The White Line presents a selection of 46 wood engravings by 29 artists culled from a larger exhibition which opens in October 1990 at the Carnegie Gallery, Dundas, Ontario. The exhibition is an attempt to document the widest possible range of work done in the medium in Canada since the end of World War II.
Three of the early practitioners represented include W.J. Phillips, H.E. Bergman and Laurence Hyde. Hyde, for example, began his study of wood engraving at Central Tech in Toronto in the early 1930s and continued sporadically until he completed the illustrations for Tolstoy's War and Peace in 1985. Sylvia Hahn's work also forms a link with the period before the war, as she studied with Franklin Carmichael at OCA and printed on the press he kept in his office. Rosemary Kilbourn was exposed to wood engraving when she studied in England after the war. She received no formal training in the medium at that time, but she does claim she was shown how to hold a burin by Stanley Lawrence of T.N. Lawrence & Son, the venerable firm in Bleeding Heart Yard where so many of the world's wood engravers have congregated to buy their supplies and books and to delight in the enthusiasm and gentlemanly manners of Mr. Lawrence.
The early engravers were often more familiar with work done in England by Eric Ravilious or Robert Gibbings, or in America by Lynd Ward or Rockwell Kent, than with the images of their compatriots. Such is unfortunately still largely the case, but it is hoped The White Line will provide the basis of a context for the contemporary work of artists such as George Walker, Nancy Jackson, Wesley Bates and Bruce Bradshaw.
After the exhibition closes in Dundas, it will travel -- to Brampton, Grimsby, St. Catharines, Timmins, Edmonton, Moncton, Belleville and Kitchener/Waterloo.
