Steve Driscoll & Tim Okamura
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Peter Robertson Gallery 12323 104 Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta T5N 0V4
Steve Driscoll is an award-winning Toronto-based painter who has had more than twenty-five solo exhibitions and has participated in group shows throughout North America. Past shows include Gallery Stratford in 2017, ‘Size Matters’ at the McMichael Art Collection, ‘Giving Context’ at Peter Robertson Gallery and in 2019, the Tom Thomson Gallery in Owen Sound. Driscoll has executed many commissions, is keenly sought after by collectors, and has been featured in Canadian Art, dART International, The Telegram (NL), NOWMagazine, Toronto Star, CBC TV and ArtSync TV. Publications include the 2012 monograph Intelligence with the Earth, with text by Gary Michael Dault, and 2014’s Giving Context.
Driscoll creates bold contemporary landscape paintings by repurposing industrial urethane to a striking effect. According to the artist, “[the] passage of time is what urethane depicts so well. Its fluidity holds the minute details of a landscape in motion. The flow of the material is much like a tree trembling in the wind, or a constantly shifting reflection on the water’s surface.” The result is a dynamic body of work, often immersive in scale, with the vibrancy of his colour heightened by the translucency of the urethane-based paint.
Tim Okamura investigates identity, the urban environment, metaphor, and cultural iconography through a unique method of painting – one that combines an essentially ‘realist’ approach to the figure with collage, spray paint and mixed media. The juxtaposition of the rawness and urgency of street art and academic ideals has created a visual language that acknowledges a traditional form of story-telling through portraiture, while infusing the work with resonant contemporary motifs.
Born in Edmonton, Canada, painter Tim Okamura earned a B.F.A. with Distinction at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Canada before moving to New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts in 1991. After graduating with an M.F.A. in Illustration as Visual Journalism, Okamura moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he continues to live and work.
Okamura – a recipient of the 2004 Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts – has exhibited extensively in galleries throughout the world, including the U.S., Canada, Italy, Japan, Ecuador and Turkey, and has been selected nine times to appear in the prestigious BP Portrait Award Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England.
In 2006, Okamura was short-listed by the Royal Surveyor of the Queen’s Picture Collection for a commissioned portrait of the Queen of England.
In 2013, the University of North Carolina hosted a retrospective exhibition of Okamura’s work that focused on nearly a decade of production.
In 2015, Okamura received a letter of commendation from the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden.
He was honored in 2016 to have a piece hanging in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Tim Okamura’s art is on display in the permanent collections of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Toronto Congress Center, the Hotel Arts in Calgary, Canada, and Standard Chartered Bank in London, England. Celebrity collectors include Uma Thurman, musicians John Mellencamp, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (The Roots), director Ben Younger, as well as actors Bryan Greenberg, Vanessa Marcil, Annabella Sciorra, and Ethan Hawke.