Bokus
J.A. Wainwright - Blazing Figures, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2010

Blazing Figures

A Life of Robert Markle

Av J.A. Wainwright

495 kr

Tillfälligt slut

Beskrivning
Robert Markle (1936-1990) was an infamous figure on the Canadian cultural scene for almost three decades. His paintings and drawings celebrating the female nude were deemed obscene by Ontario courts in 1965, and Markle defended them on national television, emphasizing what he considered a crucial distinction between eroticism and pornography. Although Markle was a Mohawk who employed Native symbolism in his later work, he refused to identify himself as a Native painter. Blazing Figures chronicles Markle's boyhood in Hamilton, Ontario, his early exposure to the worlds of burlesque and jazz, and, following his expulsion from the Ontario College of Art, his immersion in the Toronto world of painting and music. It recounts his emergence as a controversial expressionist painter of the figure and a beloved teacher of his craft. After his abandonment of urban life for small-town Ontario, Markle, in the last twenty years of his life, produced his greatest works and formed close friendships with his fellow painters and with public figures Patrick Watson and Gordon Lightfoot, both of whom were interviewed at length for this book. The book also takes a frank look at Markle's complex relationship with his wife and muse that survived his affairs with other women. The only full-length work written about Robert Markle's life and career, Blazing Figures is based on Markle's copious personal notes and numerous interviews with his family, friends, colleagues, and former students. This snapshot of Canadian cultural history will be of interest to scholars of art history, Aboriginal studies, and Canadian studies as well as the general reader.
Produktinformation
  • Utgivningsdatum: 2010-03-10
  • Mått: 152 x 229 x 25 mm
  • Vikt: 750 g
  • Format: Inbunden
  • Språk: Engelska
  • Antal sidor: 304
  • Förlag: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
  • ISBN: 9781554581825
  • Utmärkelser: Short-listed for ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, Biography Category 2010 (United States)
Utforska kategorier
Mer om författaren

J.A. Wainwright is a novelist, poet, and McCulloch Emeritus Professor in English at Dalhousie University. He is the author of a biography of writer Charles Bruce and editor of A Very Large Soul: Selected Letters from Margaret Laurence to Canadian Writers and of Every Grain of Sand: Canadian Perspectives on Ecology and Environment (WLU Press, 2004). His most recent novel is The Confluence (2007).

Recensioner i media

"Blazing Figures is most successful in discussion with Markle's individual paintings, and the best of Wainwright's writing offers attentive readings of the paintings as visual text. The book also notes the evolution of Markle's technique and a compelling narrative of the burgeoning Toronto art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, complete with energies and antagonisms.... Certainly the beautiful colour reproductions of his works that burst from the pages of Blazing Figures suggest a visionary spirit and a passion for understanding the strength and vulerability of the human body, its intimacy and its fierceness, that make the 1965 pornography charges laid against gallery owner Dorothy Cameron for mounting a show with Markle's work look like so much old-Ontario fogeyism.... In the end, the images have their say, and the muscular, brilliant toned or deeply charcoaled limbs and curves of the bodies on Markle's canvas speak loud. The ecstatic attention paid to him by Markle's eye and Wainwright's prose overcomes all arguments about the biographical rhetoric in Blazing Figures. Robert Markle emerges as a figure who wrestles with the angel of art and is blessed through his willingness to risk damnation.'' -- Tanis MacDonald -- Canadian Literature, #296, Autumn 2010, 201106

Betyg & recensioner

0 recensioner

Inga recensioner tillgängliga.