TERRY MCCUE, Opens May 20, 2006, Canada House, Banff

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"Medicine Wheels Robes"

Terry McCue, "Medicine Wheels Robes," 2005, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 48".

TERRY MCCUE

Canada House, Banff

Opens May 20, 2006

By Jill Sawyer

Self-taught as an artist, Terry McCue has taken his influences from near and far. His interest in the work of painter Mark Rothko can be seen in the horizontal planes and saturated colour fields that drop behind the figures in his paintings. And he’s clearly inspired by his cousin, the great Ojibway painter Arthur Schilling, whose soft, delineated brushstrokes can be found in McCue’s own portraits. Now presenting his first solo show at Banff’s Canada House Gallery, McCue’s work shows a remarkable maturity and originality. Raised on the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario, McCue has lived in northern Alberta since the mid-‘70s. He has spent his life working and living in First Nations communities, and his connection to them is clear in all his work. Traditional symbols, mythic animal figures, and unadorned portraits are placed against a strongly developed sense of colour theory and contrast. In one portrait, the blanket-wrapped subject is centred on the canvas, eyes closed, his softened face a startling contradiction to the aggressiveness that viewers are accustomed to seeing in Aboriginal portraiture.

Represented by: Canada House, Banff, AB