User:Theapatterson/James Gordaneer

James Gordaneer RCA was born April 14, 1933, in Toronto, Ontario, the youngest of four children. In 1952, at the age of 19, he attended his first formal art training at the Doon School of Fine Arts of Fine Arts near Kitchener, Ontario, where he studied landscape and abstraction with Canadian artists such as Jock MacDonald, Jack Bechtel, Carl Schafer, Yvonne Housser]], R. York Wilson and Leonard Brooks.

Throughout his twenties, Gordaneer traveled and painted in Mexico, Spain, France, Greece and Finland, and learned his Abstract Modernist artistic technique through practice and discussion with prominent Canadian artists of the time, before returning to Toronto to teach art. In 1966, he moved to Orangeville, Ontario, with his wife Miria, a ceramic artist. There, they taught art and raised two children, Alisa and Jeremy, before moving to Victoria, BC, in 1976.

After moving to Victoria, Gordaneer continued painting and teaching art at the University of Victoria, Camosun College and the Victoria College of Art]]. Throughout this time, he held numerous exhibitions of his work in Toronto and Victoria. In 1989 with theologian Raymond Lorens, he co-founded the Chapman Group, dedicated to “the topological question” and a practical exploration of quantum physics, mathematics and spirituality. This led Gordaneer, with his accomplished skill at painting and drawing, to discover what would happen if you bent space according to the stresses and tensions of the new physics. Gordaneer began to paint highly illustrative canvases constructed upon new topological forms. His 15-panel diorama, Space Lost, Space Regained, is permanently installed on the third floor of the University of Victoria Library.

Gordaneer has been hailed as a Canadian surrealist, an abstract modernist, a figurative painter and an experimental painter. Despite the labels, however, his paintings have remained vibrant, with an intense, painterly appeal characterized by the use of vivid colour and surprising juxtapositions in subject matter. Through his association with the Doon School, which was directly influenced by members of the Group of Seven having associated with members of the Painters Eleven,, Gordaneer represents a link between Canada’s artistic past and Canada’s artistic future through teaching and inspiring several generations of recognized and emerging Canadian artists.

In the last years of his life Gordaneer devoted himself to painting full time, despite a variety of health challenges, including a diagnosis of chronic leukemia. The grandfather of four, he continued to live, paint, and show his work in Victoria, B.C., at both the Fran Willis Gallery and Chapman West Fine Art (the latter of which he founded in 2000).

Gordaneer died in March of 2016 in Victoria, surrounded by family and friends