Curriculum Vitae

Born
Hall's Harbour, Nova Scotia, 1952

Education
1972 - 1976 - B.F.A., Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia
1975 - 1976 - 4th year at Centre de Gravure Contemporaire, Geneva, Switzerland

Collections

• Dundee Education Authority Collection, Scotland
• Saint Mary's and Dalhousie University Art Galleries, Halifax, Nova Scotia
• Canada Council Art Bank
• Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
• University of New Brunswick, Saint John, New Brunswick
• Nova Scotia Art Bank & Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia
• Museum of Fine Arts, Geneva, Switzerland
• Acadia University Art Gallery, Wolfville, Nova Scotia
• Esso Resources Canada, Calgary, Alberta
• The Canadiana Fund, Ottawa, Ontario

Activities

• 1983 - Board of Directors, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
• 1982 - Chairman of Visual Arts Nova Scotia
• 1981 - Edited publication "Printmakers of Nova Scotia"
• 1981 - Nova Scotia Art Bank Advisory Board

Awards

• 1998 - Canada Council Arts Travel & NS Arts Council Exhibition Grants
• 1994, 1990, 1986 - Canada Council Arts Grant "B"
• 1986 - Honorary Life Membership, Visual Arts Nova Scotia
• 1981 - Special Project Grant, NS Dept. Culture, Recreation & Fitness
• 1975 - Effie May Ross Scholarship, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

Solo Exhibitions

• 1999 - Fire House Gallery, Damariscotta, Maine
• 1999 - Fog Forest Gallery, Sackville, New Brunswick
• 1996, 1994, 1993 - Gallery House, Nobleboro, Maine
• 1996, 1994, 1993 - Houston-North Gallery, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia
• 1994 - Marianne Friedland Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
• 1993 - South Street Seaport Museum, New York
• 1989 - Acadia University Art Gallery, Wolfville, Nova Scotia
• 1988 - Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia
• 1987 - Great George Street Gallery, Charlottetown, PEI
• 1980 - University of New Brunswick, Saint John, New Brunswick
• 1977 - Last Great Canadian Art Gallery, Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia
• 1976 - Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia

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A view of the sea

This article first appeared in Printmaking Today magazine and is published with the kind permission of the publisher, and the author Richard Carr.

A view of the sea
Richard Carr
Printmaking Today Winter 1999

John Neville has been described as a folk artist, a master printmaker, a professional storyteller and an original Canadian artist. Brought up in a house his paternal grandfather built in Hall's Harbour, Nova Scotia, in the 1880's, he is a recorder of a fast vanishing way of life and a recounter of tales which, without him to tell them, would soon be forgotten.

Hall's Harbour faces the Bay of Fundy and is a fishing village in which the Nevilles have been prominent for generations. The grandfather mentioned was a boatbuilder, fisherman, store owner and local Justice of the Peace. John Neville's father, also a fisherman, was a renowned teller of tales. So the artist, born in 1952, was brought up in an atmosphere where physical work was taken for granted and folk memory was celebrated by stories about people's loves, hates and rivalries and of course their love/hate relationship with the sea. Even in the 1950's, Hall's Harbour (with other fishing villages) was an important conduit of national and international news, whereas the farming communities inland remained relatively isolated. Today, good roads, TV and the Internet have transformed communications while the use of sonar techniques to find dwindling fishstocks has transformed the fishing industry.

Neville's early interest in drawing was encouraged by his grandfather who gave him discarded bills to use as paper; in the early 1970s, he went to Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax to study painting. However, NSCAD was entering its conceptual phase with the result that Neville may have felt like a fish out of water, coming, as he did, from a relatively unsophisticated background and faced with a highly intellectual, international atmosphere. It was a stroke of luck that he decided to spend his final year at the Centre de Gravure Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was exposed to acquatint, mezzotint, drypoint and engraving. There, his talent was recognized by Daniel Divorne who asked Neville to run workshops on photo-etching. In return, the Centre allowed him to use Divorne's hand-built press and special rollers, as well as printing two editions of his prints.

After this year as the first English-speaking Canadian to study at the Centre, Neville returned to his roots and, in a typically Nova Scotian fashion, built his own house with a studio for himself and his wife, the artist, Joyce Martin-Neville (also a printmaker). He returned to the life of fishing and the activities (such as racing Dory boats) of the small, closely knit community. Thus his prints are essentially about life in Hall's Harbour: a boy rescued from drowning: women taking revenge on a man who sells their husbands bootlegged liquor: a man burning a boat which brought nothing but bad luck.

