In Memoriam Alf Blything

Known to many in the area, Alf Blything combined superior drafting skills with an eye for the unusual. His last exhibition at the AGN in 2006 was full of surprises and joy.

Alf Blything gave considerable time to develop a style that creates details with thought-provoking subject matter. Although he was a self-taught artist and continued to take workshops, his style remains his own.

His work possesses humour and tragedy - he has been called "the wizard of whimsy" - and reflects the artist's commitment to seeing things a little differently. His art has been selected for the annual Northumberland juried show on a regular basis.

He has a loyal following in Northumberland County where he was a well-known contributor to the local art scene, particularly in his association with the Colborne Art Gallery.

“Alf was a caring person and he cared especially for his fellow artists. He was always positive and supportive of their work. Our gallery meant a lot to him and we valued his leadership,” said Yoka Jeronimus, administrator of the Colborne Art Gallery.

"The landscape of Cobourg shifted with his not being around,“ said Dorette Carter, Curator/Director of the Art Gallery of Northumberland. “He had an energy about his art and living that you could feel whenever you were around him. He never lost his unique sense of humour which he applied to his incredibly detailed artwork. He was a gifted teacher who roused enthusiasm and commitment among his students.”

Rose Rambles into...Zed Woman and the City

Two visits, 14 segments, heaven knows how many discrete pieces.
The first visit to this exhibit at the Colborne Art Gallery was overwhelming: the installation is frenetically busy, crowded with detail and media, a foaming-over bottle top with creative energy erupting everywhere you look.
The venue is small and the installation is large -- so the immediate feeling is one of being sucked into a whirlwind of found and developed art that starts at waist level and swoops ceilingward to tower over you, forcing you to look up and around. The effect is much as I imagine life in the centre of a manic, creative cityscape might feel.
And the city motif is pervasive: there are industrial steel bands curved, woven, photographed and shaped throughout; hanging paintings and photos of advertising; ceramic cityscapes twisted and bent into smaller sculptures that have a distinctly Dr. Suess-like feel; fabric office and apartment tower representations crowding the airspaces; wire frame figures both dancing in the air and seated in conference. The first time through, I found myself bewildered and intimidated by the sheer volume of pieces: only one or two items stuck out in my mind afterward.
One of the items that stuck was in the third ceramic sculpture: a toddler playing infant games with office towers and apartment complexes. The toddler wears nothing more than a thin metallic headband and a disturbingly adolescent
expression - her face is disconcertingly old on the pudgy, childish body. The detached, slightly sulky look of a bored teenager gazes at me over her shoulder while she creates havoc with several city blocks. Copper wire curls and curves ominously around her -- is she at one with the current of place and time, or is she the destroying goddess, capricious as a 2-year-old and deadly with irritable size and power?
The fibre and fabric segment of the installation was the other thing that stuck: a huge, wavering depiction of a downtown scene in many pieces, floating lightly in the air and billowing in the breeze like their real counterparts wavering behind heat waves rising off the pavements below.
Someone had said to me that the exhibit was a bit like walking into a graphic novel. That first visit was indeed much that way: graphic novels are not a venue; my age group has had a lot to do with, so at first glance, they seem alien and unknowable -- slightly repellant in their unfamiliarity and vexing in their unexpected density. Just like getting a literary work when the cover was screaming comic book, in fact.
A second visit was in order: the first provided too much to assimilate and far more to think about than I wanted in that particular week.
So the second visit was duly undertaken this afternoon, and this time, I brought along a friend who hadn't seen the work before. At best, my companion could explain a few things to me that I didn't understand about the exhibit, I thought - she's been to art school, which I have not done. At worst, she could drag my convulsing body across the street to the plain-vanilla-one-in-every-small-town-in-the-country restaurant and pour restorative liquids into me. Either way, I would
escape the surreal place inside the gallery with some of my wits intact.
My companion wasn't at all sure she liked the exhibit.
Neither am I. I Am fascinated, however. I don't like the Zed Woman figures depicting her birth, childhood, adolescence and womanhood much -- they are all disturbing in some way, their forms subtly out of true and distorted but shaped realistically enough in some spots that distortions are emphasized and feel a little threatening.
I do like the transformations of found objects and sundry bits and pieces into fanciful flora and fauna, and the photos on canvas -- especially the almost monochromatic ones. The collection piece I simply don't understand: I have never been able to grasp what is intentionally or accidentally communicated in such pieces, and therefore can spend hours puzzling over them, mentally playing with shape and form and heft and feel.
For me, the jury is still out: I am compelled to go back yet again.