signed, titled, dated & editioned; inscribed on the lower left margin of the paper “Provenance Artist’s Archives. Art Gallery of Ontario Travelling Show 1976”
Note: This work is illustrated on p. 72 of “David Blackwood: Master Printmaker” (Gough; Firefly Books, 2001)
Between 1950 and the early 1970s, the Newfoundland government closed 250 coastal villages. Premier Joey Smallwood, who led Newfoundland and Labrador into Confederation in 1949, believed these outports to be too isolated, and providing services there proved inconvenient. 30,000 people were uprooted, including David Blackwood’s family; the home of his maternal grandparents was on Bragg’s Island, having been built by his grandfather, David Glover, as his matrimonial home. David Blackwood’s recollection of the event that influenced this print is captured on page 59 of Gough’s book:
No one had ever heard of such a thing as resettlement when young David sat in the front of a motorboat on his way to Bragg’s Island, waiting for the first sighting of the warning light. “Then one night,” recalls Blackwood, “Gram Glover had a dream. I can remember her coming down to the kitchen that morning. ‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘I had a funny dream last night, that we all had to pack up and leave this place. That we had to pack up and everything was torn to pieces, like there was another war coming. The whole place was in a shambles. There must be another war coming!’
“When the time came for them to be resettled, they didn’t shift the house, you know; they took it down. And my grandfather locked himself in his shed and wouldn’t come out. So his own son started to take the house down; piece by piece, he took apart the house.”
