The thief Alzheimer's...

I decided to prepare a new website of her background and artworks. This has been done entirely without Ina's help. However, every piece of art you will witness and see was created by Ina. There are no edits or changes by me. In many respects, the presentation remains incomplete but it was the best I could do for now. I trust you will be astonished by the professionalism and unique quality of her artworks.

My best,

Jack, 2020

jack.gilbert@rogers.com

PS: Click on any artwork to view as singles. Also click on Boogie &Blues for piano accompaniment by son-in-law Alan Gaensbauer

My Background

During my childhood, I attended art classes at the Toronto Art Gallery (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) and private classes with various artists. When I graduated from Forest Hill Village High School, I chose to study Political Science and Economics at the University of Toronto with the intention of becoming a lawyer, but continued to study art in night classes. I married a law student, Jack Gilbert, while still an undergrad. I graduated as, Ina (nee Ciglen) Gilbert and have used only my married name since. Jack graduated the same year from Osgoode Hall. I decided that one lawyer was enough in the family and apprenticed with an interior designer. I opened my own business, designing executive interiors. At the same time, I continued to study painting under various artists and raised three daughters. Two became painters and the third went the route of graphic design.

In 1959 I gave up interior design to paint full time, although I still accept an occasional design commission. I designed the house and pond on our Mulmur property in 1968, the cabana, swimming pool and rock gardens in 1986. I designed the studio building and landscaped the adjacent, stream and gardens in 1988. I moved all of my artwork and equipment out of Toronto into the Mulmur Studio in 1992.

1961 My first art exhibition, a mix of figurative drawings and large abstract oil paintings inspired by the woods behind our Deepwood Crescent home in Don Mills, took place in 1961, at the North York Public Library & Gallery.

Whimsical Aliens

1963-65 Many years before Spielberg's much loved movie E.T. was filmed, I created a series of whimsical ink drawings of people that resemble his outer space character. The Dorothy Cameron Gallery exhibited them in December 1963 and January 1964. After completing an advanced etching course with Guillermo Silva, a well-known Mexican etcher, I purchased a printing press and produced some intaglio prints featuring the foibles of these big eyed people. The prints were shown at The Holy Blossom Temple and at the Society of Co-operative Artists Gallery in 1965.

Art critic, Kay Kritzwiser wrote, "...Her figures are light-heartedly grotesque but she warms them with her minute perception - a toe curls in sympathy, a finger crooks in suspicion.” David Silcox, on the other hand, commented "Although the etchings are well printed and the drawings show considerable skill and facility, the subject matter is too ephemeral to support the macabre and sinister means of presenting it". I trust the E.T. generation will feel a kinship with my whimsical people, and understand that they represent a universal humanity that includes those with great differences in their physical appearance.

Back to the Landscape

1966 A sketching trip on Lake Rosseau brought me back to the landscape, but I saw human gestures in the skeletons of drowned trees strange and creatures in reflected images in a protected cove. Reports of thousands dying in an earthquake moved me to express my sympathetic pain in the drawings titled "Despair" and "Sorrow". These were the subjects of ink drawings and oil paintings, shown by Gallery Pascal in 1966.

Founding of the Society of Canadian Artists

In 1967, under my leadership as president of the Society of Cooperative Artists (S.C.A.), we rewrote the constitution and renamed it the Society of Canadian Artists with a mandate to hold open juried shows for artists from across the country and to make efforts to have exhibitions travel across Canada. I served one more year as president and then stepped down. S.C.A. business was taking too much of my scarce painting time.

Hard-edge Op-art

1967 Leading American artists began using the new, fast-drying, brilliant coloured, artist's acrylic paints. Op-Art art was born. Their paintings became an interaction of colour in contiguous stripes or geometric forms that revealed no brush-strokes and bore no outline. Shapes appeared to quiver and dance when complementary colours touched or the artist would create a subtle blending with related colours. To achieve maximum optical illusions, artists defined a shape with masking tape, then filled in the colour. Acrylics dried in twenty minutes. Then they pulled off the tape, masked the finished shape and applied the next colour. Paint piled up against the tape and created a tiny hard ridge from which came the term "hard-edge painting".

The possibilities of Op-Art intrigued me. Narrow 1/4" masking tape couldn't get around the tight turns that I envisioned. I bought Mac-Tac shelf liner to cut intricate shapes. The shapes that dropped away masked the finished area. I asked 3-M Company to make me a special order, rolls of 6" wide masking tape, backed by release paper. I cut through several layers at once, creating duplicate shapes to repeat in different areas of a painting or create symmetrical forms. The shapes became silhouettes of people, creatures, trees and landscape.

The highly respected Dunkelman Gallery exhibited my intricate hard edge canvases in 1968, together with my works on Plexiglas. Some of the Plexiglas paintings explored my modular art system, others created fanciful three dimensional worlds. Initially, I used the paper that protected the sheets to draw the composition and mask the glass while I sponged on acrylic paint. Later, I learned that sign painters sprayed a transparent medium on the glass. It was much easier to cut and allowed me to develop the three dimensional works on several layers of Plexiglas. This exhibition received great reviews.

