About

David MacWilliam, Dean of Emily Carr University of Art and Design, has been active in the Vancouver art community both as an artist and a teacher since 1980. Teaching painting and digital visual arts at Emily Carr since 1987, his work has been exhibited extensively in Canada and occasionally in Europe over the past 30 years. Some of these exhibitions include the Paris Biennale (1982), Vancouver Art Gallery’s Art and Artists 1939-83 (1983), and most recently in the VAG’s PAINT exhibition (2006/07).

He had one person exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1984), and the Vancouver Art Gallery (1990) and the Galleria Panorama, Barcelona (1997), the Musee Regional de Rimouski in Quebec (1998) and Winchester Galleries, Victoria (2006). He continues to develop a specific iconography of material abstraction and remains primarily concerned with the social role of painting; the relationships between forms and areas of colour; and the aspects of beauty and aesthetics that are determining qualities of life.

His recent research focuses on observable, real-time coloured light events and environments, and an exploration of very slow- shifting coloured lights in exterior spaces. I am primarily intrigued by the transitional moments of twilight, as daylight fades and artificial light takes over the illumination of an environment.