About

Peter Hendrick is a Canadian artist born in Toronto Canada in 1953.  He has been painting for over 40 years and his work includes printmaking and sculpture as well as watercolour, oil and acrylic paintings.  Hendrick has exhibited in Canada and the United States and his work is in collections in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain.  He is a member of the Open Studio printmakers cooperative in Toronto and the Arts & Letters Club, Toronto.

Peter Hendrick is represented in Toronto by Jackie Baker and the Art Connection Group.

My art practice has covered a wide range of media and subject matter over the last 40 years including painting and drawing, sculpture, set design and instrument making. My current work focuses in two areas: landscape painting and printmaking. My landscape painting is almost exclusively made outdoors from life and allows me to directly engage natural phenomena including light and colour. I will often develop larger landscape paintings in my studio based on plein air sketches. Printmaking for me is an extension of drawing and most recently has focused on variable editions of watercolour aquatints as a way to add colour to the prints.

I have always enjoyed examining colour in the natural world and I am always exploring the act of painting. Paint can never capture what we see – a painting will always be an interpretation or a metaphor for visual response.  Optical science tells us that human vision works like a camera, that what we really see is a photo-like image complying with all the principles of perspective created by the lens of our eyeball. While the mechanics of the eye are clear, I think the process of seeing is much more complex. Our eyes race around the field of vision zooming in on areas of interest. Many aspects of what we see are ignored while other elements are focused on intensely. As we look, we are constantly comparing objects to similar objects seen before and recalling memories of similar details we have experienced in the past. My paintings are an attempt to represent this process of seeing and the visual process when we recall what we have seen from memory.

Much of my current work focuses on colour - the choice of hue (the colour itself), colour intensity (the amount of grey added to the colour which reduces its impact) and the interaction of all the colours within a painting. I use a very limited palette - usually just three colours - a red, a yellow and a blue - with the addition of white but no black. Limiting the colours creates an automatic harmony among all the colours in picture mixed from those fundamental pigments. Also the choice of which primary hues I use will affect the overall mood of the painting much like the chosen scale affects the emotional tenor of a piece of music.

Mixing hues from limited primary colours also makes one very sensitive to exactly what colours are at play in the picture. A yellow object will always have some blue and some red in it - this mix of hues will also affect how light or dark the object appears when compared to objects of different colour next to it - sensitivity to the lighter or darker values created by colours can add magic to a painting. 

Peter Hendrick

January 5, 2019

2005 to 2018 Summer ONTARIO COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN

Painting (Chinkok Tan)

2004 Spring OPEN STUDIO, Toronto

Etching studio (Pawel Zablocki)

2002 Fall / 2003 Spring ONTARIO COLLEGE OF ART, Toronto

Printmaking studio (Jack Cassidy)

1997 Fall UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR, Windsor, Ontario

 Painting Studio (Adele Duck, Robert Ferraro)

1996 Summer NEW YORK STUDIO SCHOOL, New York

 Painting Marathon (Graham Nickson)

1995 Fall New York Studio School, New York

 Drawing Marathon (Graham Nickson)

1995 Summer  Escola d’Arts Apicades i d’Oficis Artisticas (“Llotja”), Barcelona

Painting Studio (Tom Carr, Carmen Miguel, Perico Pastor)

1993-1995     SCHOOL OF VISUAL ART, New York

 Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree June 1995

(Alice Aycock, Andrew Gernt, Georgia Marsh, Robert  Murray, Jacqueline  Windsor, Jessica Stockholder)

1993-1995   ART STUDENTS LEAGUE, New York

 (Oldrich Teply, Frederick Wong)

1989-1993   ONTARIO COLLEGE OF ART, Toronto

Admitted with advanced standing  to the full-time Fine Art Progam, September 1992.  Part time studies 1989 – 1992.

(Natalka Husar, Greg Murphy, Richard Robertson,  Maria Gabankova)