4th Annual Ted Raftery and Robert E. Wood Show

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Left: Robert E. Wood, "Alberta Rockies Sunrise" Right: Ted Raftery, "The Sentinel"

Left: oil on canvas, 30" x 48" Right: oil on canvas, 18" x 24". Images Courtesy of the Gallery.

Our November show with these two acclaimed Canadian Artists is one of our most popular! Both Robert and Ted will have new pieces on display and both will be in the gallery for a chat and discussion about their work.

Ted Raftery

As a child in England, Ted was constantly drawing and painting, mostly from his imagination. In his early teens he realized that he achieved better results when he sketched from nature.

He joined an art club and was able to draw from live models and plaster casts. This improved his skills markedly but he never attended an art school to receive formal tuition as at that time art schools were only teaching graphic arts and various modernism’s in vogue at that time.

Teds interest lay in a more traditional approach and he continued along that path. By his early twenty’s he was married and had a family and job as an electrician. His painting became sporadic for a while but he continued to study the fine art in the English public art galleries, such as the National Gallery in London and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

On immigrating to Canada in 1974, the landscape here inspired him to take up the brush and palette again. At first he painted prairie scenes and grain elevators and always the big Alberta sky he admired so much. His interest in cross-country skiing led him to also paint mountain winters. By 1978 he had placed paintings with the Gainsborough Galleries in Calgary, and they were selling readily.

At the time he decided to quit his job and to paint full time. With the help of the Gallery he was able to make a living on his sales.

Now Ted’s painting grace the walls of many corporations and businesses and also many private homes in Canada, UK, USA, Hong Kong, Australia and many other places around the world.

Since the closing of Gainsborough at the end of 2018, Ted now has found a new Gallery to represent him in Calgary, at Webster Galleries in the SE of the city. Webster’s hopes to continue to expose new people to Ted’s work and provide a venue for his many avid followers for years to come.

Robert E. Wood

Robert E. Wood grew up surrounded by artists and art. He was born in North Vancouver, B.C. in 1971, and currently resides in Calgary, Alberta. He has been painting full time since 1989, and his career follows over 70 years of professional art in his family. His grandfather was Robert E. Wood and his father was Karl E. Wood - with whom he spent eight months training. This was followed by study with several other notable artists, including Harold Lyon, and years of personal artistic exploration and development. Robert has been surrounded by art his entire life and took to it from his earliest years, when his grandfather called him “the little painter”.

Primarily known for his Canadian landscapes, Robert is adept at portraying a wide variety of subject matter: the mountains,  canyons, lakes, rivers and forests of the Rocky Mountains, sunsets, old cabins and barns of the West, the Okanagan, Europe, Mexico and other tropical settings, and a variety of still-life, floral and garden scenes.  His paintings sing with color and always depict scenes he is dramatically inspired by.

Robert enjoys working on location, plein-air painting, which helps his images achieve a sense of true light and life. He extensively travels and explores his favorite regions of Alberta and British Columbia - these include the Kananaskis and Banff National Park regions of the Rockies, as well as the South Okanagan. As well as painting on site, Robert takes large numbers of photographs to use as reference material for his studio paintings. His visual library consists of some 60,000 slides and photographs which are always on hand to inspire future paintings.

Robert Wood’s love of light and color, and passion for conveying his vision of the world, is a never-ending source of inspiration, and he has come to see his task as almost a spiritual one, using oil as a medium to imbue his canvasses with beauty and positive energy, which then resonates with the viewer. Although he believes awards in the arts are ridiculous and a matter of subjective opinion, Robert is nevertheless honored to have won first place in the only art competition he has ever entered: Arabella art magazine’s 2014 “Great Canadian Landscape Painting Competition”.