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Paterson Ewen (1925-2002) was a Canadian painter best known for his abstract landscapes and monumental paintings dealing with themes of nature and cosmology. Born in Montreal, Ewen was associated with the mid-century abstraction movement in Quebec. He moved to London, Ontario in 1968, where he lived and worked until his death in 2002.

Ewen briefly attended McGill University, studying geology, but transferred to the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1948. It was here that Ewen developed an interest in painting landscapes, inspired by his teachers Arthur Lismer and Goodridge Roberts. While attending the School of Art and Design, Ewen met his first wife, Francoise Sullivan, with whom he had four sons: Vincent, Geoffrey, Jean-Christophe, and Francis. It was through Sullivan that Ewen was exposed to the work of the Surrealist poets and Automatiste abstract painters, such as Jean-Paul Riopelle and Paul-Emile Borduas. Ewen married Sullivan in December 1949, and a few months later left art school, dismissed by Lismer in response to an exhibition of Ewen’s paintings at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Ewen held various part-time jobs to support his family during this period, including caretaker and training coordinator at a box factory and supermarket chain. Ewen and Sullivan divorced in 1968, and he moved to London, Ontario. It was in London that Ewen came into contact with local artists such as Greg Curnoe, Jack Chambers, and David Rabinowitch. Their influence impacted Ewen’s art, as he moved from representational landscapes to a more abstract style. It was around this time when Ewen developed techniques that would be a hallmark of his later works, such as the use of plywood gouged with an electric router as a painting surface. He also began using more unconventional materials in his art, including wire and other metals. In 1972, Ewen began teaching painting at University of Western Ontario, where he met his second wife, Mary Handford. The two married in 1995.

In 1982, Ewen was chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale, and he received other recognition in the form of several awards, including the Chalmers Award for Visual Arts and the Toronto Arts Award. In 1996, the Art Gallery of Ontario mounted a retrospective exhibition of Ewen’s works that travelled to the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art. Ewen’s work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and other museums.

Betty Roodish Goodwin (1923-2008) was a Montreal-based printmaker and installation artist.

Murray Favro (1940- ) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, sculptor, and musician based in London, Ontario. He is known for his multimedia installations and his work with the Nihilist Spasm Band, of which he is a founding member.

Favro was born in Huntsville, Ontario where he lived until moving to London, Ontario in 1957 with his mother. Here he attended the H.B. Beal Technical and Commercial School (1958-62), where he studied art and became acquainted with a number of other artists in the area. In 1968 Favro married Judith Bryon, and their son, Mark, was born in 1969. After receiving a Canada Council Arts Bursary in 1970 he was able to leave a job as a commercial artist at a printing company and begin working on creating and exhibiting his art full time.

Throughout his career Favro has worked with a diverse range of materials and mediums, including paint, sculpture, projections, film, instruments, and machinery, although he is perhaps best known for his projected reconstructions and technical objects, which cross the borders between art and invention. Much of his work reflects a strong interest in perspective, the relationships between art and science, and technology, and is known to challenge traditional categorization. Two major retrospective exhibitions of Favro’s work have been held to date, the first by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1983 and the second by the London Regional Art and Historical Museums and the McIntosh Gallery in 1998.

In addition to his artistic career, Favro is the guitarist for the Nihilist Spasm Band, which he founded alongside John Boyle, John Clement, Greg Curnoe, Bill Exley, Art Pratten, Archie Leitch, and Hugh McIntyre in 1965. Favro has described his work with the band as influential and parallel to his work as an artist, noting the band’s lack of hierarchy and their music’s lack of structure as intentional and significant. The instruments he plays as guitarist for the band are of his own creation, as are a number of the instruments played by other members of the band. They have performed shows across Canada and internationally, including an appearance at the Paris Biennale in the 1970s and at least two Japan tours in 1996 and 1999.

Throughout his career Favro has given artist talks and lectures at institutions across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, and taught classes at the Ontario College of Art in the 1970s. Together with a number of other artists who were active in London in the 1960s and 70s, such as Jack Chambers and Tony Urquhart, he was involved with some of the first artist-run galleries in Canada, namely the 2020 Gallery, which existed from 1966-1970 and the Forest City Gallery, founded in 1973.

Favro’s work is held and has been exhibited by many major art institutions and private collections across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Fine Arts Museum. He has been represented variously by the Carmen Lamanna Gallery and the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto. Favro received the Gerhson Iskowitz Award in 1997 and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2007.

Sorel Etrog (Jassy, Romania 1933 - Toronto, Canada 2014) was an artist, writer and philosopher. He began his art studies at the Institute of Painting and Sculpture in Tel Aviv; his first solo show in Tel Aviv (1958) led to a scholarship at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In New York, he caught the attention of Samuel Zacks, which led to his first show at Gallery Moos in Toronto. Etrog subsequently immigrated to Toronto in 1963, and made his home here for the remainder of his life (apart from sojourns in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, working with the Michelucci foundry). Etrog’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada and internationally, and his artwork is in the collection of major
museums and private collections worldwide, in addition to the public art works noted above. A retrospective of his work was held at the AGO from April 27-September 29, 2013. Sorel Etrog died on February 26, 2014.

