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Item Name: Print
Title: Print Arboretum
Maker: Kenneth Lochhead
Year: 1979
Country: Canadian
Materials: lithograph, 94/150
Measurements: overall: 57.75 cm x 76.5 cm
ID Number: PC96.8
Legal Status: PERMANENT COLLECTION


Extended Label Info: An arboretum is a garden of trees, grown as a collection for study. In this artwork, Lochhead uses lithography to create an image that explores the forms of trees using line and colour. Lithography is a printing process that uses a flat stone or metal plate on which the image areas are worked using a greasy medium so that the printing ink will adhere to them, while the non-image areas are made ink-repellent. To create this image, Lochhead would have created a different plate for each colour in his drawing, and then used a printing press to apply individual colours to each print, gradually building the full image. In print-making, artists number and sign their work to indicate how many images exist in each edition of images they create. As an artist, Lochhead was known for his research into modernism, a philosophy of art that represented abstract visual forms as a universal language of visual experience, and to offer the viewer a space to contemplate non-verbal, philosophical or emotional responses to artwork. This print simplifies trees into a series of expressive lines and uses warm yellows and cool blues to build mass and shape. Individually spaced, the trees exist in a park-like setting, very much like Regina’s Wascana Park which is a planned greenspace that features a variety of specimen trees. Kenneth Campbell Lochhead (1926 – 2006) was very influential artist and museum director in Saskatchewan in the 1950s. Lochhead trained in art at Queen’s University, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Barnes Foundation. From 1950-58, Lochhead was the Director for both the University of Saskatchewan's School of Art at Regina College (now the University of Regina), and the MacKenzie Art Gallery. He recharged the University’s Emma Lake Artist Workshops by inviting international artists and critics to work with Saskatchewan artists. This also ignited an international critical interest in Saskatchewan. Lochhead also brought together a group of Saskatchewan-based modernists known as the “Regina Five”. The group included Doug Morton, Art McKay, Ron Bloore, Ted Godwin, and Lochhead himself, though initially the group also included the architect Clifford Wiens and painter Roy Kiyooka. Lochhead received the Order of Canada in 1971. At the time of his death, he was retired and living in Ottawa. His work has been shown extensively and is held in numerous private and public collections.