Doug Guildford
Doug Guildford is a largely self-taught Canadian visual artist. He was born in Nova Scotia, in 1948, and lived there until graduating from Dalhousie University with a BA in Political Science in 1969. He lived in Vancouver throughout the 1970’s. Since then his home base has been in downtown Toronto. For most of that time, however, he has migrated annually, back to coastal Nova Scotia for summers of from 3 to 6 months. He continues now to divide his time between his studios in downtown Toronto and on a coastal stretch of rural Nova Scotia, where he shares an old farmhouse with his partner, the playwright and novelist, Don Hannah.
His practice is rooted in drawing, encompasses printmaking, collection, and the manipulation and fabrication of objects. It allows for obsessive sculptural crochet projects. It acts as a shorthand for his take on the universe; lab notes; a compulsive kind of journal entry, and perhaps, a distillation of accumulated knowledge. It wanders suggestively between male and female.
As an active member of Open Studio (print media centre) in Toronto, he has produced many suites and series of etchings and screenprint work, some concise, some sprawling and on-going over several years. He is more interested in exploring and inhabiting an expansive metaphor through creating variations in process-driven series than in creating the single masterpiece moment.
He has exhibited largely across Canada in group and solo exhibitions. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Burnaby Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Grenfell Campus Art Gallery in Corner Brook, NL, Saint Francis Xavier University Art Gallery in Antigonish, NS, and Connexion Gallery, the artist-run centre in Fredericton NB. His work has also been well-represented in group exhibitions including at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, Centre Materia in Quebec City, PQ, and at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, ON.
He has benefited over the years from funding from Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Art Council and the Toronto Arts Council. Other awards include first place in the Great Canadian Print Competition, the Nick Novak Scholarship and the Hexagon Special Projects Fellowship, both from Open Studio in Toronto. His residencies include St. Michael’s Printshop in St. John’s Newfoundland, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Atlantic Centre for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.