TOM FORRESTALL (Estate), 1936-2024

Biography

As a painter, Forrestall is as deeply interested in how we see as in what we see. He knows that as viewers, each of us brings to works of art both our conscious skills and ideas and our own range of subjective experience, of which we are only partly aware. Sometimes in approaching contemporary works of realism, we are tempted to puzzle out specific narratives or to read finite symbolic meanings into objects. Such calculated exercises in interpretation will always lead us astray. Paintings such as Forrestall's elude interpretation. They are not containers for meaning. Their truth resides in their stillness and in their ability to inspire stillness in us.

Dr. Eva Seidner

TOM FORRESTALL (1936-2024), one of Canada's top realist painters, remained remarkably consistent in his work for over 65 years. Forrestall, like his teacher Alex Colville and his contemporaries Christopher Pratt and Mary Pratt, found his own route to painting that was relevant to him, crafting a personal approach that is less part of any defined group than it is a response to specific biographical and emotional facets of his life, depicting his immediate surroundings, filtered through his imagination and his sensibility.

 

A major retrospective of Tom Forrestall’s work was organized by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in 2008. The show subsequently travelled to Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick; Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario and Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick – Forrestall’s alma mater.

A gift of 400 sketchbooks spanning a period of 70 years was donated by the artist to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.

 

Forrestall’s works are held in many Canadian and international, public, corporate and private collections.

Forrestall, Essay by R. Cronin (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
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