Vancouver based artist, historian and printmaker Gary Sim’s work is a combination of meticulous mark-making and west coast sensibility. Best known for his delicate relief prints, pen-and-ink drawings and evocative studies of regional landscapes and wildlife, his work is rooted in a combination of lived experience and imagination. Whether it’s a crane waiting at dockside or the subtle contours of coastal terrain, Sim’s works whisper the poetry of place with a fan’s devotion to nature and a historian’s eye for detail. His creative practice extends beyond pure art making – it explores the rich tapestry of British Columbia’s artistic heritage through both image and archive.
Born in Vancouver in 1951, Sim has been a rock gang worker, an architectural technologist, a writer, an art historian and a printmaker. After studying briefly at Simon Fraser University and the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design), he pursued a long career in architecture while steadily building an artistic portfolio and an encyclopedic knowledge of the BC art scene. He has produced hundreds of original works and shown them in more than 40 exhibitions across the Lower Mainland and beyond. His limited edition prints have been commissioned by the Burnaby Art Gallery and his large format pencil drawings have been the subject of a number of solo shows. His art can be found in the Burnaby Art Gallery’s permanent collection and in private and public collections, including works donated to the National Gallery of Canada.
Beyond his art-making, Sim is probably best known and celebrated for creating British Columbia Artists, a free online database documenting over 20,000 artists and serves as a vital research resource. In 1996, he was inspired to create his database after buying a watercolour by Vancouver artist Maud Sherman, whose 40-year career is mostly unknown today. As Sim himself has wryly observed about his archival obsession: “If someone as distinguished as her can disappear, what does this mean about my art?”. Sim is working on a narrative non-fiction account of his research about Maud’s life called Looking for Maude. Creation and remembrance are often inseparable. Quote from Collecting BC Artists, Janet Nicol, Galleries West, https://www.gallerieswest.ca/magazine/stories/collecting-b-c-artists/
About Looking Away.
Gary Sim’s Looking Away is a relief print that showcases both realism and playfulness in his depiction of a waiting cargo ship in English Bay, Vancouver, BC.
Various fish, starfish and spiky sea urchins play between the waves. The two bands of clouds in the sky seem to be made of flowers, creating a rippling horizontal texture. The forested mountains are vertical stripes and the width of them is varied, representing different qualities of light.
Do the black shapes at the top of the work represent stars? What are the two iconic landmarks at the end of the nearest point of land? Is the foreground beach or is it what is beneath the water’s surface? Imagery ambiguities like these often keep viewers coming back.
This is a newly acquired work that has not yet been added to our database, but click here to view other work by Gary Sim.
For all you deep art divers out there.
More on Gary Sim’s life and work
British Columbia Artists website
Article on an exhibition of The Gary Sim Donation to the National Gallery of Canada
The Canadian Art Preservation Foundation posts short biographies and information on artists and artwork from its collection in a not-so-subtle attempt to capture your attention and interest in our mission, but we also just want to keep this artwork in view. We are excited about the art we collect and want to share it with you. CAPF is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the artwork of Canada’s superstar artists for future generations to examine, study and exhibit – the ones you know and the ones you might not know so well. We accept artwork, journals, notes, letters, exhibition catalogues and anything else that might comprise a visual and/or intellectual “portrait” (ahem, please pardon the pun) of a particular artist.
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