Gary Olson

A veteran printmaking instructor at Alberta College of Art and Design for close to 40 years, Gary Olson has spent a large portion of his practice depicting animals and animal subject matter. He is best known for his large-scale unsentimental portraits of cows. Starting in the 1970’s, he used cows to tackle formal issues in contemporary art including illusion, magnification, and foreshortening. His approach to the subject is not personal, but straight ahead and blunt, and at times, confrontational.

In the mid 1980’s, Olson expanded his subject matter to include wild animals from the nearby Rockies, exploring life in the wide-open landscapes surrounding his home in Cochrane, Alberta. Olson’s realist images of animals have often been used to comment on the skewed relationship between animals and society, and the alienation between humans and the natural world.

Always the educator, Olson’s self-portraits done in graphite were a way to convey difficult theoretical art concepts to students in a very literal way. These amusing works feature a close-up of his face, pressed against what appears to be a sheet of glass, but is in fact the flat picture plane. At the same time, Olson takes the opportunity to poke fun at the theory of art, capturing something of his own irreverent desire to continuously push the envelope.