PROVENANCE
Gallery One, Toronto
Winchester Galleries, Victoria
Private Collection, Victoria

LITERATURE
David Blackwood: Ephraim Kelloway’s Door Paintings 1985 – 1990, Gallery One, 1990, titled Ephraim Kelloway’s Black Door and dated 1986, reproduced, unpaginated

EXHIBITED
Gallery One, Toronto, David Blackwood: Ephraim Kelloway’s Door Paintings 1985 – 1990, October 6 – November 1, 1990, catalogue #5

The door depicted in this work, the shed door of David Blackwood’s childhood neighbour Ephraim Kelloway, was a central motif in the artist’s work for 40 years. “Uncle Eph’s” fishing storage shed on water’s edge in Wesleyville, Newfoundland, was grey, unpainted clapboard, except for the door. In the 1950s, Kelloway chose to paint and repaint it repeatedly, sometimes multiple times a summer, and decorated it with horseshoes, model ships and tin lettering. The door fascinated Blackwood as a child, and this fascination continued throughout his life as an artist. He eventually acquired the door, shipping it to his studio in Port Hope, Ontario. It is now preserved in the collection of The Rooms in St. John’s, alongside many other important artifacts from Blackwood’s collection.

Of Blackwood’s most frequently employed themes—whales, sea captains, schooners, icebergs—his most recurrent image may very well be this seemingly modest door. He depicted it in paintings, etchings, drawings, watercolours and even three-dimensional constructions. He returned to it as a poet might to the form of a sonnet or haiku, finding new ways to imbue the same structure with fresh meanings. Although known by many as Canada’s most virtuosic copperplate printmaker, Blackwood was a formidable colourist as well, as the multitudinous combi-nations of colour he used in this series demonstrate. In Ephraim Kelloway’s Door, Black, he explores nuanced expressions of blues and reds within a darkened, dusky palette, offset by an explosion of hot pink and deep rose in the crepuscular sky beyond. These choices subtly imbue the image with a romantic and resonant sense of the day’s first—or perhaps final—moments.

In Blackwood’s eyes, this battered, stalwart, utilitarian object became an icon. His portrayals of it are compelling symbols of the irrepressible human need for creation and expression, no matter the circumstance, and emblematic of Newfoundland itself.

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