The influential artist and educator Ron Shuebrook works every summer in his Blandford, Nova Scotia studio. He is best known as an abstract painter who aligns his work with American late Modernist tendencies. In Shuebrook’s work, “late Modernism” means adherence to the principles of formalist aesthetics, compositional refinement and exploration of the properties of his materials. For this artist there is no practical distinction to be made between drawing and painting: “Drawing and painting are both about working with a certain material.”
This exhibition acknowledges the centrality of drawing to Ron Shuebrook’s practice. Representing over 30 years of production by the artist, Drawings has much to teach viewers about process. Freed from the burden of representation, Shuebrook’s hard-edged geometric figures in black compressed charcoal interlock in dynamic tension, generating graphic elegance from the visibly erased and reworked remnants of false starts and new decisions.
This is the first retrospective survey with a catalogue of drawings by Ron Shuebrook. The exhibition will tour Canada from coast to coast over the next two years.
