Ottawa School of Art

Gail Bourgeois 

Gail Bourgeois holds an MFA from Concordia University. Her exhibition record spans more than twenty years in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and in England. Her commitment to cultural practices includes independent curating and publishing articles, reviews and essays in leading Canadian and British journals. She has been teaching for more than fifteen years and has developed and taught university lecture courses at Concordia University and the University of Ottawa. Currently she teaches drawing at the Ottawa School of Art where she coordinates the Diploma Program. Since taking her administrative position, she has initiated and is developing a unique mentoring crafts certificate program launched in September 2007.

www.gailbourgeois.ca

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David Clendining

Born in Canada, David has pursued and developed his art throughout Europe, Canada and the US for over 25 years. While studying bronze casting and commercial art at the Ontario College of Art, he also audited animation classes at Sheridan College. He worked in the field of animation at Dick Williams Disney Studio in London, England, Nelvana Studios in Toronto and in the television and film industry in Canada, the US and England. His art can be found in many public and private collections, and his illustrations have graced the pages of a variety of children's books.

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Dawn Dale 

Born in Alberta, Dawn Dale has lived and worked in the l'Outaouais - National Capital Region for the last 28 years. A graduate of the four year Fine Arts Program at the University of Ottawa, she has taught sculpture since 1990, both in the General and Diploma Programs at the Ottawa School of Art. More recently, she teaches a term of the Advanced Studio in third year Diploma.

Her primary focus in her art practice is ecological art, realized in large scale outdoor, site specific works, ephemeral organic installations in gallery spaces, often accompanied with experimental drawings. She was invited to Banff Centre of the Arts to participate in a summer residency on The Environment and Land Use. She has exhibited across Canada, in the United States, Mexico and Bolivia. An active member in the arts community through the artist-run centres and artists¹ collectives, she has curated and facilitated exhibitions (Spirited at Gallery 101 with Donna Quince, art fundraisers for Houseworks and Oxfam, and Divina et Femina with the Department of Religious and Classical Studies of the University of Ottawa) as well as writing on women and art for Breaking the Silence and Parallelogramme magazines. Workshops and residencies with MASC and the Artists in the Schools Program of Québec allow her to bring her particular ecological vision and sculptural skills to young students across Ontario and Quebec.

Recent projects include macro renderings on the sidewalks at Parc Imaginaire, an eco-art project at Beaupré Park in Markham, a solo performance piece on Rideau Street in Ottawa as well as the solo exhibition, Magan at the Sussex Gallery. In 2008, her work was chosen by the City of Ottawa Public Art Program for both the Bank Street Bike Rakes Project and the City of Ottawa Purchase Program.

www.dawndale.com      www.aregeebee.net/dawndale/.

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Lucia De Marinis

Lucia De Marinis graduated from a five-year Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1984, where she majored in painting. She was given advanced standing to third year upon admission to the program, and was selected for the National Dean’s List in 1984. She was a finalist for the prestigious Gund Award competition at graduation. Lucia also has a Bachelor of Arts in Italian Literature from Carleton University, and studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome with the assistance of a scholarship from the Italian government. 

Lucia has been teaching at the Ottawa School of Art since 1988 and in the Department of Part-Time Studies at Algonquin College since 1994. She was a faculty member in the Department of Visual and Creative Arts at St. Lawrence College from 1988 to 1991. In 2006 she was the recipient of the first Instructor of the Year Award at the Ottawa School of Art. She has exhibited her work in numerous solo, group and juried shows in Canada and the USA and is represented in corporate, public and private collections. 

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Mahshid Farhoudi

Born in Iran (1971) Mahshid Farhoudi immigrated to Canada in 1987. She Attended York University and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Upon completion of the Drawing and Painting program, she then studied traditional method of drawing and painting in Florence, Italy.

Mahshid is a Canadian Figurative painter who addresses issues of identity and belonging. Her work has been published alongside the poetry of Canadian writer and Trent university professor Kelly Young. Mahshid is a recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts and teaches at the Ottawa School of Art. She is one of the founding members of Propeller Gallery and AWOL Gallery in Toronto.

Mahshids’ work was featured on Canoe Live Television (2007). Her work can be found in private collections in Canada, Europe, Australia and the United States.

www.mahshidfarhoudi.com

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Andrew Fay 

Andrew Fay was raised and educated in Ottawa and received his training at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His work continues to focus on figurative subject matter. The paintings centre on the human image, examining a gamut of physical and emotional drives. The figures are often nude, not to portray excessive sexuality but rather to convey the essence of the human spirit. The nudity in his work also reflects his appreciation and affection of the nude as found in the great masterpieces throughout art history. The narrative of his paintings is often intentionally ambiguous. He creates a surreal atmosphere which invites the viewer to interact with the work on their own terms, with minimal direction.

