Art Gallery of Newfoundland and
Labrador (AGNL)
Shaped by the Sea
Permanent Collections
Don Wright was born in Timmins, Ontario, in 1931. Although he did not move to Newfoundland until 1967, he became one of the province's best-known, most productive artists. He also was an important teacher, and a mentor and role model for younger artists.
Already an accomplished painter by the end of high school, Wright took a number of art courses and teacher training, then taught in public schools for several years. At age 28, he went to the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, to study printmaking, attending intermittently from 1959 to 1966. In 1967, he moved to Newfoundland, where he worked as an art specialist with Memorial University of Newfoundland's Extension Service until the early 1980s. He was responsible for children and adult art classes, both on campus and in communities throughout the province.
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Split Fish Stage Floor 1969 Watercolour 56.5 x 76 cm 
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One of Don Wright's most significant contributions was his co-founding of St. Michael's Printshop with Heidi Oberheide in 1972. This production centre for fine art prints was in an old schoolhouse in St. Michael's, on the Avalon Peninsula's Southern Shore. Not only did it enable Newfoundland artists to make prints, it drew professional artists from across Canada and a variety of countries. Now located in downtown St. John's, it continues to attract artists today. (The artist Anne Meredith Barry lives and works in the former St. Michael's Printshop building.)
In the course of his career, Don Wright worked in many media—watercolour, printmaking, sculpture, drawing, handmade books and installation art—all in a fluid, dynamic, gestural style. Wright's work almost always dealt with landscape and people's relationship to it. From the mid-1960s to the 1980s, it was rooted in his observation and direct experience of life in coastal Newfoundland, particularly around Port Kirwin, where he had a house. He depicted outport communities and their traditional activities, such as wood-gathering and fence-building, as well as many aspects of the inshore fishery and the natural environment.
In the 1980s, faced with change, loss of friends and family, and his own impending death, Wright made increasingly personal and powerful art, reflecting on the inexorable cycle of generation, life and death, and on people's place in nature. These themes were the basis of a important 1987 exhibition, Falling, at Memorial University's Art Gallery. They also were reflected in a controversial large-scale sculpture, Red Trench, commissioned for the Confederation Building in St. John's. Seen by some as representing female genitalia, the work was removed from view and stored for eight years. It now hangs in the atrium of Memorial University's Arts and Administration Building.
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Storm 2 1975 Lithograph, 3/9 55 x 75.8 cm
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A haemophiliac, Wright contracted HIV through a blood transfusion and died in 1988. He was survived by his wife Pat, children Perry, Krista, Tommy and Catherine, and his brother Ken.
In 1990, the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador mounted a large-scale retrospective of Don Wright's work. It travelled to eight galleries across Canada and was the first exhibition of Newfoundland art to be presented at The National Art Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
