Greg Curnoe (1936–1992) was a Canadian painter known for his patriotism and for his attentiveness on subjects associated with London, Ontario.

He became known for work in the pop art genre, which sustained to influence his later work.

He was also a founding member of the Nihilist Spasm Band, a group which debatably pioneered the concept of noise music.

He was an avid cyclist, and bicycles were a favorite subject of his work. Tragically, while on a club ride, a distracted driver of a pickup truck failed to see the group of riders and plow up into them. Curnoe was killed and several others were gravely injured.

The Honorable David Alexander Colville, PC, CC, ONS, BFA, LL.D (born August 24, 1920 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian painter.

His drawings and paintings often engage scrupulous planning and have a strict geometric underpinning that is then carried from the test draft to the real painting. Colville stated on many occasions that he was an artist of the real and despised other artists who did not carry their work ahead of the geometry or other abstract ideas in the heart of their work, hence the argument regarding the style of his paintings.

Colville calls himself a realist, while many critics and art lovers have selected to see him as a magic realist. Indeed, his strange landscapes, settings and characters, though often desolate, frequently have an internal conflict, stemming from the ever-present, yet unseen, pattern of geometric design. The complexity of categorizing his work is in itself a sole mark of his art and is possibly an implicit comment on issues of existentialism and estrangement in the world from which Colville drew his ideas and images.

Emily Carr (December 13, 1871 – March 2, 1945) was a Canadian artist and writer

She was born in Victoria, British Columbia, and moved to San Francisco in 1890 to study art after the loss of her parents. In 1899 she traveled to England to deepen her studies, where she spends time at the Westminster School of Art in London and at various studio schools in Cornwall, Bushey, Hertfordshire, and elsewhere. In 1910, she spent a year studying art at the Academy Colarossi in Paris and somewhere else in France before moving back to British Columbia enduringly the following year.

In the 1920s she came into contact with members of the Group of Seven (artists) after being invited by the National Gallery of Canada to partake in a trade fair of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern. She traveled to Ontario for this show in 1927 where she met members of the Group, counting Lawren Harris, whose support was invaluable. She was invited to submit her works for addition in a Group of Seven exhibition, the beginning of her long and precious association with the Group. They named her ‘The Mother of Modern Arts’ around five years later.

Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Emily Carr Elementary School in Vancouver, British Columbia, Emily Carr Middle School in Ottawa, Ontario and Emily Carr Public School in London, Ontario are named after her.

Janet Cardiff (born 1957) is a Canadian installation artist.

She was born in Brussels, Ontario. She studied at Queen’s University (BFA) and the University of Alberta (MVA). She at present lives and works in Lethbridge, Alberta.

Her artworks, whether they are installations or walking pieces, are mostly audio-based. She has been built-in in exhibitions such as: “Sculpture Projects”, Muenster, 1997, “Present Tense, Nine Artists in the Nineties”, SFMOMA, “NowHere”, Louisiana Museum, Denmark, “The Museum as Muse”, MOMA, Sao Paulo Bienal ‘98, 6th International Istanbul Biennial, The Carnegie International ‘99/00, “The Tate Modern Opening Exhibition” plus a project commissioned by Artangel in London. This project (”The Missing Voice (Case Study B)”) was commissioned in 1999 and continues to run. It is an audio tour that leaves from the White chapel Library, next to the White chapel tube stop and snakes its way through London’s East End, weaving fictional narrative with descriptions about the actual landscape.

In 2005, the Hirsh horn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institute commissioned and exhibited her effort “Words Drawn in Water”.

Her other works are incorporated in private and public collections in Canada, the United States and Europe.

Janet is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery, NYC, and Barbara Weis Gallery, Berlin.

Roland Brener (February 22, 1942 - March 22, 2006) was a South African-born Canadian artist.

Brener’s early practice grew from the formalist innovations of his generation at St. Martin’s. During the 1980s his work developed a more playful independence as he began to slot in consumer items, most often toys, and experiment with kinetic sculpture driven by electronic motors or computers. In his later work he began to use the computer as a design means to produce fantastical distortions of everyday images and objects which were then fabricated in wood or synthetic materials.

During his lifetime Roland Brener was one of the mainly distinguished sculptors and art educators in Canada and his work is represented in most of the chief public collections in the country, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. He also represented Canada at the Biennal International de São Paulo in 1987 and the Venice Biennale in 1988. More recently, Brener exhibited Swinger at Deitch Projects (2000) in New York, and in Part Two, a duo display with Mowry Baden, at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2006).

Sacha Dean Bïyan is a fashion photographer and photojournalist specializing in high-end viewpoint, advertising and fine art photography. He is known for his provoking and eccentric style.

Biography

Biyan was born on October 1, 1968. Although he brought up in Montreal, Canada, he spent most of his life hopping between continents. Today he’s a self-proclaimed international gypsy who speaks five languages and feels evenly at home in the concrete jungle or in the Amazon jungle. He holds a Master’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering and worked as an advisor in the aerospace industry for over ten years before diverting his notice fulltime to photography. Although he had no proper training in photography, he began experimenting with cameras, film and darkroom techniques at an early age. Biyan’s similarity for photography finally led him to switch careers in his early thirties. Since then, his images have appeared in many magazines and galleries, and he has shot for clients such as Adidas, The Gap, Sony Music, Discovery, etc. He has also involved a wide global audience with the popularity of his website Eccentris.com, considered by many as one of the the majority cutting-edge websites on the Internet.

