REGINA HAGGO
The Burlington Fine Arts Association turns 50
The Burlington Fine Arts Association is 50 years old.
Its aim is to help local artists get together and inspire one another through workshops, discussions and exhibitions. The founder was Gery Puley, a well-known Burlington painter. Pat Boddington was the first president.
The BFAA was also instrumental in launching what is now the Art Gallery of Burlington in the 1970s.
“BFAA together with the other six guilds at the time joined forces to form Arts Burlington, the umbrella group that eventually convinced the city and the provincial government that an arts facility and gallery was needed in Burlington,” Lois Crawford tells me. An artist, she’s been a member of BFAA for 44 years.
The gallery is helping the association mark its milestone with three major exhibitions.
The main exhibition, in the Lee-Chin Family Gallery, celebrates all things local. Burlington Urban & Rural was open to all regional artists. It offers paintings, sculpture, textiles, photographs, jewelry, ceramics and installation work.
The show is like a tour of the area with dozens of artists as our guides.
Fred Urron gives us a compressed bird’s-eye view in “Burlington.”
He paints in a vividly coloured and simplified style. There are two big shapes: the blue water of Lake Ontario and the red foliage along the shore. Tiny highrises cling close to the water’s edge. Urron lets smaller multicoloured geometric shapes stand in for the escarpment.
Claudette Losier depicts a similar combination of urban and rural environments in “Escarpment Burlington.” Her view is more detailed than Urron’s, her perspective fanciful and animated.
She highlights a handful of landmarks. The Art Gallery of Burlington looms on the far left and the Skyway flops sideways on the right.
The Skyway appears in a more upright position in Jane Armstrong’s “Swans at LaSalle Park,” a compositionally concise juxtaposition of nature and architecture.
Sun-speckled Burlington Bay occupies the painting’s centre and takes up more than half the pictorial space. In the foreground, blue-beaked swans gather along the thin strip of shoreline. The bridge stands beyond the bay.
Joan Harris sticks to the rural, and gets personal in “The Harris Family Farm,” a wool-on-linen tapestry. A glorious selection of farm animals surrounds the central buildings.
Helen Griffiths brings us indoors. A bouquet of flowers lies on an old straight-backed chair in “After a day in (the Country) Burlington.” An exotic skunk lies on the hardwood floor smelling the roses.
In Burlington, obviously, rural and urban intertwine.
Other great offerings include pieces by Grace Afonso, Callie Archer, Rossana Dewey, Paul Elia, Donna Fratesi, Elizabeth Ludovics, Victoria Pearce, Lorraine Roy, Barbara Townsend and Nikola Wojewoda, among others.
There are two more relevant exhibitions. Power of Passion celebrates the work of 18 BFFA artists who had solo shows at the gallery. It runs until Aug. 14. Presidents’ Wall, closing July 25, features work by past presidents of the BFAA.