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Content, History and Currency
While ronbloore.ca is the painter’s official web site, originally set up and supervised by Ron Bloore and now kept up by his estate, it is no less a personal work. This site is entirely the product of one person’s efforts and it benefits and suffers from the unity and eccentricity of all such sites. The studio assistant who began the site at the turn of the century by buying a book about HTML became over the years Ron’s closest friend, advisor and colleague in arms and eventually the director of his estate and he maintains the site to this day.
RonBloore.ca began as a byproduct of the job of cataloguing the works which remained in the painter's possession. Its inevitable expansion to include commentary was a bit problematic because its subject and sponsor refused to read it. The painter stuck to a policy, implemented in 1959, of not saying, writing, nor even reading anything about himself or his work, except to speak of his methods or to fact-check information.
Fact-checking is always difficult. It means judging the relative value of sometimes dubious and occasionally contradictory memories, reports and records. The artist temperament is not renowned for its reliability in regards to accuracy of memory, consistency of reports or conscientiousness of record keeping. Art lovers, commentators and hangers-on neither. But the gathering and sifting and sorting will go on.
Commentary is rightly asked of the estate. That is a request Bloore himself denied because his remarks could be given too much weight. Painters tend to speak as artistically as they paint. As methodically, coherently and clearly too. So Bloore was an exemplary speaker. But his understanding of the meanings in his own work could not be resolved into unambiguous “ artist’s statements” and so he kept silent in that regard. Now he has left us to try for ourselves - and there is no risk of being given too much weight.
Still, Bloore's art and, to some extent, his public life are the site's main concerns. In terms of his personal life, suffice it to say, he was born in Brampton ON (at 2:49 a.m. May 29, 1925), he had an older brother, two wives (both named Dorothy), four children and died in Toronto ON (at about 1:30 p.m. September 4, 2009).
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Currency
The oldest sections of the site were designed for 56Kbps modems. Later on gallery pages were tailored to 1Mbps broadband and larger monitors. Now, with higher speed connections and new browser features images are gathered onto single long pages and higher resolution versions of those images can be viewed in separate windows.
Ronbloore.ca is always being updated piecemeal. New pages are being posted even when they are in early stages of development. Recently added or altered pages appear in light text on the Contents page and hovering on those links will reveal when they were added or updated. No page on the site is ever really finalized.
Wandering the site will usually lead to vintage web pages. A few of these will be kept for their old world charm. But they are still corrected, adjusted and added to as new information arises and their code will be kept viable as long as their look and feel can be preserved.
In early days links were hover-colour coded differently. Orange links still go around the site or around the current page or may pull up a high resolution image. Red colouring now applies to works in private hands, links (and image borders) that turn green when hovered over are artworks in public collections and those that turn blue are in the estate and so are now for sale (or at least they will be).
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