Painter helped bring western art to forefront
Regina Five artist Godwin dies at age 79
Calgary artist Ted Godwin died early Friday. The 79-yearold artist, who had been hospitalized recently after a heart attack, died in his sleep, according to an e-mail from the Wallace Gallery, which represented Godwin.
Godwin, born in Calgary and a graduate of the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (and Art) in 1955, was a member of the Regina Five, a group of five Regina abstract artists — along with Kenneth Lochhead, Arthur McKay, Douglas Morton and Ronald Bloore — who achieved major national success with a 1961 art show at the National Gallery of Canada.
That show — Five Painters from Regina — put western Canadian art on the forefront of the art scene. Godwin was also a faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan from 1964 until his retirement in 1985.
His work has been exhibited at major galleries across Canada and in the United Kingdom, and is part of many major collections, including the Glenbow, the Ontario Museum of Art, the CBC and the National Gallery of Canada.
While Godwin achieved his breakthrough as an abstract painter, he later returned to representational painting, including a major 1992 exhibition of paintings showcasing the Lower Bow River. The show was critically acclaimed, receiving exhibitions in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Regina.
“Ted was certainly one of the giant figures of western Canadian art history,” says Museum of Contemporary Art Calgary Artistic Director Jeffrey Spalding.
“Not only was he an influential member of the Regina Five — that’s a significant enough achievement,” adds Spalding, “but people will also remember him here in Calgary as somebody who was brave and willing to turn away from that (abstract art) to representational painting.
“That’s not an easy thing for a professional artist to do,” he says, continuing. “To turn his back on that ... was quite brave. He embraced a whole legacy of representational painting, to rejoin the legacy you could trace back to Illingsworth-Kerr — even the Group of Seven — and he created stunning, inventive work. That took an enormous amount of personal courage.
“There are very few painters,” Spalding says, “who (could be said to) own the Bow River.”