A Gift of the Artist

An early contributor to the VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation Art Collection, celebrated Canadian artist Sylvia Tait has long supported healing through art. From teaching art classes in hospitals during her fine art studies at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to gifting artwork to our centres of healing and contributing to many public collections, Tait continues to celebrate life as a creative journey. Inspired by the West Coast landscape, Journey – Similkameen translates nature and experience into a rich visual symphony of form and colour. From the staccato of strands of alternating colours to the crescendo of fluid brushwork converging across the canvas, Tait’s layered surface resonates with expressive movement, inviting us to revel in the journey rather than the destination.

A Gift of Dick & Lyn Whittall

Andy Warhol challenged the world to see art differently. One from a portfolio of 10 screenprints, Warhol took inspiration for Flowers II.118 from his visit to Japan in 1974, a floral design book on Ikebana floral arrangements and wallpaper samples. While Warhol sketched the expressive drawing with an overhead project to make the screenprints, each print in the series is unique. Hand coloured by a studio assistant with Dr. Martin’s aniline watercolour dyes that flow into one another beyond the gestural line of the screenprint, Flowers II.118 celebrates the cyclical nature of life, the passing of time and the beauty of existing in the present moment.
 
“I always notice flowers.” — Andy Warhol

A Gift of the Artist

Born the Netherlands, Peter John Voormeij came to Canada in 1965 to pursue his Master of Arts degree from Concordia University. Building on the foundation of his academic training in realism, he embraced a new language of expression and freedom in abstraction. Voormeij put it all into his paintings—celebrating life in the rhythmic forms, rich colours and sweeping gestures, the suffering and the sublime in the hard and soft edges.
Grounded by a gestural form respecting the Earth in the lower canvas, in Start Again Voormeij’s floating organic forms represent “Life in balance,” swirling and vibrating in a centrifugal force of luminous colour and lyrical lines. Ever the optimist, Vooermeij’s Start Again reminds us of the possibility of hope and new beginnings.

A Gift of Vivian Chan

Vancouver-based artist Christopher Rodrigues investigates the fringes of painting where it overlaps with collage, photography, sculpture and the digital image. His practise has evolved to examine still life and landscape in digital form from traditional cibachrome prints to NFTs and large-scale exterior installations at Art Basel Miami.
Much like its reference to the Dutch “Golden Age” age of painting in the 17th century when the world was obsessed with flowers, Still Life 07 is a botanically impossible bouquet. A contemporary composition of altered reality painted with pixels of colour from images found on the Internet or scanned from his own paintings, Still Life 07 examines ephemerality in reconstructing nature.
“My photographs honour Nature while celebrating Technology, an important concern for me in an age when humans are struggling to find a balance with the planet that sustains them. Through my art, I have found a way to showcase Nature’s all-encompassing beauty while at the same time expressing my genuine concern for its preservation and safety.”
— Christopher Rodrigues