Artwork of the Week!

Week 10:

Winston Leathers (1932-2004)
Periodic Dynamic Field
1969
Silkscreen

Painter, printmaker, poet and professor Winston Leathers graduated from the University of Manitoba School of Art in 1956 and studied art education in the late-1950s. A design instructor at Winnipeg’s Tech-Voc High School for ten years, Leathers joined the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba in 1969, where he taught until his retirement in 1993.

Leathers experimented with new materials and techniques throughout his artistic career. An example of this is Periodic Dynamic Field which was included in the 2005 Gallery 1C03 and Gallery One One One joint exhibition Winston Leathers: In the Moment. Periodic Dynamic Field wdas one of the artist’s earliest images that used plastic as a printing medium and employed new fluorographic and metallic inks, causing parts of the work to glow under black light conditions. The hard edges, geometric shapes and bold colours of this print represent a shift from the compositions Leathers produced earlier in the decade. However, this work also incorporates painterly calligraphic markings that reflect the artist’s abiding interest in the teachings of Zen philosophy. In writing about a slightly later series of prints, Cosmic Variations, for which he is perhaps best known, Leathers explained the purpose behind his art: ‘As for my own work I hope to evoke a sense of wonder I see around me, not as a pictorial souvenir, nor as an equivalent of what I see, but as a personal statement of order and beauty.’ (Winston Leathers’ Cosmic Variations, unpaginated)