reference for printmakers to this day.
The earliest works in this exhibition belong to the Manitoba period, when Phillips spent his summers at Lake of the Woods and found, in its islands and channels, a subject he would return to throughout his life. Rushing River, Lake of the Woods (1920) and Sunset, Lake of the Woods (1928) show the woodcut at its most lyrical, while Hnausa (1934)—named for the Icelandic settlement on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg—reveals the assured draughtsmanship of his maturity.
The centrepiece of the exhibition, York Boat on Lake Winnipeg (1930), belongs to this same world. Its subject—one of the broad inland boats once used to carry goods across the northern waterways—gave Phillips the chance to set the geometry of sail and hull against the open expanse of the lake. It is, by common consent, among the most accomplished colour woodcuts he ever produced, and the most significant work in the present selection.
Phillips’s first journey to the Rocky Mountains in 1926 reshaped the second half of his career. Over the following decades the mountains became his principal subjects with Beaver Lodge (1944) and Rundle Winter (1949) depicting the alpine spirit in woodcuts. The watercolour Elbow Falls (1958) captures the rush of an Alberta mountain stream and dates from later years, when his handling of the medium reached its height. Later the British Columbia coast became of interest to him. In the watercolour Deep Cove (1957), Phillips displays his strong sense of colour and reveals the soft light of the Pacific coast.
Phillips’s work is held in major collections across Canada—among them the National Gallery of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies—as well as in London, Washington, New Jersey, and Japan, and in private collections around the world. The most extensive private holding, the Crabb collection, was gifted to the city of Winnipeg and is now permanently displayed at the Pavilion Gallery Museum in Assiniboine Park, where it may be viewed year-round.