Paul-Emile Borduas (November 1, 1905 - February 22, 1960) was famous Canadian painter known for his abstract paintings. He was also a protester for the separation of church and state, particularly for art, in Quebec.

Borduas was born in Saint-Hilaire, Quebec. At the age of fifteen he became a trainee to Ozias Leduc, a church decorator. Leduc gave Borduas a basic antistatic training, teaching him how to reinstate and beautify churches. In 1923 he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montreal that he followed up by studying in Paris from 1928 to 1930.

He began painting abstracts in 1941, becoming more concerned in the act of painting rather than the subject matter. He and some of his students became known as the Automatists for their attempts to paint “automatically”. It was with these students that he wrote Le Refus Global in 1948. It was a significant manifesto that pushed forward the division of church and state in Quebec, particularly for the arts. The group discrete soon after the manifesto was published. The manifesto is one of the motions to have sparked the Quiet Revolution in Quebec.

In 1955 he moved back to Paris where he died of a heart attack in 1960.

His most well-known work is the painting L’etoile noire (Black Star) composed of a white background and dabs of black paint.

Robert Bateman was born in Toronto on the 24th of May in 1930. Even as a child he was attracted in art and wildlife. He found motivation from the Group of Seven, making abstract paintings of nature. It wasn’t awaiting the mid 1960’s that he changed to his present style, realism.

Bateman was always interested in art, but he not at all intended on making a living from it. He was enthralled by the natural world in his childhood. According to the CBC, as a child he recorded the sightings of all of the birds in the area of his house in Toronto. Although the stage was set for a specialist wildlife artist, Bateman moved on to be a high school history teacher. However, he still painted in his gratis time. It wasn’t until the 1970’s and 1980’s that his work started to get major recognition. Robert Bateman doesn’t have to hunt himself for a motive to paint, he just enjoys to. His main thought is not at all if the painting would sell for a huge profit on the market, or whether the critics would like it or not, or if it would be the next Mona Lisa. He lives to paint, and paints to live.

Today, Robert Bateman lives in Salt coil Island in British Columbia with his wife Birgit Bateman. He has five children from two wives. Robert Bateman Secondary School in Abbotsford, British Columbia and Robert Bateman High School in Burlington, Ontario are named after him.

In 2005 Bateman volunteered for an appraisal of chemicals present in his body that had a proven unhelpful health effect. The assessment was sponsored by the organization Environmental Defense. 32 carcinogens, 19 hormone disruptors, 16 respiratory toxicants, and 42 reproductive/developmental toxicants were found in his body.

Earl W. Bascom (June 19, 1906 - August 28, 1995) was an American-Canadian painter and sculptor who actually portrayed his own cowboy experiences of the American and Canadian Old West.

International Artist

Earl Bascom became globally known as a cowboy artist and sculptor. His art has been exhibited in the United States, Canada and Europe. He was privileged by the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Artists Association as the first rodeo cowboy to become a specialized cowboy artist and sculptor. He was the first cowboy artist to be honored as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts of London, England. In the summer of 2005, the Earl W. Bascom Memorial Rodeo was detained in Berlin, Germany by the European Rodeo Cowboys friendship in honor of Earl Bascom and his world-wide influence upon the sport of rodeo.

Always one who had cavernous thoughts and religious leanings, Earl Bascom was ordained a Mormon Bishop later in life.

As the late cowboy celebrity Roy Rogers, who worked with Earl Bascom in TV commercials and was a antenna of Bascom art, once said, “Earl Bascom is a walking book of history. His knowledge of the Old West was acquiring the old fashioned way – he was born and raised in it.”

In life Earl Bascom followed his own philosophy – “If you desire to be a champion bull rider, you have to ride the toughest bull.” Bascom rode the tough ones.

In his ninetieth year of life living on his farm in Victorville, California, Earl Bascom waved his hat good-bye in his Grand Entry into that “Big Rodeo Arena in the Sky” on August 28, 1995 - a cowboy through and through.

Myfanwy Ashmore (born 1970, North York, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian abstract artist who has been involved in information art, fresh media art, gameart, video art, interactive art, internet art since 1995. She studied at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, in 1990, graduated from the Sculpture-Installation section at the Ontario College of Art in 1996 and conventional her MFA from York University in 1998.

In addition to being an international exhibiting artist, at present she is a technician at the Ontario College of Art and Design in the Academic Computer Centre. She has received numerous findings as well as awards from various councils and artist run centers. Most lately she was nominated and short listed for the important 2003 K.M. Hunter award through the Ontario Arts Council. 

She is known for her contentious soma/somo project, a series of networked decaying grapefruits that converse with the viewer and vice versa—for which she received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, which punctually ended up in debate in Canadian Parliament and unavoidably the media. She has sustained to make work that is hard to distribute, that sometimes exists in an indeterminate space, or has not been exhibited until much later when there are fitting venues.