Ivan Kenneth Eyre (15 April 1935 – 5 November 2022)

  I finished school and moved to Calgary to join Helen in the summer of 1988. We were both at the U of C that summer just in time to see Personal Mythologies/Images of the Milieu a solo show by the Canadian artist Ivan Eyre at The Nickle Gallery. One day a week admission was free (we had little money) and I was there every lunch hour. Later the library I worked in in Calgary  held Eyre's large painting Floodwood, a strange merger of still life and landscape typical of the artist. Another library and I shared my office with a print of his landscape Red Hill. Since my first viewing of his work Eyre has not just shared my personal space through his works but also my imaginative space through his oft repeated images of wheeled horse, giants shapes in the sky and hornblowers. I have collected show catalogues, books and a few works. He has influenced how I view the cityscapes and the landscapes of the prairies in which I have spent most of my life. As Helen once said after seeing his cityscapes one learns to look up at the tops of the tall buildings to catch a glimpse of the Eyre hornblowers silhouetted against the prairie sky.

Obituary

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/winnipeg-mb/ivan-eyre-11003438

Wikipedia entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Eyre

A lovely youtube clip of Eyre in his studio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4URm0196QjM

When I look at a painting it isn't only the painting I see but the thing that I am. If there is more in the painting that I am, then I won't see it.

Ivan Eyre

Thank you Ivan.

2011-02-25 Today when I took these pictures it was one of the coldest
morning this winter. About -30 C with a windchill at 7:30.
I was unhappy I missed the sunrise when I noticed the smoke curling
up from all the buildings.  I love to look at the tops of buildings.

My favorite artist is a Canadian called Ivan Eyre. I first saw his work 
when his show Personal Mythologies/ Images of the Milieu
was at the Nickle Arts Museum in Calgary in 1989.
 I must have seen it 5 or 6 times, afterwrds I collected books
and catalogues, actually worked near one of his large canvases etc. 

One of his recurring motifs is figures up along the top of tall buildings
often blowing horns.  Both my wife and I now often scan the tops
of buildings because of this.  I have not seen an Eyre hornblower
but with the proliferation of satellite dishes and other

equipment the buildings now appear as crowded
stage sets where anything is possible.

"under a sky taut with time's tension,

never a sun

in that sky, but

brilliance, the splendid,

cosmic, benign."

                The Edge of Fire

                          for Ivan Eyre

                     

                                                    George Woodcock