Additional Images

Provenance:

Private collection, Stittsville, ON

Note:

Blackwood’s hometown of Wesleyville was once an important outpost for fishing and sealing enterprises. Poor farming conditions in Newfoundland meant that residents relied on the ocean’s bounty for survival, travelling to the rich northern waters off the Labrador coast in the brief summer months. Wesleyville was close to these abundant fishing grounds, and the local geography played host to large schooners and custom-built facilities designed to cure the Labrador catch. The majority of the men in the community would depart annually for Labrador, returning with a ship full of fish. Once they had returned, the local women and children would clean and dry the fish for export.

Blackwood’s grandfather and father were both noted ship’s captains. The artist recalls: “my father started going to the Labrador when he was only ten. By the time he was seventeen, he took charge of a schooner under the watchful eye of a relative who was all of forty! But no problems developed, and he carried on. My father had a tremendous fear of the ocean–which is another way of saying he had tremendous respect for it.”

In Outward Bound for the Labrador, the artist deliberately includes the Arctic icefields, noting that the captains aboard these vessels “were navigating through all that [ice], against the wind and tides, so there is no doubt that they were to become great ice navigators. Admiral Perry depended on those same men to take them to the South Pole and the North Pole.”

Gary Michael Dault, “An Interview with David Blackwood.” Black Ice: David Blackwood Prints of Newfoundland, ed. Katharine Lochnan. (Vancouver: Art Gallery of Ontario, Douglas & McIntyre, 2011), 34-36.