Neville reduces the depth of field in his work so that the land or seascape seems to be flattened. Figures are modelled with sparse detail, becoming just parts of the scene, at one with the environment in which they find themselves - a simplicity reinforced by restrained use of colour. As the critic, Felicity Redgrave, writes: 'As in primitive art, Neville has abstracted from his images that which is not necessary.' She likens his images to Van Gogh's concept of work being 'simpler, more concise, more serious so that it can carry universal messages made explicit through everyday activities.' His work also conveys the sense of timelessness that still exists in the communities around the Bay of Fundy.

Though Neville remains close to his roots, he is not. After graduating in 1976, he operated an intaglio studio for 11 years and, during that period, edited the publication of Printmakers of Nova Scotia, for Visual Arts Nova Scotia, before becoming chairman of Visual Arts in 1982 (in 1986, he was given Honorary Life Membership). He has also been a director of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax and has shown his work extensively throughout Canada and in New York, USA. Today, he no longer has fishing to hand down to his children but instead has has art as a legacy; his daughters have learned to make prints on their parents' press. It is typical of him to say: 'anything you can teach your kids is good, especially if it's work they can do with their hands'.

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Drawings and Etchings From Hall's Harbour 1980-1988

The following is a review of a 1988-89 exhibition of John Neville's drawing and etchings. The exhibition was organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The review has been reproduced with the kind permission of the author, Felicity Redgrave.

John Neville
Drawings and Etchings From Hall's Harbour 1980-1988

John Neville was born and raised in Hall's Harbour, a small fishing community on the Bay of Fundy. His grandfather was prominent in the community; he ran the general store, was the Postmaster at Hall's Harbour and was also a Justice of the Peace. He encouraged John to draw by giving him any paper that was around - often the backs of bills of sale. His father was a boat builder and he recounted to John the stories and legends of the region; John call him "the teller of tales". John followed his artistic bent and studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. There he was thrown into a sophisticated environment where not much credence was given to the realistic interpretation of a specialised community that John was to find would be instrumental as a direction for his artistic talents. He gravitated to the printmaking studio, where he studied under Edward Porter, Head of Intaglio. The photoelectric process of fixing the image onto the engraving plate was the method favoured at the time, and when John and his wife, Joyce, went to Geneva to take his fourth year at the Centre de Gravure Contemporain in that city, he was able to introduce this new process to both the Centre de gravure and the Musee des Beaux Arts.

After graduation, Neville returned to Hall's Harbour where he built a house for Joyce and their two daughters. He involved himself in the artistic community's voluntary work; he was the Chairperson of Visual Arts Nova Scotia. Artistically, these were the years of struggle to find a way to express his perception of the world around him. His imagery is taken from observations of the daily and seasonal activities in Hall's Harbour such as the painting of buoys in the spring and dulse gathering. The life of a community that is involved with a primary industry such as fishing, with its direct contact with the environment, places its community values within the Christian context of sin and salvation, life and death: the goals of the self are synonymous with group goals.

Neville finds his depictions of these grander themes through his imaginative reinvention of the legends he grew up with; the thoughtful viewer comes to realize that the theme of justice is perhaps an integral part of an isolated community's way of life. Women's Revenge on Martin Porter, Bootlegger and Johnson at Long Beach, two strong works in this upcoming exhibition, show justice meted out in an ad hoc manner of extreme physicality; the feeling remains with the viewer that the community will review and pass a considered judgement on the individuals who perhaps exceeded their roles in the community. In the work, Boat Burning, the Greek chorus of fishermen bear witness to the burning of an unsatisfactory boat, placing the non-performance of this boat by which the fisherman had to make his living, within the ancient context of the possibility of it being a vehicle of the Fates.

For John Neville, artistic assimilation of his urban art training with the strong visual imagery derived from an archaic way of life was achieved through formal abstraction and development of a personal rhythmic line. Aspects of primitivism are apparent in the abstracted planar surfaces of Neville's boats and the undifferentiated facial and bodily forms of his fishermen. A world of silence and timelessness is created by these hierarchical images of fishermen drawn in their broadest aspect in front of bleached rocks and deep shadowed land forms. No Expressionist tendency is apparent: pencil and crayon marks on paper and stylus and burin incisions on plate are appropriately scaled to the overall dimensions of the working surfaces. The seemingly unavoidable sentimentality in work that reactivates an older stylistic mode such as that work falling within the category of 'folk art' cannot be detected in Neville's work. Rather, his vision is of a way of life that has the dignity of a special status, and is achieved in part through his subtle colouration and emphasis on light. His organic structure is spatially sensitive; distancing between objects and the viewer is implied by the elimination of irrelevant detailing. The body of work, which covers the period from 1980 to the present, is a breakthrough for the artist and should indeed by celebrated by this exhibition at the new Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. To find a relevant artistic focus within a traditional fishing culture is to recognize that culture is the means by which man becomes himself.

Felicity Redgrave
Guest Curator

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