Name Rosemary Kilbourn | Books Out of the Wood | |
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Education Slade School of Fine Art, OCAD University | ||
Printmaker Rosemary Kilbourn (born April 3, 1931, Toronto, Canada)
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Kilbourn graduated from Toronto's Ontario College of Art in 1953, then studied wood engraving in London, England. Upon returning to Ontario, she was commissioned to paint a mural for the new dining hall at University of Western Ontario. Along with commissioned portraits, her early works included illustrating, with wood engravings, two books by brother William Kilbourn, The Firebrand (1956); The Elements Combined (1960) and Farley Mowat's, The Desperate People (1959). In addition to her book size wood engravings, Kilbourn used larger than normal wood blocks to engrave both landscape and figure compositions for individual prints (1960s to 1980s). In the late Sixties Kilbourn began to create stained glass commissions for churches, including windows for St. Thomas's Anglican Church, Toronto where she illustrated one of T.S. Eliot's poems from the Four Quartets. Other windows include those in St. Bartholomew's Anglican Church in Ottawa.; St. Timothy's Anglican Church, Toronto; St. Michael and All Angels Anglican Church, Toronto; St. James' Cathedral Church, Toronto and Trinity Anglican Church, Ottawa, among others.
Kilbourn has lived and worked in an old schoolhouse in the Albion Hills since 1957, and has taught at the Artists' Workshop in Toronto, Central Technical High School, and McMaster University . In 1976 she illustrated Florence Wyles' collection of poems Shadow of the Year published by Aliquando Press. Recently, with Anne Corkett, she selected poems by Richard Outram to accompany illustrations by Thoreau MacDonald, a work commissioned by the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto: South of North: Images of Canada by Richard Outram with drawings by Thoreau MacDonald (2007). In 2012 The Porcupine's Quill published Out of the Wood, a collection of eighty reproductions of wood engravings by Kilbourn, done over a period of fifty years, accompanied by short, elegiac fragments of text that elucidate her unique and influential aesthetic. Some of the reproductions fold out into a double spread; 'Out of the Wood' also includes a full size reproduction of The Obedience of Noah, which gives an example of the large scale of some of Kilbourn's work.
In 1977 she was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and to England's Society of Wood Engravers in 2001. She also figures in Havergal College's Hall of Distinction from 2004.