David Blackwood

Canadian [1941-2022]

Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers, Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour, Order of Canada, Ontario Society of Artists, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts

David Lloyd Blackwood was born in Wesleyville, Newfoundland. Known primarily for his etchings, Blackwood sought to bring life to the coastal ways of living and the tales of Eastern Canada. Being one of Canada’s most influential visual storytellers, David achieved a multitude of great accomplishments and found widespread success and notability throughout his career.

David Blackwood’s early life was ripe with aspirations of continuing his family’s legacy and becoming a fisherman. His grandfather, and his father were both fishermen, David spent many summers aboard his father’s schooner The Flora S. Nickerson. It is these early memories in which a great deal of inspiration for his future artworks arose. His work His Fathers Dreams II Labrador Days is quintessential to these early ideas and a key representation of the influence this sea-faring upbringing had on his artwork later in life.

At the young age of 23, his work The Lost Party, a collection of fifty etchings all representing the 1914 Newfoundland Sealing Disaster, was put on display in the National Gallery of Canada. This series remains to this day as perhaps the most expansive visual depictions of Canadian History. The dark and ominous themes presented in this series followed Blackwood’s career through his almost a hundred solo exhibitions, as well as the displaying of his artwork at the Windsor Castle, the Uffizi in Florence, and the National Gallery of Australia to name a few.

Blackwood spent a vast majority of his career passing on his craft to future generations, teaching for nearly three decades at the Trinity College in Ontario, as well as a brief residency at the University of Toronto’s Erindale College. Art was more than a career, was more than a way of sharing stories, but also served as a way to inspire and influence the generations to come. It was this positive, selfless attitude, as well as his undeniable talent which led to many outstanding decorations.

In the mid-2010’s David was beginning his battle with a lengthy illness that ultimately led to his death in 2022. It is in this final battle we see his final exhibition come to life, Images of Home, where a majority of the works were completed from the hospital room. In this final series Blackwood shifts the focus of his work from the gothic etchings of the past, to vibrant, beautiful watercolor’s. For him, especially in his later years, art was Therapy. David has been on record stating that painting helped him through the hardest points and helped him survive.

From his early days depicting the disasters of the Maritimes, his representations of the legends and lives of the harbor towns along the coast, to his bring and colorful work in his garden later in his life, David Blackwood is one of the most emotive visual storytellers to have ever lived and his legacy of the peace found through art surely will live on.

“Working on watercolor painting…it helped me survive.”…”Any kind of painting is therapeutic, it keeps you busy physically and mentally…I could not walk and now I’m running around. It’s a wonderful thing, a great gift.”

-David Lloyd Blackwood, 2016

Literature: “David Blackwood: Master Printmaker”(WIlliam Gough; Firefly Books; 2001); “The Art of David Blackwood” (William Gough; McGraw Hill Ryerson; 1988).