He has participated in numerous exhibitions, most notably at the Karsh-Masson Gallery, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Ottawa School of Art Gallery. Andrew’s paintings can be found in important civic and private collections in Ottawa, and his work is currently on view at the La Petite Mort Gallery.

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Tami Galili Ellis

Tami Galili Ellis was born in Israel and immigrated to Canada in 1986. She graduated from the University of Ottawa with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Shortly thereafter, she joined the Ottawa of School of Art as an Instructor in the Children's Program.

From 1995 to 1998, she returned to Israel with her family where she designed and delivered a very successful multimedia arts program to children in an alternative school. Her main passion is painting in oils. Since graduation, she has exhibited mostly in group exhibits and various galleries both in Israel and Ottawa.

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Chantal Gervais

Mortality and the body as the site of lived experience are central to the work of Chantal Gervais. Her large colour photographs and photographic and video installations teeter on the edge of seduction and revel in the body’s corporeality, its vulnerability and strength. Inherently theatrical, yet sensitive, her works explore the affects on the body of aging, accident, disease and life itself and how our perception and understanding of the body is influenced and altered by popular culture, art, science and medicine.

In her most recent project /Les maux non dits/ Gervais sets out to discover what she can learn about herself from the observational and representational tools used by science, art and society at large to know and understand the body. Interested in both historical and current technologies for mapping, imaging and interpreting the human body and mind, she is working with medical images and scans of her own body to see what they reveal about herself and to question their usage and the affect they have on our understanding of the body, bodily experience and concepts of self and other.

Chantal Gervais has an artistic practice in photography and video frequently presented as installation. She obtained a BFA in photography from the University of Ottawa and an MA in Art and Media Practice from the University of Westminster in London, U.K. In 2002 she was awarded the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. In 1999 and 2004, she was nominated for the Ontario Art Council’s K.M. Hunter Artists Award and in 2005 for the City of Ottawa’s Karsh Award. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Harcourt House Gallery in Edmonton; McClure Gallery and Vidéographe in Montreal; Galerie Séquence in Chicoutimi, Quebec; Centre d’exposition Art-Image in Gatineau, Québec, and Carleton University Art Gallery and Gallery 101 in Ottawa. In September 2008, her photographic work will be presented in the X Ottawa Photography Festival at the Red Wall Gallery. Her artistic production has been supported by the Canada Council for the arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa. Since 2007, she has been on the Board of Directors of Daimon, a centre of production in Gatineau in Quebec. She is a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa where she teaches courses in photography and intermedia.

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Kathy Gillis

Kathy Gillis worked as a commercial artist for seven years. She then enrolled in the Visual Arts programme at the University of Ottawa and graduated with an Honours B.A. in 1979. After graduation she started teaching art, established a studio, and began exhibiting her work. During this period she explored several themes in mixed media, painting, installation, and land-based art. She participated in over a hundred exhibitions and her work is in several public collections.

Since 2003 Kathy Gillis has been creating work for an international group of artists. Their exhibitions, called Truth Compassion Tolerance, have been shown extensively in USA and Canada, while high-quality prints continue to be shown outside of North America reaching over one hundred locations on several continents. These works are about the phenomena that has become known as Falun Gong.

Kathy Gillis continues to make work for this important collection, and she teaches Visual Foundations and Traditional Oil Painting Techniques at the Ottawa School of Art.

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Robert Hinchley

Robert Hinchley is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art. His paintings and prints have been shown in many exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Painting trips in Canada and especially the Ottawa Valley offer Rob an endless source of inspiration.

His unique approach to printmaking combines painterly and experimental methods to this timeless graphic form. A selection of his prints was presented as gifts from Canada to the world leaders that attended the APEC summit in Vancouver.

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Farouk Kaspaules

Farouk Kaspaules is a Canadian artist who has been exhibiting since the mid-1990's, and has been engaged with artist-run-centres, organizing and curating exhibits on political and cultural themes. In 1993, Farouk undertook his first European exhibit in London, U.K. In 1995, he exhibited Non Sequitur at SAW gallery. In 2001, he participated in the exhibition The Land Within Me, at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Farouk has participated in group exhibitions in Brazil (2001) and Chile (2002). In 2003, Farouk exhibited State of Things, at L'Imagier in Aylmer, Quebec. He also held two concurrent exhibitions in Egypt and Jordan, and participated in the 9th Cairo International Biennale in the same year.

In 2004, Farouk held an exhibit, Crossing Borders, at SUNY Potsdam, USA, dealing metaphorically with issues of global violence. He also held an exhibit in Bordeaux, France titled Lieux-Fusions. In 2005, he exhibited Traces at Gallery 101 and Shadow Dialogues at Studio sorge in Durham, Quebec. In 2006 at Art Metropole he participated in orientalism-and-ephemera. In 2007 he exhibited at Munz Museum, Washington University, Washington D.C. He also exhibited Be/Longing at the Ottawa Art Gallery from November 2007 to February 2008.

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Maggie Knaus

Maggie Knaus is a professional photographer and artist originally from Washington, DC. Her favorite topic is documenting her children and her extensive travels, using many non-traditional photographic processes in her work. She is a photo teacher (in Ottawa at SPAO and OSA), a commercial photographer (for the White House Historical Association and many stock agencies), and an artist (with shows in galleries across the US). In Ottawa, she has shown at the Bruyere Gallery and at La Petit Mort Gallery.

www.maggieknaus.com

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Yves Larocque

As a world scholar in Canadian Surrealism, Yves Larocque holds Bachelors degrees in Visual Arts and Theory and Art History from the University of Ottawa, a Master’s degree in Art History from the Université de Montréal, a Diplôme d’Études Approfondies and a Doctorate in Art History and Archeology from the Sorbonne (Université de Paris I). He is also a painter and consultant in the fields of visual arts and architecture. In Paris he studied under renowned professors such as François-Marc Gagnon, René Payant, José Vovelle and Jacques Derrida at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (ÉHÉSS).

As well as demonstrating extensive knowledge in the survey of Art History, Yves specialized in Surrealism and Canadian Art. His doctoral thesis deals with the mediology of Surrealism in English-speaking Canada. He has been teaching the aforementioned disciplines at the Ottawa School of Art for 20 years. As a known painter whose works have raised several polemics, he is also a respected teacher of drawing and painting.

His participation in the realm of art goes beyond his academic and teaching activities. Many times his voice has been heard over the radio waves of Société Radio-Canada (SRC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as an art critic and historian. TVOntario also produced a short program on his works, and the Roger’s Network invited him to discuss Canadian Art. Furthermore, as art historian he regularly publishes in periodicals such as La Vie des Arts (Montreal), Liaison (Ottawa), Histoire de l’Art and Médium (Paris), and RACAR (Canada). His speaking engagements on art history have taken him across Canada and to France, the Netherlands, Colombia and the United States. He is also a participant in the important annual conferences of the UAAC, the ACFAS and others.

He curated Mikihiro Nishimatsu and Robert Hyndman: 50 years of painting. Catalogues of both retrospectives can be found at the National Library of Canada and the library of the National Gallery of Canada.

His paintings have appeared in several group exhibitions, most significantly Arteder 82 at the Muestra d’Arto Grafica of Bilbao, Spain, where he represented Canada. His works have also been shown in Rome, Toronto, Montréal and Ottawa; many are in private collections. Press reviews often have lauded the pertinence of his work.

www.painting-workshops.com/leader.htm

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Pamela Cockcroft-Lasserre

Pamela Cockcroft-Lasserre studied Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting (St Martin’s Central, University of the Arts, London) and graduated with merit distinction. Subsequent experience included gallery custodianship, teaching Art History and being an Art Critic for the Cape Times in South Africa.

Widely traveled in Africa and Europe, she has settled in the Gatineau Hills where she has a studio, creating predominantly figure paintings and drawings; she teaches at the Ottawa School of Art and exhibits regularly in Ottawa and South Africa. Her work can be found in private collections in Canada, USA, France and South Africa.

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Erin Maura Robertson

Erin Robertson is a versatile, classically trained artist. She has worked as an artist and teacher in Ottawa for several years. Erin works in a variety of media including; oil, acrylic, watercolour, clay, plaster, papier-mache and wood. Her mixed media sculptures can be found in museum displays and in private collections throughout the world. She has exhibited her paintings and sculptures in public and private shows in Canada and Tanzania. Erin is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Guelph University.

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Blair Sharpe

Born in Montréal in 1954, Blair’s early life can best be described as nomadic, moving across Canada and overseas. He arrived in Ottawa in 1973. His childhood interest in art as a means of investigating the universe became serious in his teens. He went on to complete his “A” Level in Fine Art (University of London Board) at Kent School, Germany and a special Post “A” Fine Arts Programme while living in Düsseldorf, Germany from 1971–73, followed by studies at the Ottawa School of Art (then the Ottawa Municipal Art Centre), notably with Richard Gorman and the late James Boyd.

Sharpe has exhibited widely, with numerous solo shows in Ottawa and Toronto, including a major mid-career survey at the Ottawa Art Gallery in 1989 as well as group shows across Canada and abroad. He is represented in Ottawa by Wallack Galleries.

His work is found in many public, corporate and private collections notably the Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa Art Gallery, Carleton University Art Gallery, City of Ottawa and Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. His painting River Keeper is on permanent exhibition at the Canadian Embassy in Oslo, Norway. Public commissions include the mural Ouananiche at the Jack Purcell Community Centre and a floor work, River's Invitation at the Smyth Transitway Station in Ottawa.

Blair teaches painting and drawing at the Ottawa School of Art, and has contributed writings on art and art practice to a number of publications. While his work is formally centred in the traditions of abstract painting, a profound affinity to nature and natural process pervades his work.

www.blairsharpe.com

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Carla Whiteside

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