Pat FAIRHEAD Toronto - Muskoka Bloomsbury at Charleston with Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf solo exhibition 2008 aug 13 - 31

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OPENING RECEPTION
thursday, aug 14, from 5 to 7 pm,
the artist will speak at 6 pm

During the first half of the twentieth century, a few recent Cambridge graduates and their closest friends who happened to reside in the Bloomsbury district of London, England, would assemble on few nights a week for some drinks and conversation. Conversation about the nature of consciousness and its relation to external nature, about the fundamental separateness of individuals that involves both isolation and love, about the human and non-human nature of time and death, and about the ideal goods of truth love and beauty – all these underlie the group’s dissatisfaction with capitalism and its wars of imperialism. Thus, this is how the "Bloomsbury Group" started, and later deeply influenced 20th century literature, aesthetics, criticism and economics, as well as attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.

The establishment’s hostility to post-impressionism made Bloomsbury controversial. Much criticism of Bloomsbury continues to center on the group’s class origins, their elitism, satire, atheism, oppositional politics and liberal economics, their non-abstract art, modernist fiction, and their non-nuclear family and sexual arrangements.

Bloomsbury artists rejected the traditional distinction between fine and decorative art, as can be seen at Charleston Farmhouse where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved from London in 1916, and which became a place of Bloomsbury gatherings. Now it is a Mecca for intellectuals from around the world. Distinguished Canadian painter, Pat Fairhead had visited it several times back in 90s. Her watercolour collection of the Charleston Farmhous garden with shadows of Bloomsbury members was exhibited in the US, but this is its first public show in Canada.

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Pat Fairhead is an elected member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art, and an active (and of the first women!) member of the famous Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, following members of the Group of Seven. Pat Fairhead is considered to be one of the top woman watercolourists in Canada.

Pat is a Master of Arts graduate and also holds a Master of Education. She has painted full time for the past 30 years. As well as in private collections and art galleries, her work can be found in Windsor Castle and over 200 corporate collections.

Born in Yorkshire, England, Pat Fairhead came to Canada as a child. After living in Toronto most of her life, a few years ago she bought a house/studio in Muskoka. She continues to travel, paint, and teach the art.