My children's teachers asked me to teach Op-Art in their classes. Masking tape and acrylic paints were not available in the classroom so I devised a way to use coloured construction paper. The students chose four sheets of either complementary or related colours which they held together with paper clips, They cut the stack into three to five shapes like a puzzle, then reassembled the four puzzles on a large sheet of paper, interchanging colours to create Op-Art pictures. I used the system for several years when participating in Toronto's "Artist in The School" program.

Galerie Libre, Montreal

My 1970 exhibition at Galerie Libre in Montreal, at the height of the F.L.Q. crisis explored human relationships and emotions. Most of the works were large hard edge canvases of geometric shapes representing faces. "The Fanatic" had one eye hypnotically persuading his followers while the other rigidly hid his bigotry. Others explored "Flirtation", "Seduction", "Anger", "The Qizzical Response" etc. In recognition of the Disco craze, I created geometric torsos that seemed to sway if you stared at them. There were also paintings on Plexiglas that explored modular puzzle picture concepts. Outside the gallery, the army patrolled the streets with automatic rifles. The Montreal critics were enthusiastic, but the Montreal art enthusiasts were afraid to come downtown to see the show.

Development of Modular Art

For the next 12 years, I was caught up in the excitement of creating my own original, art form. Applying my modular system, I created intricate wall-hangings from felt cut with a die containing 35 shapes and other works of art from walnut of different thicknesses, cut into just three shapes. These were shown at Nancy Poole's Studio in 1972. I created wall murals from die-cut carpeting, stained birch compositions including some held in place by Velcro so that the composition could be changed at will. These were shown at the National Interior Design Shows in 1973, 1974. My large free-form wood constructions were featured in an exhibition titled Architectural Art, sponsored by the Interior Designers of Ontario in 1976.

Enroute to Snow Mass for spring skiing we passed through the Mesa country of Colorado. In the bright sunlight the rocks that ring the tops of the mesas were defined only by their shadows. My husband set the camera for me and I shot several rolls of film of these formations. I spent six weeks, on our return recreating them in pencil and charcoal drawings.

ln 1975-76, I studied photography to take reference photos on an excursion to Canyonlands, Utah. Having married into a family of photographers (Al Gilbert is my brother-in-law) I had, until then, left photography in the capable hands of my husband, Jack. We returned from our 8 day trip with 1500 slides. He used the wide-angle lens to capture the scenic views. I used the telephoto lens to abstract elements that I wanted to recall for future paintings.

I returned to Utah for six weeks the following summer with my two eldest daughters, observing and photographing the barren landscape in every type of light. We explored Canyonlands, Arches, Goblin Valley, Bryce, Valley of the Gods, Lake Powell and Grand Canyon. No two parks were alike. The colours were incredible. The rock formations resembled creatures, faces and fairy castles locked forever in a state of suspended animation. In the summer of 1976, Nancy Poole's Studio exhibited drawings and oil paintings inspired by these midwest trips, together with my modular wood constructions.

Using my modular system, I created an educational toy from felt and flocked cards that I called "Designart." It was one of twenty toys, selected from a world-wide competition of artist-designed toys, for the exhibition, "Child's Play", at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, 1979. I spent the next few years selling "Designart", expanded to four felt models plus cardboard puzzles. Runaway inflation made toy buyers wary of stocking new products. When I had finally sold the last of the 80,000 "Designart" sets and puzzles, I went back to full-time painting. Development costs, 20% interest rates and overhead expenses had eaten up all the returns from Designart, and then some.

Mixed Media Electrographic Photo Collages

In 1984, I explored the use of colour copiers to print my slides on paper. It enabled me to reverse the slide and print mirror images. At first, I created simple symmetrical images, then I cut the prints and assembled large asymmetrical compositions. The symmetrical images in them often appeared animated. I converted photos of farm machinery, plants, flowers, tree stumps and rocks into new forms. The camera became an art tool. I framed my photo subjects with the collage process in mind. I augmented and altered colours in my assembled compositions with artist's pastels and fluid acrylics to complete these mixed media works. Visual Arts Ontario sponsored a juried selection of artists in a show of Electrographic Art at Gallery 77 in 1986. An entire room was devoted to my work.

Modelled Canvas Paintings

At the same time I began to experiment with canvas as a modelling medium to create sculptured paintings that would truly capture the essence of the canyons where formations change shape as you view them from different angles. I create the shapes by creasing the canvas. Acrylic medium stiffens the fabric and adheres it to an underlying stretched canvas support. The most recent modelled canvases are pure explorations of colour and three dimensional forms. I build up the colour textures with layers of acrylic glazes topped with interference colours to create the pearlized or metallic gleam.

Cracked Pavement

In the summer of 1993 I discovered that the pavement squares covering the underground garage on the Spadina Pier between Spadina Ave. and Bathurst St. had cracked beautifully to form endless connected designs. With permission from the owners I coloured between the cracks, picking out shapes that formed birds, fish and even a sixteen foot dinosaur to draw attention to this phenomena. They washed away with the snows of winter but I have preserved them in photographs and created new compositions in small pastel drawings. Currently, I am working on a series of life size paintings.