A foundational theme to the work of David Blackwood is storytelling. So foundational, in fact, that Blackwood’s works are, in their essence, stories about stories. Born into Newfoundland’s rich narrative tradition, he was steeped in it from an early age. There was a general open-door policy in the small coastal town of Wesleyville where he and generations of his family were raised, with members of the community frequently paying each other social visits. The young Blackwood would sit in the presence of Master Mariners like Elijah Mullet and listen to their dramatic accounts of great storms at sea, great whales and great tragedy. He said the tales, too, could change from telling to telling, becoming grander and more compelling with each reiteration.

Blackwood stitched together those experiences with his love of literature’s great poet-storytellers such as William Shakespeare, William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to infuse his images with a dreamlike intensity and mythical presence. The phantasmal imagery Blake produced relating to his and Shakespeare’s words was a lifelong influence for Blackwood, as were Gustave Doré’s masterly etchings inspired by Coleridge’s surreal epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. One of the many things Blackwood gleaned from these titans of artistic expression was that the best and most lasting works of art are always infused with a compelling, confounding and inexhaustible sense of mystery. Like the Sphinx’s riddle that can never quite be answered, this quality was something he always sought to instill in his own work, and with In the Labrador Sea, he clearly achieved his objective.

Among his monuments of imagery depicting the beauty and trial of maritime life, this vertical orientation of a humpback whale near a fleet of schooners is a composition Blackwood returned to multiple times. At least two later oil tempera versions of it exist, in addition to the major etching Wesleyville Fleet in the Labrador Sea, produced the same year as this painting, and the large-format watercolour North Atlantic from 2003, sold by Heffel in May 2013. The upper third of the composition was also explored by the artist in the 2010 etching Twilight Sounding, complete with ships visible along the distant horizon. It is an image that held the artist’s imagination for well over a decade, and arguably the most important example of his whale motif outside of his iconic Fire Down on the Labrador, lot 328 in this sale.

With Blackwood’s whale imagery, be it For Ishmael Tiller: The Ledgy Rocks (1990) or Loss of the Flora S. Nickerson (1993), there is always an element of scale. The whale’s immense size renders the nearby ships as strikingly small and fragile in comparison, whether they are lifeboats fleeing disaster or a crewed vessel at full sail. One’s heart fears for the safety of these sailors, pitted against the profound and ancient powers of nature. Such works impart a feeling of awe in the word’s original sense—an overwhelming blending of reverence, admiration and fear.

In this work, through a trick of perspective, Blackwood allows us to see both above and below the plane of the ocean, with the whale in the process of breaching the surface with its tail. The resulting crash of the massive tail smashing down onto the water can be thunderous, and here Blackwood holds us in the tension just before impact. In one masterful and indelible image, Blackwood presents the daunting majesty of nature and a community’s tenuous and hard-earned place within it.

The major exhibition David Blackwood: Myth and Legend opens October 8, 2025, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, proudly sponsored by the Heffel Foundation.