Black Ice
David Blackwood: Prints of Newfoundland
A lush tribute to an iconic artist and the vibrant culture his work depicts.
David Blackwood was engaged in telling stories about Newfoundland through his epic visual narratives for most of his career. Drawing on childhood memories, dreams, superstitions, oral tradition, and the political realities of the place where he was born and raised, he created an iconography of Newfoundland as universal as it is personal, as mythic as it is rooted in reality, as timeless as it is linked to specific events.
Now, the volume that brought together these narratives — and accompanied Blackwood's 2011 exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario — is back in print. The lavishly illustrated Black Ice features over seventy reproductions of Blackwood’s Newfoundland prints, in addition to contextual essays by artists, scholars, and curators from Canada and Ireland, including Sean Cadigan, Michael Crummey, Gary Michael Dault, and Caoimhe Ní Shúilleabháin. Together, they place his work within the changing social context of twentieth-century Newfoundland.
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"This eloquent piece sheds valuable light on those veiled, ghostly figures that haunt so many of Blackwood’s most mysterious works." — British Journal of Canadian Studies
Katharine Lochnan is a senior curator emeritus at the Art Gallery of Ontario and a senior fellow at Massey College. Lochnan was the founding curator of the prints and drawings department at the AGO, continuing her work there for over 30 years. She has curated numerous exhibitions and authored numerous publications for the AGO, including Painting Toward the Light: The Watercolours of David Milne; Turner, Whistler, Monet: Impressionist Visions; Mystical Landscapes from Vincent Van Gogh to Emily Carr; and Black Ice: David Blackwood, Prints of Newfoundland.
