| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Bill Rodgers’ interest in history grounds his work. After graduating with an Honours Diploma in Painting and Drawing from ACAD in 1975, he studied pre-Columbian art history at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, Mexico. His teaching practice included a 30-year career as an instructor at ACAD. He also travels to conduct research. The physical form of his work has taken many shapes, from painting to drawing to mixed-media collage. Many of his works make reference to art history, as well as to social history and memory, to the process of construction, and to labour – or “journeyman” work – itself.
Encountering ancient manuscripts prompted Rodgers’ long-standing interest in the palimpsest – the erasure of one work to make room for another. Scraping down his previous paintings, he would re-work and re-paint what he remembered of them, thus revivifying the “host” work underneath. He has since investigated such areas as the selection of the colours for the Hudson’s Bay blankets (In the Wool: Queen Anne’s Colours, 2006), again re-picturing an iconic form. His Studies in Citizenship paintings (2009) reproduced vintage book covers from 19th-century texts on survival in rural Canada and the cultural values of self-reliance. Portraying the books as a painted space, and including the preliminary drawings that informed the painting process, proposes a way of archiving the original books. His painting series Crazed (2011) was based on crack patterns in ceramics, traced, enlarged and transferred to canvas – the paint also alluding to clay slip and transparent glazes. Rodgers thus links the potter’s process to the making of a painting and the recording of an object.
Rodgers’ interest in social history and labour is explored in other projects, which are sometimes also triggered by travel or chance encounters, including paintings inspired by the illuminations in Ireland’s ancient Book of Kells, as well as works based on photographs of Irish tenant farmers evicted in the late 1800s.
Bill Rodgers’ solo shows have been held mostly in Calgary, as well as in Edmonton and Toronto. His work is held in collections at the Nickle Art Museum, Calgary; the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina; the Canada Council Art Bank, and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ottawa.
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