INTERVIEWS, ESSAYS, ARTICLES
Descriptions of the Texts
and Links to their Pages
Robert Enright for Border Crossings Magazine,
1991
Eugene Knapik for Work Seen Magazine,
1991
Ron Moore for Hamilton Community TV,
1988
Joan Murray, The Unpublishable Interview,
1978
Opening Address, Doug Morton Retrospective,
1994
Opening Address, Jan Gerrit Wyers Retrospective,
1989
Opening Address, The Life and Role of the Artist,
1983
Baker Lake Prints, Foreward to the Catalog,
1973
Folk Painters of the Canadian West: Jan G. Wyers,
1960
Canadian Art VIII #3, Art in Canada, Spring
1951
Ken Lochhead and Ron Bloore at the Wallace
2021 -
Essay for the exhibition
I.M. Tamplin, Bloore at 80, Paintings 1988
2005 -
Essay for the exhibition catalog
Robert Enright, Regina 5 at Not Without Design,
1991 -
Interviews about the exhibition
Terrence Heath, Not Without Design,
1991 -
Essay for the exhibition catalog
David Burnett, Masterpieces of Canadian Art in the National Gallery,
1990
Kay Kritzwiser, Tamplin Collection Donation,
1988 -
Article about the exhibition
I.M. Tamplin, R.L. Bloore, Drawings 1960-
1988 -
Essay for the exhibition catalog
John Mays, Regina Five In a High School Gym,
1981 -
Article about the exhibition
T. A. Heinrich, Ronald Bloore, New Directions, artscanada magazine
1979
Barry Lord, Bloore and Contemporary Criticism, Canadian Art Magazine
1966
Robert Fulford, Bloore at the Here and Now,
1962 -
Review of the exhibition
Win Hedore, I Remember Dada, Time Magazine,
1960 -
Article about the exhibition
Hank Roest, Bloore's Dialectic,
2017 - Essay for the web site
Miscellaneous
Quotations
Brief
Biography
By far the most important and longest text on Bloore is the catalog essay by Terrence Heath for the travelling exhibition, Not Without Design which he curated in 1990. That entire text is here on the site, its four chapters distributed across four pages, notes and references on a fifth.
Bloore published many articles in periodicals in his day, especially in artscanada magazine as a contributing editor. These will be added in time. Also some drafts and notes for public talks and university lectures exist in the Bloore Archives at the University of Regina and there are many audio recordings in the library of York University.
A constant theme when Bloore spoke about art, is that exclusive knowledge does not elevate art nor privilege its appreciation.
The Regina Five Interviews in Border Crossings Magazine
I'm doing a bunch of four-feet by four-feet paintings now, which makes my wife a little happier because she keeps asking what am I going to do with 34 eight by eight-foot paintings. I mean, people have got eight and a half-foot ceilings. So they're stacked up,
...1500 words
Former student fellow painter with Bloore in the studio
I've been in the Heart of God. It was a little wee mosque insofar as you would walk in on an angle and turn. It was very small. You go inside and the dome of it, decorated the traditional way, was practically pulsating. Glorious blue, gold, white. By the way, it was all marvellously non-figurative, except for the Arabic inscriptions from the Koran. Art can be very moving at times — not too many times. The more you get up off your ass and travel and see, the less you like, but what you do like is incredible, an intense experience.
...4130 words
Long time dealer interviews Bloore at his gallery in Hamilton
It's infinitely more difficult to teach someone to learn how to paint a little bit, than to stand up in front of a class and give a lecture, much more difficult. Because your teaching them a language. It's like they're in kindergarten learning the ABCs but they're at University. But that's fine. I mean, that's where they're at. And may we not teach too much painting or art history in high schools as far as I'm concerned. But they have got to start somewhere and gradulally they learn that they have a very very complex language to begin to learn. Every stroke, every colour, every shape, every form, all these things, all the relationships are difficult.
...5200 words
with a separate page of Notes and Comments etc.
The whole mistake of Western Art was made by Giotto. He painted the sky blue. Duccio didn't do it. Cimabue didn't do it. None of my great Byzantine men did it. They knew what they were doing. Giotto paints the sky blue - what the hell happens? No longer did the Byzantine figures loom into space. No, you got a little picture window of the world
...10,300 words
Bloore's talk at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
published as the Forward to the exhibition catalog
Morton's bold imagery is difficult to place within a Canadian visual art milieu because his roots seem to be in the apparently contradictory sources of pre-war French Purism and German Expressionism... His individual, recognizable manner of image-making retains something of Purism's simplified shapes and the potency of Expressionism's colours.
...200 words
Bloore's talk at the MacKenzie Art Gallery Regina
published as the Forward to the exhibition catalog
Now, as back then, I consider it to be one of the few major iconic visions in the art of Canada or of the Great Plains.
...1200 words
Bloore's keynote talk at the Special Committee on the Arts
three day forum at York University, Toronto
Now, as back then, I consider it to be one of the few major iconic visions in the art of Canada or of the Great Plains.
...1200 words
The highly selective method of seizing upon the essential tends to eliminate the accidental, the incidental, the particular and the idiosyncratic. These images come from a unified mind and spirit response to life. They are direct, unambiguous and, at times, in diversity of style reflect, as in the art of the South, a variety of constantly changing circumstances and influences. A comprehensive examination of recent Inuit art in all its manifestations would reveal in subtle ways important aspects of cultural transition
...600 words
Canadian Art, Vol. XVII #2, March 1960
This article for Canadian Art illustrates Bloore's views on such things as what it is to be a painter, how art should be appreciated and how it should be analyzed. Most importantly, though, it illuminates the wonderous work of Jan Wyers.
