Stephen Livick

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Stephen Livick
Born(1945-02-11)February 11, 1945
Allerton-Bywater, West Yorkshire
NationalityCanadian
Educationself-taught
Known forCanadian photographic artist and printmaker
SpouseKaren Johns (m. 1974)

Stephen Livick (born February 11, 1945) is an innovative photographic artist and printmaker living in London, Ontario. His career dates from 1974 as a full-time photographer. For him, the real magic began in the dark room. [1] He mined the potential of photographic technology. [2] [3]

Contents

In 1974, he invented a photographic printing process that combined Laser Techniques and Gum Bichromate, wedding modern technology with historic procedure. [4] [5] [6] Using his new way of printing photography, he could make images very large in size, even eight by 12 feet (perhaps a first for Canada) as in his Kolkata series. They have a distinctive, rich effect with soft, muted, mysterious colour, and have the "qualities of paintings". [7] He used the new technique often in his photography shows, one of which was called a "dazzling breakthrough" by Maclean's magazine. [8]

Livick also produced gelatine, silver, cyanotype and platinum prints. [8] He was a meticulous craftsman, faithful to external reality, but enhanced. His gift as an artist, besides his printing technique, was a "capacity for finding the brooding presence lurking inside objects and people...." [5]

Career

Livick was born in Allerton-Bywater, West Yorkshire, Britain but emigrated to Canada with his family in 1947. [9] He grew up in Montreal where he attended Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University). [10] He had no formal training in photography but found instructive ten years of work from 1963 on in commercial photographic studios in Montreal and Toronto. [10] He began exploring photographic processes and came on the scene in the early 1970s with several public exhibitions of his work. [10] It varied at the time from studies of people, colorfully printed, [11] to studies of landscape. [12]

His work was exhibited in a solo show at the London Art Gallery (now Museum London) (1971) in London, Ontario [10] and in a second show, another solo exhibition at the same institution titled Stephen Livick: Photographs in 1975. [13] Another solo show in 1975 was held at George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum, in Rochester, New York. [14] In 1976 and 1977 he had solo shows at the David Mirvish Gallery in Toronto, the only photographer shown at Mirvish along with a host of colour field painters, and in 1977, his work was discussed in "Photography Year 1978" by the editors of Time-Life. [10] [14] In 1980, his show Stephen Livick; Photographic Explorations, was held at the Art Gallery of Ontario. [15] [16] From 1978-1981, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, N.Y. and the David Mirvish Gallery in Toronto toured his photographic landscapes in a solo exhibition. [14]

About 1976, influenced by Diane Arbus he began to change his photographic practise from nature and objects to people. The result was an important body of work about America in its Bicentennial year of 1977 titled "Amerika", a Portfolio of platinum prints. [17] Later he pointed his camera at the entertainment industry in North America, and developed several series, including ones he titled "Middle America" (1981) and "Joints" (1982). [18] For the Middle America series, he travelled from Timmins, Ontario to the Carolinas in the United States, but unlike the freaks of Arbus, he photographed ordinary people [10] at fairs, festivals and amusement parks to create a kind of consensual portraiture — a collaboration between photographer and subject. [18]

In 1984, he began travelling to India to document and photograph rituals, festivals and citizens using a large format view camera. One of the group of works he called the "Calcutta Series" consists of very large prints (ten feet in length) which focus on religion in Kolkata. [19] He made nine trips to India between 1984 and the early 1990s. [20] [21] In 1993, he had a highly praised [21] [7] [20] solo show with a catalogue titled Calcutta (now Kolkata) at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (now part of the National Gallery of Canada), Ottawa.

In the 1990s, India continued to absorb him. In 1990, produced a series he called "Portrait of a Country Fair" shown the Sarnia Art Gallery in Ontario (now the Judith and Norman Alix art gallery). [14] In 1993, he developed a "Mural" series of photographs of murals which he found there. The Macintosh Gallery, Western University in London, Ontario correctly titled its retrospective of his work Stephen Livick: Metaphorical Transformations (1996) to express the transformations made by a photographer in recording subjects, in Livick's case, India. The catalogue had 24 color plates of work from the artist and three essays on his work in English, French, Bengali, and Japanese since the exhibition travelled to Yokohama, Japan. [22] In 2017, a show Stephen Livick: Midway, going back to his work in the early 1980s, was held at the Woodstock Art Gallery, guest curated by Matthew Ryan Smith. [18]

