Book of Condolences Painting

ABOUT THE WORK This latest series of paintings and constructions focuses on shape, colour and texture, continuing an exploration of images and objects made by the construction of many pieces into a solid and cohesive, but somewhat fractured whole. They bring with them the energy of healing and rebirth, expanding a series of works rooted in an autobiographical narrative involving loss and death. My past constructed works made of plywood, drywall, canvas and paper grew out of a search for expressive materials with which to build objects that reflected natural and organic forms describing structure, fracture and façade. Surfaces reflected those of aged and scarred walls, or skin, assembled and finished roughly, in the manner of an imperfect repair to a broken object, a healed but scarred human mind, or body. More recent work leans toward a more finished aesthetic, although the surfaces of most pieces remain textured and worn. The colour, and organic shapes and rythyms of this latest work speak to a wholeness, and celebration of life and love. BIOGRAPHY John Ford was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada. Ford graduated from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in 1990 and pursued a career as a painter, exhibiting in commercial galleries and artist-run centres into the early ‘00s. Following the death of his mother in 1990, and the related suicide of his father in 1994, his work dealt primarily with the idea of love and loss. During this early period, he increasingly viewed his own making of art as self-indulgent. He left art as a career in 2004, when he moved with his family to a rural setting to begin a career as a police officer, while continuing to paint and periodically exhibiting his work at both commercial and public galleries. Despite thriving in this new career, as a result of the cumulative trauma of his personal history and a decade of exposure to death and loss as a police officer, he struggled with PTSD and took leave from work in 2014 to recover. After an extended period of treatment during which art-making proved fundamental to his recovery, he retired from policing and returned to Toronto to again pursue a career as an artist. Ford’s work is now collected across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia.