Sun and Shade (pigs):

1994Purchased for the Camosun College Art Collection by the Camosun College Cultural Enhancement Committee from the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Art Rental and Sales Gallery).Born in Vancouver in 1915, Colin Graham was an artist, curator, and educator. Graham received a BA (Medieval History) at the University of Cambridge in 1939 and completed his MA from the University of California in Berkeley in 1948. Following graduation, Graham lectured at the California School of Fine Arts and was the Director of Education at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. In 1951 Graham returned to Canada becoming the founding director of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV). In 1973 he retired from the AGGV and began painting. Graham was a member of the respected Vancouver Island painters’ group The Limners, whose members included Maxwell Bates, Richard Ciccimarra, Karl Spreitz, Jan and Helga grove, Pat Martin Bates, and Myfanwy Pavelic. Graham’s work is featured in the collections of the University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, the Whatcom County Museum of Art in Bellingham, Washington and the Burke Memorial Museum of the University of Washington, as well as in private collections throughout North America. ARTIST INFO: Times Colonist Obituary: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/timescolonist/obituary.aspx?n=colin-graham&pid=143158946 (Accessed January 10, 2017); Sidney Fine Art Show website, “New ‘Colin Graham’ Award at 2010 Show’”: http://www.sidneyfineartshow.ca/new-colin-graham-award-at-2010-show/ (Accessed, February 26, 2017)Robbyn LanningDESCRIPTION: Landscape painting of (Saanich Peninsula) farmland featuring pigs. ARTIST STATEMENT: Cubism as developed by the School of Paris, together with the work of such Americans as Arshile Gorky and Mark Tobey, have been major influences. Ever since engaging in modest astronomical research as a youth, my outlook has been to some extent conditioned by modern particle physics. As a result, my aim as a painter has been to develop my own kind of abstraction. Curiously, however, although my paintings tend to start out as abstractions, they almost invariably end up as landscapes. While this fact continues to puzzle me, I have learned to accept it. My subject-matter is derived mainly from the Saanich peninsula and the waters around it, a fact which probably reflects the impact of my earliest influences: the Group of Seven and David Milne