James Sutherland BA, UBC, ’66, English & Art History, studied Architecture but soon left to explore Expo ’67.
I was hired by Raymond Moriyama Architects to work on the Science Centre and the Toronto Metro Zoo, and studied painting and drawing under the tutelage of Dennis Burton at Night school at 3 Schools. Ray Moriyama asked me to paint some murals in his office space, a charming adaptation of an old gas station. which he had transformed into a very inspiring reflection of Japanese architecture. Ray then asked me to make banners for his clients’ buildings and I was off on a whole new career. Hired to design graphics for the village buildings at Ontario Place, my partner Robert McIlhargey and I worked ourselves half to death for 6 months, growing from a 2-man studio to 38 employees when we finished in early May of ’71.
It seemed that ‘Architectural Graphics’ painted on to masonary buildings had become the Architectural Art of the time as we grew and thrived across Ontario, Quebec, Vancouver and even London. I took photographic courses at Gallery 44 and digital design courses at OCAD to keep ahead of the burgeoning digitization of design. Additionally, I produced banners for The Vancouver Arts Summer Festival and mosaic murals for the Dupont Subway Station in Toronto in 1978 and again in 2018.
I was entrusted with the Circle of Clans mural on the Casino Rama project helping the artists of Mnjikaning with some thorny technical problems we had to add to epoxy finished aluminum panels – a favourite assignment and a political paradigm on how the ‘settler’ community and the native Canadian community can profit through cooperation. While all that was going on I tried to fit in some painting which I still hope to pursue further.
The personal entanglement of paint and thought and brush can be a magical rite and or a spiritual prayer, a song across miles of forest or sea. All we are, and all we can be, can emerge, bloom and clarify our relationships with one another and nature. I hope you like the work that is played and that it may inspire some to join us, to take pencil and brush in hand, for, as Robert Frost once observed “for Heaven and the Future’s sakes, is the deed ever really done”.
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