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Don Wright I have always felt the urge to point out to others those qualities of nature which delight me. Excerpt from artist's statement in Coastal Images exhibition publication (Guelph, Ontario: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1984). Don Wright was born in Timmins, Ontario, in 1931. Wright was already an accomplished painter by the end of high school. He completed numerous teacher training and art courses that prepared him as a public school teacher. Intermittently from 1959 to 1966, he attended the Ontario College of Art to study printmaking. In 1967, he moved to Newfoundland where he worked as an art specialist with Memorial University of Newfoundland's Extension Service. He conducted art classes for children and adults on campus and in communities throughout the province.
In 1972, he co-founded St. Michael's Printshop with Heidi Oberheide. The printshop not only enabled Newfoundland artists to produce fine art prints, but also brought professional artists from across Canada and elsewhere to make prints in Newfoundland. Wright's work almost always dealt with landscape and people's relationships to it. He depicted outport communities and their traditional activities, as well as aspects of the inshore fishery and the natural environment. In the 1980s, faced with change and his own impending death, Wright's art became increasingly personal and powerful, reflecting on the relentless cycle of generation, life and death, and on people's place in nature. These themes were the basis of the 1987 exhibition Falling at Memorial University Art Gallery. A hemophiliac, Wright contracted HIV through a blood transfusion and died in 1988.
In 1990, Memorial University Art Gallery mounted a nationally-touring retrospective of Wright's work. It was the first exhibition of Newfoundland art to be presented at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Wright's art work can be found in private and public collections including that of the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador; The Canada Council Art Bank, Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery; and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador.
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