Livick's work was included in numerous group shows in Canada and abroad [10] since the 1970s such as Invisible Light at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington (1979); [10] Twelve Canadians (1981) at the Jane Corkin Gallery, Toronto; [23] and Seeing People, Seeing Space: Contemporary Photography from Ontario, Canada held at The Photographers Gallery in London, Ontario (1994). In 2024, he was included in the Winnipeg Art Gallery's (the WAG-Qaumajuq's)'s four-person exhibition featuring work from the permanent collection Animating the Figure with Photography curated by Dr. Stephen Borys, WAG-Qaumajuq Director & CEO. [6] His photographs in the show were all from the collection which holds his work from 1981 to 1993. [24]

Selected public collections

Livick's work has been widely collected, both in Canada and abroad in the following selected institutions:

Further reading

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References

  1. ↑ "Shabby Clothes". Toronto Star, May 17, 1974.
  2. ↑ Langford, Martha (2010). ”A Short History of Photography, 1900-2000”. The Visual Arts in Canada: the Twentieth Century. Foss, Brian, Paikowsky, Sandra, Whitelaw, Anne (eds.). Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press. p. 293. ISBN   978-0-19-542125-5.
  3. ↑ "Art History: The Art Story, Photography: Later Developments - After Pictorialism". www.theartstory.org. The Art Story. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  4. ↑ Stephen Livick: Metaphorical Transformations (1996), c.v.
  5. 1 2 Jenkner, Ingrid. "Exhibitions". Macdonald Stewart Art Gallery, 1983, 4. ISBN   0920810136 . Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  6. 1 2 "Exhibitions". www.wag.ca. Winnipeg Art Gallery. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  7. 1 2 Nancy Baele, “Deities and Demons”. The Ottawa Citizen, Dec 21, 1992.
  8. 1 2 David Livingstone, "Gummed Up Grotesques". Maclean's Sept 28, 1981.
  9. ↑ Artist's File, National Gallery of Canada, Ottaea.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Joan Murray, "Stephen Livick". Contemporary photographers (1995), isbn 1558621903 / executive editor, Martin Marix Evans ; consultant editor, Amanda Hopkinson ; advisers, Andrey Baskakov... [et al.], pp. 677-678. -- (sirsidynix.net).
  11. 1 2 "Collection". collections.eastman.org. George Eatman Museum. Retrieved 18 July 2024.
  12. 1 2 "Collection". www.moma.org. MoMA. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  13. ↑ "Exhibitions". library.gallery.ca. London Art Gallery Extension Services. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  14. 1 2 3 4 Stephen Livick Artist's file, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
  15. ↑ "Artist File". e-artexte.ca/. Artexte. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  16. 1 2 "Collection". www.gallery.ca. National Gallery of Canada. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  17. ↑ Sol Littman, "Livick: Goya with a camera". Toronto Star, 17 June 1979.
  18. 1 2 3 Smith, Matthew Ryan. "Exhibitions, 2017" (PDF). www.cityofwoodstock.ca. Woodstock Art Gallery. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  19. ↑ "Seminar". students.senecapolytechnic.ca. Seneca Polytechnic. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  20. 1 2 Craig Pearson, "India holds powerful attraction". Express Magazine, Windsor, Ont, 14 Sept 1995.
  21. 1 2 Charles Mandel, "Oh Calcutta!: rare images captured on film". Edmonton Journal, 0ct 5, 1996.
  22. ↑ "History". mcintoshgallery.ca. Macintosh Gallery, London, Ont. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  23. ↑ Twelve Canadians. Toronto: Jane Corkin Gallery. 1981. ISBN   9780771022890 . Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  24. ↑ "Collection". www,wag.ca. Winnipeg Art Gallery. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  25. ↑ "Collections". www.gallery.ca. National Gallery of Canada. Retrieved 17 July 2024.
  26. ↑ "Collection". ago.ca. Art Gallery of Ontario. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  27. ↑ "Collection". online.collections.theimagecentre.ca. The Image Centre, To. Retrieved 19 July 2024.
  28. ↑ "Collection". www.wag.ca. Winnipeg Art Gallery. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  29. ↑ "Collection". collection.museumlondon.ca. Museum London, London, Ont. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  30. ↑ "Collection". mcintoshgallery.pastperfectonline.com. Micintosh Gallery, Western University. Retrieved 18 July 2024.
  31. ↑ "Collection". www.facebook.com. Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
  32. ↑ "Collection". collection.artbma.org. Baltimore Museum of Art. Retrieved 18 July 2024.
  33. ↑ "Works". Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  34. ↑ "Collection". collection.artbma.org. Boston Museum of Art. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
  35. ↑ "Collection". harvardartmuseums.org. Fogg Art Museum, Boston. Retrieved 14 July 2024.
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