Toni Onley and Penticton
The South Okanagan landscape has special significance for Toni Onley. He first came to Penticton with his two daughters in 1955, after the sudden death of his wife, Mary. His parents had settled in Penticton. He worked for the Meiklejohn architectural firm as a draughtsman and designer and when he found out his application for a scholarship to attend the Art Institute of San Miguel de Allende was successful, he held an auction in the Knights of Pythias Hall in Penticton in the fall of 1957, where he sold about 250 works for an average price of $5. With $1,300 he was off to Mexico with his two daughters. The rest, as they say, is history. The Mexican sojourn was a watershed experience as far as his work was concerned and about a year later in 1958 he had his first one-man show at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The
Juice Factory,
1957, watercolour on paper
27.9 x 39.4 cm
Collection: Art Gallery of the South Okanagan, 1989.1.1
Early Penticton Watercolour Landscapes
Toni’s earliest landscapes of the Penticton area have more to do with prevailing modernist painting styles in the mid-1950's than with the place itself. In Mexico, Onley experimented with abstraction and this led to a series of very important abstract works still much admired today.
In 1963, he was awarded a Canada Council grant which allowed him to return to his artistic roots. Once a week, at the British Museum, he examined the works of the great British watercolourists of the past: John Sell Cotman, David Cox, Peter De Wint and J.W.M. Turner... Two years later, back in Vancouver, he re-discovered landscape painting, and turned to watercolour once again. He also discovered a special brush: a Chinese goat hair brush with which he could combine the abstract qualities of his previous work with the landscape tradition. He began flying his own plane in about 1967, and since that time, he has painted the landscapes of many parts of British Columbia, as well as farther afield... Alberta, Georgian Bay, Nova Scotia, the Arctic. His travels to foreign lands have all been documented to the day by a watercolour or two.
Rain Shower, Skaha Lake, 1971, watercolour on paper, 28.6 x 38.7 cm, Collection: Art Gallery of the South Okanagan, 1978.2.1
Toni has always returned to Penticton, visiting family, and his links to the city are renewed several times annually. His support of the Art Gallery of the South Okanagan goes back to its creation before 1985, and it is fitting that as it approaches its Tenth Anniversary Year, the Gallery would celebrate this association.
The Gallery has a special reason to celebrate. Last year, Toni Onley donated to our Gallery no less than 18 watercolours of landscapes of the South Okanagan, with views over Okanagan Lake, Skaha Lake, the Carmi Valley and Kaleden. These were painted during the past decade. They join others in the collection. Indeed, the Gallery is very privileged to possess a number of early works by Toni Onley, including one or two which were probably among those sold at that famous auction at the Knights of Pythias Hall.
It is also our intention in 1997 to assemble as many of the works from that auction sale, forty years after the event, and attempt a critical assessment of what exactly he had accomplished before going on to San Miguel de Allende, and track the influences that can be seen in his early work.
Munson
Mountain, Lake Okanagan, B.C., 1993
watercolour on paper
28 x 38 cm
Collection: Art Gallery of the South Okanagan, 1994.12.11
Current Criticism
Current criticism of Toni Onley's work often points to the fact that he is 'too prolific,' that 'his palette never varies,' that 'his style hasn't changed in years.' Much of this criticism is based on modernist notions that art must always be in the avant-garde in order to be deemed significant. It must be subversive towards established conventions. The art world is fickle and riddled with paradoxes: when an artist works within a style, he is said to be repeating himself; when he attempts new things, explores new subject matter, he is accused of being inconsistent. Collectors complain about prolific artists because the supply of works is constant, and this does nothing to raise the value of the work on the secondary market. Whatever an artist does, he will be criticized for it.
There are, however, a number of statements that can be made. Toni Onley settled on the landscape after a number of years of doing highly successful non-figurative work. He did so at a time when returning to the landscape was considered to be some kind of betrayal to the modernist cause. To be sure, his landscapes have always been highly formal arrangements of shape and the composition is only limited by the genre of landscape itself. While the scene is specific due the presence of recognizable topographical features, the formal arrangement removes the work from being a mere record of the scene. His watercolours are, rather, a synthesis of his innate sense of composition, his consummate knowledge and mastery of the technique of watercolour, and the spontaneity with which he approaches any landscape.
The watercolours record the experience of the landscape (as was the case in the British watercolour tradition). They bring together those elements of the landscape he has selected, and his interaction with the watercolour process itself as it emerges on the paper owes something to the Chinese masters of the brush he admires as well as the Abstract Expressionists who influenced his work in Mexico. For all the apparent ease with which they are made, Onley's watercolours have not only recorded a place, but the experience of a time and a vision, expressed though a fluid medium which time itself crystallises on the paper. They are never the same.
RHB
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