Paintings from 2000 - 2003*

* Paintings from 2000 - 2003

Another period of transition, of "shaking things up," characterized as usual by varying the proportions and size, experimenting with intense colours, varying techniques for rendering the fields, and an apparent oscillation between elegance and turbulence.

Too much can be made of the events in a painter's personal life when considering his work, but the one clear relation is quantitative. Bloore's bypass surgery in '85 slowed him down considerably but ultimately liberated him from teaching. The death, on December 31st, 1999, of his wife Dorothy Cameron was another matter. By the following summer output had slowed to a trickle like a spring after the fall.

Work had begun to flow again in May 2002 when the studio landlord said he had to move out but offered him a space in a nearby building on Spadina Avenue. This severely de-stabilized production until the summer of '03.

In an interview with Linda Corbett for her film White Balance, shot mostly in 2003, Bloore expressed concern that these paintings might be "too apparently emotionally derived." Once the dark and colourful late paintings had been realized, the searching process so evident in this period of transition could easily be seen as a natural development.