Sunlight Painting

JOHN WARD was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1948, and emigrated to Canada in 1969. At age seventeen he finished school to work professionally as a scenery artist for film and theatre. On arrival in Toronto he worked briefly as an illustrator, working for most of Canada's major magazines, before quitting in 1974 to paint full-time. In 1974 he exhibited with The New York Illustrators Society.

In 1993 "Courage to Create", a documentary about the evolution of his work was broadcast in Canada on CBC TV. The film outlines the transition from the urban subject matter of the 1970's to his nature based paintings of today. Since the late 1980's his paintings reflect what he calls "Entering Nature". He lives in the countryside north of Toronto.

As I went further into that place I call "Entering Nature", I realized that my subject matter ultimately became a vehicle for light, colour, and the mystery that surrounds us. The symbolic use of vivid colours and the contrasts between black and white convey a duality, both foreboding of the potential death of our planet and my own sense of hope and joy in nature. I will keep going where it takes me. - John Ward

We stand in nature as we look at John Ward's recent paintings, and sense the incredible dimensionality of a world we are inside, for a brief period of time, before we pass on. Light and bio-matter become a basis for identifying with energy per se, and the essentially abstract nature of energy, that ever transforming energy that exists in nature. Neither surreal, nor rational, John Ward has built his own structural model through his art, for a total world that is recognized within the world of the plant world, of the leaf structure. This becomes a sort of genetic library or compendium that speaks of reality as filtered through John Ward's art is a total structure in the process of becoming. It is a world entirely designed by the artist, that nevertheless, could potentially express some greater, even magical force, something immeasurable, uncontained, and yet that has not been labelled or caricatured, that exists in and of itself, and that our hereditary memory shares some primordial recognition with. - John K. Grande, writer and art critic.