Ron Bloore at 80

Paintings from 1988 to 2005

Art Gallery of Peterborough

August 19 - October 2, 2005

What a beautiful exhibition. Another Tamplin / Bloore show in Peterborough. Two of the gallery's walls had been painted a soft grey-yellow-green colour for a show in July - August and this worked out perfectly for the installation of six warm works in gold-leaf frames and 11 cool ones in silver-leaf frames.

As adjunct to the show, 11 Bloores from the AGP collection adorned the ramps leading to the main room (see below).

The curator, Illi Maria Harff-Tamplin, who was retiring as Director of the AGP, had two ideas for her third and last Bloore show.

First was the need for a retrospective that would display the paintings done since his last major public survey, Terrence Heath's Not Without Design of 1991, with emphasis on the startling new Dark Chocolates.

And second was an examination of the emergence (revelation?) of the masonite substrate as the field in the new panels, a subject Tamplin analyses in her catalogue essay in relation to the gold-leaf grounds of Bloore's beloved Byzantine and Japanese art. That essay is on our site here.

Six of the paintings, offered by the painter and selected by the curator, were donated to the gallery's permanent collection.

On the ramps were displayed 11 Bloores from earlier times, ten of which can be found in the AGP collection galleries but I only have a record of nine. (The eleventh was a beautiful painting from about 1969 that we do not have a photo of yet):

790803a, 790806b, 790808a, 8500b, 860425, 860424, 860414, 830702b, and 830712e.