Richard (Dick) Ferrier

Canadian [1929-2001]

Dick Ferrier was born May 29, 1929 in Oshawa, Ontario and received his public and high school education there. Dick’s talent was first recognized in high school and was rewarded with awards throughout his years at the Art College. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1953, the winner of the coveted Gold Medal in Design.

In the commercial and graphic field, Dick Ferrier gained an excellent reputation, won a number of National awards in advertising and became senior art director for MacLean Hunter Limited. He resigned from this post in 1970 to paint full time.

Dick Ferrier has long history of successful one-man exhibition at galleries across Canada: Toronto, Burlington, Hamilton, Ottawa, London, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Vancouver, as well as in Northern Ontario summer galleries.

Ferrier’s first artistic exodus to the West took place in the late summer and early fall of 1972. He subsequently many visits to the prairie provinces spending time researching, photographing, sketching and painting. Through an eastern artist’s eye, the Ontarian captured a quality in his paintings, which perhaps the average Westerner takes for granted–a feeling of vastness, of tranquility and solitude, complimented by a richness yet subtlety of colour. Ferrier travelled extensively in North America and but felt these qualities are unique to the Canadian Prairies.

A painter who has been influenced by the famed Group of Seven, Dick Ferrier had several successful exhibitions highlighted by works depicting Ontario’s beautiful Madawaska Valley region, plus many commissions of Canada’s Maritimes and Eastern Seaboard. “A feeling of the land” is the description
many art dealers and gallery attendees have given Ferrier’s paintings. Based on this gift, along with his unique style of interpreting a landscape, a prominent Burlington dealer recommended that these qualities would lend themselves to a series of works, describing the serenity of Manitoba’s landscape, the vastness of Saskatchewan’s wheat fields and open plains, and the colour of Alberta’s foothills.