Peter Aspell | Colossus

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Peter Aspell, “The Industrialist,” 1988

oil on canvas, 56 × 70 inches (courtesy of the Gallery)

Throughout his career, Peter was recognized as a colossus in the Vancouver art scene. He had an uncompromising conviction to a visual language that is characterized by an unadulterated intensity. Peter’s paintings have been exhibited in galleries in Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Europe. 

Artist Bio:

A passionate and devoted artist, Aspell was born in Vancouver in 1918 and passed in 2004, at the age of 86. He was educated at the Vancouver School of Art as well as at the Academie de Ghent in Belgium. He was an educator at the Vancouver School of Art, today’s Emily Carr University, from 1948-1970 and taught alongside other pioneers in painting, namely Jack Shadbolt and Gordon Smith. He eventually developed The Peter Aspell School of Art, which he ran from 1970 through to 1978. Aspell was controversial, a risk taker, and incapable of compromise as evidenced in his epic masterpiece, March of the Machines, his amassed critique of societal mechanizations. While defiance and satire often characterized his work so did an inherent sensitivity toward the human condition. Joy and humour were prevalent signifiers as evidenced in Man in the Herringbone Suit from his memory portraits series. As well, highly motivated by religious worship and rituals embedded in other cultures, he took notions of various gods and deities and totally transformed them, as with the invention of Morning Sun Goddess, a celebratory painting measuring seven and a half feet in height. Peter Aspell adopted his own primitive, expressionist style of painting and his legacy lives on through his surreal aesthetic, his iconic subjects, and his evocative and complex use of colour.