...1350 words
Canadian Art, Vol. VIII #3, The Art Forum
In this letter from New York, where he lived at the time, to the Art Forum in Canadian Art magazine Bloore does not mince words in attacking the provincialism he had, temporarily, left behind.
...700 words
Text written exclusively for this web site's feature page
“The two became colleagues and lifelong friends in Regina around 1958 at Regina College in very eventful times, times fraught with tumult, some that is controversial to this day and when it came to visual art these two were at the two eyes of that hurricane. Insofar as any issue had two sides these two friends tended to be, temperamentally at least, on opposing sides while fighting ideologically for the same side...”
...3680 words
In 2005, when Illi Tamplin was retiring as Director of the AGP, she had two ideas for her third and last Bloore show. First was the need for a retrospective that would feature the paintings done since the Not Without Design retro of 1991. And second was an examination of the emergence, or revelation, of the masonite substrate as the field in Bloore's latest panels, a subject Tamplin analyses in this catalogue essay in relation to the gold-leaf grounds of Bloore's beloved Byzantine and Japanese art
...1900 words
The Regina Five Interviews by Robert Enright
When Terrence Heath's Bloore Retrospective touched down in Regina's Mackenzie Gallery, all the five were there and Robert Enright interviewed each one of them about the show,
Ted Godwin,
Doug Morton,
Ken Lochhead,
Art McKay and
Ron Bloore himself.
This article was printed in the Winter 1993 issue, Vol. 12 No. 1, with the title “Roy Kiyooka and the Regina Five.”
...3300 words
Catalog essay for the travelling retrospective exhibition
Ronald L. Bloore, Not Without Design
organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina
This is the fullest analysis yet published of Bloore's ideas on art and art making. These five website pages contain the entire english text which runs over 17,000 words and is the only such large work here. The essay was published in the catalogue of its eponymous traveling show curated by Heath and organized with Andrew Oko, director of the Mackenzie Gallery. The exhibition was hosted in Edmonton, Calgary, Hamilton, Halifax and Regina.
...17000 words
On the Introduction Page is Burnett's essay from p.162 of
“Masterpieces of Canadian Art From the National Gallery of Canada”
Many of his paintings comprise only linear forms; others include stars, circles, arches, or triangles, forms he has described as “symbol-like elements,” not because he proposes specific meaning by them but because they are forms deeply embedded in the history of art. In structural terms, he has been greatly influenced by architectural forms, particularly those of ancient civilizations, whose currency has never been devalued.
...500 words
The AGP Tamplin Collection Donation
by Kay Kritzwiser for the Globe and Mail, Nov. 12
“The unexpected announcement was received with a standing ovation.” The Globe and Mail reported on the opening at the Art Gallery of Peterborough of the “Drawings 1960 - 1988” show.
...700 words
“This exhibition of my work was completely hers. It was her development, her selection, her concept. She never faltered in the development of the show, though often she was challenged by the enormity of the decisions. She selected the frames, she wrote and designed the catalogue. She even corrected my biography!”
...3650 words
Regina Five In Creemore, with Olive Price-Adams
John B. Mays, Globe and Mail, October 12, newspaper article
The Regina 5 Exhibition Number Two, a display of 25 paintings (five each)...[that ends] after only three days in Creemore since the basketball stars-to-be will be wanting their gym back. But the show will go on
...830 words
T. A. Heinrich, artscanada magazine, May/June, article with photos
Ronald Bloore is a romantic Euclidean, interested in constant speculation rather than a final order. He is also a teacher and talker with positive, sharply defined, tersely expressed opinions. These often display a nice balance between humour and scorn. He also has a strongly spiritual side of Emersonian cast but tinged with non-rational mysticism. It is this very private sense that nourishes and perhaps at bottom inspires his art, an art that might be uncomfortably austere were it not warmed and humanized by memories
...1200 words
Barry Lord, for Canadian Art Magazine Oct. ’66, pp 22-4
Lord's review shows well how acutely some aspects of an artist's work can be grasped, or let us say accepted, while the most important aspects are grossly, willfully misunderstood so they may be forced into the service of a horribly misguided but fashionable ideology.
...1850 words
Robert Fulford, Toronto Daily Star, March 3, newspaper review
For a painter who has never had an exhibition to call his own, Ronald Bloore owns a considerable reputation. His paintings have been bought by the National Gallery and some important private collectors, he was included in the Canadian display at last year's Sao Paulo biennial
...400 words
Time Magazine, Canadian Edition, Nov. 7, article with photos
When Regina's university art gallery opened an exhibition "Images and Studies" by a local unknown named Win Hedore, Gallery Director Ronald L. Bloore - a telegram in hand - regretfully announced that the artist could not be present. That seemed to be a sensible precaution on Hedore's part
...400 words
by Hank Roest, Estate Trustee and author of this site
Bloore's dialectic is rooted in rejecting resolution as a satisfactory solution. The demonstration that something can be beautifully and completely resolved is tantamount to an assurance that some things are ultimately fathomable and that is a dangerous falsehood. It is a lie, Bloore said, we have been telling ourselves since Giotto.
...400 words
RLB on Art, Artists, Methods and Others on RLB
Go into the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul where space, rather than the object, is really the sacred thing, and you become identified with it - you're enveloped with the space and light.
...3800 words
RLB: the life in 500 words
Ron Bloore was born near Toronto in 1925. At the University of Toronto he studied Art and Archeology and wrote about ancient Chinese bronzes in 1949. He did post-graduate studies in New York at NYU in the early fifties. He finished his MA at Washington University and went to the Courtauld Institute in London and Paris to pursue a PHD...
...500 words
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