Jeff Willmore

Infobox Artist
name = Jeff Willmore


imagesize = 230px
caption = Picture of "Jeff Willmore'
birthname = Jeffrey John Willmore
birthdate = birth date|1954|12|23|mf=y
location = flagicon|Canada Toronto, Canada
field = Painting, Drawing, Storytelling
training = Fanshawe College

Jeffrey John Willmore (b. Toronto, Ontario, December 23, 1954) is a Canadian visual and performance artist based in London, Ontario. Willmore originally enrolled in design at Fanshawe College in the early 1970s, but did not complete the program. He returned to Fanshawe in the later 1970s and completed the Fine Art program in 1980.

Early life

Willmore’s mother died of cancer when he was an early school-age child, which resulted in a disrupted family life. His childhood was characterized by frequent moves among the small towns of Northern Ontario. The family finally settled in the Sarnia, Ontario area, from which Willmore moved to London to pursue his post-secondary studies in art. Between leaving Fanshawe’s design school and returning to the college to complete his Fine Art diploma, Willmore worked in construction, house painting, and related skilled trades.

Visual and performance art career, 1980s and 1990s

Willmore began his career as a visual and performance artist upon his graduation from Fanshawe, exhibiting regularly at such venues as London’s well-known Forest City Gallery and Museum London. Willmore’s performances were a staple at the Forest City Gallery, most notably at its annual performance art festival. He also showed at Nancy Poole’s gallery in Toronto during this time. His visual work at the time consisted of paintings, drawings and collages in a neo-expressionist vein.

By the early 1990s, Willmore began to concentrate more on painting, producing various series of popular landscape and portrait work and mounting exhibitions, such as "A Forest the Size of France" in 1994, which combined painting, three-dimensional and performative elements. The premise for the exhibition was inspired by Willmore’s childhood in Northern Ontario.

Current work and activities

Willmore’s work has continued to be dominated by landscapes informed by the sketch painting accomplished during daytrips and more substantial travels, primarily in southern and northern Ontario and Canada’s east cost. However, his painting increasingly includes elements of figure and portrait work.

"Organizing the Search for Tom Thomson", at London’s McIntosh Gallery and other regional galleries beginning in the fall of 2007, is Willmore’s most recent multi-dimensional painting, installation and performance work. Willmore’s work has come to be increasingly dominated by an exploration of the concept of painting in visual art as an art form met primarily with ambivalence or, worse still, contempt. Willmore uses painting, storytelling and installation work to comment on a consumer society dominated by mass-produced objects and imagery, in which the sense of wonder for the painted object has all but disappeared.

External links

* [http://www.jeffwillmore.ca Jeff Willmore website]
* [http://www.thielsengalleries.com Thielsen Galleries] , London, Ontario
* [http://www.gevik.com Gallery Gevik] , Toronto, Ontario