I first met Oak Bay artist Robert Amos extra than 40 years in the past. He changed into portray photographs of homes and websites that had been vanishing from the landscape and he told me he become going to be the artist who painted Victoria.
Not long after that, Amos commenced making images of the city’s iconographic images — the Legislative precinct, the Empress Hotel, Chinatown. When he and his spouse, artist Sarah Amos, moved to Fairfield to raise their daughters, Amos started out to paint Cook Street Village. Seven years in the past, this creative couple moved to Oak Bay and constructed their present day domestic-studio.
“The past due mayor Nils Jensen met me on his bicycle excursion one day and said, ‘I want to make Oak Bay the art capital of the Capital Region’,” Amos tells me.
We’re in his studio lounge, in which he stores his notebooks, diaries and sketchbook documents. There are cabinets of them — personal chronicles of his career and development as an artist. There are also a handful of his posted books, like ultimate yr’s critically acclaimed best-seller E.J. Hughes Paints Vancouver Island.
In October, Amos celebrates the book of his second quantity of Hughes’ biography, and he’s already at work on volume three, the battle years.
“I just like the way his paintings look!” Amos exclaims, smiling like a Cheshire cat. “I wrote about him, met him, and were given an invite to spend the day with him.”
Amos then shows me a sequence of commissioned paintings of a house in Oak Bay documenting a half of-century of life for the mom and daughter who live there. It’s every other contemporary mission, similarly to lectures on Hughes and Emily Carr.
“A close appearance, of what it’s like to paint,” Amos says dramatically. “Ninety minutes of near remark. We’re going to do a little video recording of the lectures, too.”
Born in Belleville, Ontario in 1950, Amos spent his school years in Toronto, followed by means of two years at Queens University taking English literature courses. Amos got a element-time activity lifting crates at an art gallery and that’s while he saw his first art show.
“Heart of London!” he says. “That become the identify of the show. I concept…my lifestyles will be the problem count, too — a framed revel in, painting. I went to York to study satisfactory artwork, art records and Japanese art and a professor bought a number of my art work. In my final year, I did not anything however studio paintings.”
Amos landed at Western Front in Vancouver and a waterfront studio on Carrall Street, close to Gastown. He hung out with The Pier Group of artists that protected Victoria fashion designer J.C. Scott. Performance artwork, stay co-op radio performs, live song, and desires of going to Japan — Amos lived a bohemian life and continued it when he got here to Victoria with fellow artist Andy Graffiti, setting up store in Chinatown above Fan Tan Alley.
“The place appears superb!” he recollects. “That view getting into metropolis over Royal Oak? Beautiful!”
Amos got a task at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, in which he stayed for 5 years. He says he noticed a whole lot of Japanese artwork, Japanese timber block and German expressionism.
“Then I end and went to Japan for a yr of journey in Japan and Thailand,” Amos says. “I studied Japanese. I met Sarah. We were given married. We travelled. We were crossing into Malaysia at Langkawi and I had to claim my profession, that I became an artist. That became a large second. I am an artist!”
Amos is probably Victoria’s maximum public artist. Besides a long time of writing approximately artwork in his Times Colonist column and Monday Magazine before that, and generating CBC Radio reports on Victoria’s artwork scene, Amos is at work in Greater Victoria’s neighbourhoods — literally portray the city.
He’s been artist in residence at The Empress and the Oak Bay Beach Hotel, in which he additionally wrote drafts of his E.J. Hughes e-book throughout breaks from months of summer season portray in a sunny room throughout from the David Foster Theatre.
Amos is also a fixture on the annual Bowker Creek Brush Up and at neighborhood colleges, considering that his early collaboration with Barb Adams at Monterey. He’s also a member of Oak Bay’s public art advisory committee.
“I suppose that’s the only organization I’ve ever joined,” Amos grimaces. “I don’t like meetings!”
Every Friday for the ultimate 17 years, Amos has visited Mount St. Mary’s Hospital wherein he reads to the residents even as they paint and draw.
“It’s probable the happiest times of my lifestyles,” he says, smiling. “I love painting landscapes, homes and gardens, motors, puppies — anything, but it’s still a conflict to promote a portray. The artwork enterprise remains a battle.”
But regardless of that, and after decades of willpower to his craft, Amos has performed what he set out to do: he’s painted Victoria. And the art work and drawings of Oak Bay and different neighbourhoods are his lasting legacy.