Rosemary Kilbourn

Printmaker Rosemary Kilbourn (born 1931, Toronto)

Kilbourn studied at Toronto's Ontario College of Art, then the Slade School of Fine Art in London, England. Upon returning to Ontario, she was commissioned to do a mural for the new dining hall at University of Western Ontario. Along with commissioned portraits, her early works included illustrating two books by brother William Kilbourn and one by Farley Mowat, The Desperate People. Her etchings, often of religious themes, led her to create stained glass works, including one window for St. Bartholomew's Anglican Church in Ottawa.[1]

Kilbourn set up in Albion Hills in 1957, and taught around the province in the years thereafter. Among her students were wood engraver Barbara Howard, who had been a friend since college.

Other books to which she has contributed include Julian Huxley's Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963: a memorial volume, and Richard Outram's South of North: Images of Canada, with drawings by Thoreau MacDonald (2007), for which she selected the poems and drawings. In 2012 Canadian publisher The Porcupine's Quill published Out of the Wood, a collection of eighty reproductions of wood engravings created by Kilbourn over a period of fifty years, accompanied by short, elegiac fragments of text that elucidate her unique and influential aesthetic. Some of the reproductions fold out into a double spread, and also included is a full size reproduction of the Expulsion of Noah, which gives an example of the huge scale of some of her work.

In 1977, she was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, England's Society of Wood Engravers in 2001, and Havergal College's Hall of Distinction in 2004.[2]

Exhibits

Collections

References

  1. ↑ "The Interior of St. Barts". The Church of St. Bartholomew: the guard's chapel. Retrieved February 12, 2011.
  2. ↑ "2004 Hall of Distinction". Havergal College. Havergal College. 2004. Retrieved February 12, 2011.