| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Spanning a period of fifty years, Douglas Haynes was a distinguished instructor and an important figure in post-war abstraction Canada. It could be argued he was Alberta’s pre-eminent abstract painter with solo exhibitions beginning in the early 1960s at the Edmonton Art Gallery (now Art Gallery of Alberta), Studio 60 and Jacox Galleries in Edmonton. Haynes was known primarily as a painter on canvas but he also made works on paper including monoprints, gouache and collage.
Haynes’ formal training was with the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art (now Alberta College of Art + Design) where he earned a diploma in 1958. He then studied for one year (1960-61) on a scholarship at Netherland’s Royal Academy of Art (The Hague) where his engagement with abstraction began. Soon after he was selected to show in the National Gallery of Canada’s Fifth and Sixth Biennial of Canadian Painting (1963, 1965).
Haynes’ painting can be divided into several periods of which the best known are his spilt-diamond works (1970s), a series loosely described as “cubism revisited” (1980s) and his richly coloured and luminous Toledo Series (1990s) inspired by El Greco’s portraits of Christ and twelve apostles. As a committed modernist, Haynes’ art interacted with aspects of Western art history’s past and its more recent post-war trajectory involving post-painterly abstraction and the modernist-formalist legacy.
From 1970 to 1995, the artist worked as a professor and department head in fine art at University of Alberta. More than 70 works by the artist are found in public collections across the country and his exhibition history is extensive. |