James Stanley McLean (1876-1954), Toronto business executive and art collector, was president of Canada Packers and founder of the J.S. McLean Collection of Canadian art. He was born in Clarke Township, Durham County, Ontario. Having graduated from the University of Toronto in 1896, McLean became an employee of the Harris Abattoir Company in Toronto in 1901, rising to become president in the 1920s. He achieved a merger of his firm with three others in 1927, forming Canada Packers Limited — of which he was president until his death. J.S. McLean was a founder-member of the Art Gallery of Toronto and a member of its executive from 1934 until his death. He was a patron of Canadian art himself and started collecting in 1934. In 1939 he began to buy Canadian artworks of art to hang in the offices and other areas of Canada Packers’ plants across the country. The result was a significant collection amassed at a time when such art was not widely sought after. Among the creators of modern art in Canada, he focused especially on the work of A.Y. Jackson, Carl Schaefer, Paraskeva Clark and David Milne. In 1952 the collection was the subject of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Paintings and Drawings from the Collection of J.S. McLean. Many of the works lent for this exhibition were subsequently donated to the Art Gallery of Ontario. J.S. McLean died in Toronto in 1954.

Donald William Buchanan (1908-1966) was a Canadian author, art historian/critic and arts administrator. Born in Lethbridge, Alberta, he was the son of Senator W.A. Buchanan, publisher of the Lethbridge Herald. Donald Buchanan studied modern history at the University of Toronto and held a fellowship at Oxford University. In 1935, he founded the National Film Society of Canada (from 1950 The Canadian Film Institute). The following year, his biography of James Wilson Morrice was published in Toronto. Subsequently, he worked at the CBC (1937-40), Canadian Art Magazine (1942, as co-editor) and the National Film Board (1944-46), where he established the stills division. He was at the National Gallery of Canada from 1947 to 1960 and there founded the National Design Centre, eventually becoming Associate Director (1956-60) and afterward (1963) a trustee. In addition to the Morrice biography, Donald Buchanan wrote Educational and Cultural Films in Canada (1936), This Is Canada (1944), Canadian Painters from Paul Kane to the Group of Seven (1945), Design for Use (1947), The Growth of Canadian Painting (1950), Alfred Pellan (1962) and To Have Seen the Sky (1962). After leaving the National Gallery, he began a career as an artist/photographer; his work was exhibited successfully and appeared in published photo-essays. On his death in a car crash in Ottawa in 1966 his collection of artworks was bequeathed to the art gallery in Lethbridge.

Kenneth Lund served as president of the Board of Directors of Galerie Scollard, later Factory 77.

(Marie) Illy Gepe (1903-) was a ceramic artist born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the area that later became Czechoslovakia. She and her husband, Herbert Gepe, immigrated to Canada in 1935. Illy Gepe was an honourary member of the Women’s Art Association of Canada in Toronto, offering pottery classes there in 1952, and a friend of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring’s.

The Fairlies were a prominent Canadian family who lived and worked throughout Ontario during the first half of the twentieth century.

Reverend John Fairlie (1844-1919) and his wife Hannah Waldrup Fraser (ca. 1847-1929) came from Scotland to Quebec in 1873, then to Kingston in 1900. They had nine children—four girls and five boys. One of their sons, Matthew Fraser Fairlie (ca. 1883-1944), attended Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. He graduated in 1902 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mining Engineering and moved to Cobalt, Ontario with his wife, Anne Louise Fitzpatrick (ca. 1881-1961) to work for Kerr-Addison Gold Mines Ltd. during the Silver Rush of 1903. They moved to Toronto in the late 1920s, purchased a house in Forest Hill, and adopted two children: Alan Fraser Fairlie (1927-2001) and Joyce Fairlie (1929-1956). Alan attended both Crescent School and Upper Canada College (ca. 1935-1948), two prestigious all-boys private schools in Toronto. Joyce attended Bishop Strachan School for girls (ca. 1935-?).

After attending the University of Toronto for Radio Broadcasting (1949-?), Alan F. Fairlie started a film company, Monarch Productions Ltd. He was commissioned to produce films for the Canadian Rugby team in Bermuda, the development of Giant’s Tomb in Penetang, Ontario, and various programs for CTV Television Network. He also shot and produced his own films documenting archaeological caves in Yucatan, his travels to Mexico, and footage in various countries throughout Europe. Alan married Snezana Susanne Popovich in 1962. They had two children: LuAnne Fairlie (1963- ) and Matthew Peter Fairlie (1966- ). Alan retired to Salt Spring Island, British Columbia where he lived until his death in 2001.