Peter aspell biography

Despite his considerable skills as a colourist and the appealing energy of some of his compositions, the late Peter Aspell is not the best known of West Coast modernist painters. Until now, he has been mostly ignored by public institutions, and his two-part exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery and the West Vancouver Museum was an attempt to redress that condition. The argument given for Aspell’s relative lack of recognition is that he worked figuratively at a time when his more esteemed colleagues, such as Jack Shadbolt and Gordon Smith, pursued lyrical, landscape-based abstraction. From the 1950s through the 1970s, their art was strongly identified with this place—this moody, rain-forested coast. Aspell’s landscapes, where they exist, are mythic and symbolic, filled with vividly hued figures and exotic motifs floating in a dreamlike space. A far cry from the local.

Even in the 1980s, when Vancouver audiences awoke to European Neo-Expressionism and American New Image painting, Aspell’s often angst-ridden works stimulated little curatorial interest (although he did exhibit in commercial galleries and at international art fairs). With the artist’s prolific output posed against this record of institutional neglect, curators Rachel Rosenfield Lafo and Darrin

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Peter Noel Lawson Winterhalter Aspell

1918 - Dec 28 2004

Vancouver School call up Art (Diploma 1942)
Dick Aspell Secondary of Art

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Creator Record

Biography Peter Aspell (Canadian, 1918-2004) was born in Vancouver. He lived and worked on Pender Island and later settled in North Saanich, BC, with his wife and fellow artist Joy Anson.

Aspell attended the Vancouver School of Art from 1937 to 1941 and the Academe de Ghent in Belgium. He served in the Canadian Army during World War II and, upon his return, taught at the Vancouver School of Art from 1948 to 1970. He ran his own art school, the Peter Aspell School of Art, from 1970 to 1978.

His oil paintings often depicted the human body, including self-portraits and nudes. He also worked with abstraction, practicing an evocative use of colour and expressionist style. He exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions in North America. His work belongs to collections including the National Gallery, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Gallery Jones in Vancouver, BC, represents his estate.