What Lays Beneath: A Retrospective of Works by Leonard Juvenville

Exhibition Dates: January 27 - March 26, 2023

Opening during ARTcrawl, February 10, 2023 from 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM

Programing Dates:

Celebration with the Artist: Saturday, January 28, 2023 from 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Long View Tour Wednesday February 15, 2023 from 2:30 - 3:00 pm

Drop-in & Draw during Gallery open hours March 2, March 9, March 16, 2023

Leonard Jubenville enrolled at the Ontario College of Art in the 1960s, completing a formal education that would ensure that his practice would be well-founded in the craft and discipline of painting. The techniques he would develop were labour intensive and considered. His clean and controlled painting surfaces allow the viewer to enter the realities he describes. As the artist adamantly asserts, it is left to the viewer to decide where to go from there.

Well-traveled and educated, Jubenville chose to bring his journeys home. He paints the fields and waning edges of Kent County’s forests, its beaches, its moonlit skies, and the gardens he tends at his family farm in Pain Court, Ontario. As beautiful as his colour and compositional finesse are, the artist’s eye consistently gravitates toward small disruptions and tears in the idyllic and picturesque - a landscape is never just a landscape as worlds continue to unfold and shift through time. People come and depart. Moments arrive and fade.

With this opportunity to look across the span of Jubenville’s artistic career, his restless curiosity manifests itself most prominently. While he dedicates himself to painting landscapes and tableaux of life, there is a pervasive and often unsettling sense that there is always more than meets the eye.