Winnipeg

CITIES; JOHN HARTMAN
John Hartman has painted cities from Parry Sound and Owen Sound on the shores of Georgian Bay, to London, New York, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, and Glasgow. He is particularly interested in cities that are also ports. His paintings of imagined aerial perspectives look down on the intricate contours of the urban space where towers, cranes and docks meet the open blue of an ocean, lake or river. He writes: "The water reflects the sun and creates an intensity of light above these places. This light in the sky is so different in feeling from the material density of the cities themselves, but both are full of possibilities for painting."

Hartman sets out to combine his own memories of cities with a collective understanding informed by many factors: history, politics, film, literature, technology, and the media. What results is a multi-faceted mapping that may not be geographically exact, but is immediately recognizable. Hartman says, "Because my experience of a place is generated over a continuum of time and by circling the place and seeing it from many viewpoints, the final images often have multiple viewpoints and often contain small vignettes of peoples' lives that were lived in that place."

Born in 1950 in Midland, Ontario, John Hartman studied Fine Art at McMaster University. Over the past 25 years, he has exhibited his paintings in Canada, Great Britain, Denmark,, and Germany. His paintings and prints are included in numerous public, corporate and private collections in Canada and around the world.