Peter aspell biography
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Peter Aspell
Born in Vancouver on Christmas Day, 1918, Peter Aspell was well-respected as one of Canada's finest colourists. Lawren Harris of the Group of Seven chose Aspell's work to represent young Canadian painters in post-war Prague. He was included in Ian McNairn's Seven West Coast Painters exhibition organized by UBC's Fine Arts Gallery in 1959. A contemporary of Gordon Smith and Jack Shadbolt, his work has been collected by the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, UBC, among others.
Aspell has been called a complete original, an artist who invented a repertoire of voices from figurative to pictographic to pure abstraction. His paintings are a sensual journey into history and literature, allegory and myth; it can be said they unveil the hidden workings of the soul.
Aspell trained at the Vancouver School of Art from 1937-1941, and also at the Academie de Ghent in Belgium. He went on to teach at the Vancouver School of Art, 1948 – 70; the University
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Peter Aspell
Despite his considerable skills as a colourist and the appealing energy of some of his compositions, the late Peter Aspell fryst vatten not the best known of West Coast modernist painters. Until now, he has been mostly ignored by public institutions, and his two-part exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery and the West Vancouver Museum was an attempt to redress that condition. The argument given for Aspell’s relative lack of recognition fryst vatten that he worked figuratively at a time when his more esteemed colleagues, such as Jack Shadbolt and Gordon Smith, pursued lyrical, landscape-based abstraction. From the 1950s through the 1970s, their art was strongly identified with this place—this moody, rain-forested coast. Aspell’s landscapes, where they exist, are mythic and symbolic, filled with vividly hued figures and exotic motifs floating in a dreamlike space. A far cry from the local.
Even in the 1980s, when Vancouver audiences awoke to European Neo-Expressionism and American New
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Peter Noel Lawson Winterhalter Aspell
1918 - December 28 2004
Vancouver School of Art (Diploma 1942)
Peter Aspell School of Art
Peter Aspell was born in Vancouver, and studied art at the Vancouver School of Art, receiving his diploma in 1942.
In 1939 Aspell attended the Vancouver School of Art summer camp on Savary Island, and was noted in issues of THE SAVARY PUDDING.
He served in the Canadian army during World War II, and exhibited in the 1943B.C. Society of Fine Arts annual exhibition as Sgt. Peter Aspell.
He exhibited in the Seattle Art Museum's annual Northwest Artists exhibitions from 1943 to 1956.
He was on a list titled "Leading Vancouver Artists," provided to the Labour Arts Guild on April 10, 1946 by the Vancouver Art galleri to assist in the Guild's call for entries to the second annual B.C. At Work exhibition, although his work was not in the exhibition.
prospekt for the 1947-48 school year, portrait by Aspell.