Ken Danby

Ken Danby, DFA (Hon.) (6 March 1940 – 23 September 2007) was a Canadian painter known for highly realistic paintings that study everyday life. Danby encouraged Canadians to identify with their natural and cultural heritage. His portraits, and realistic interpretations of farm and rural life, and sport, had a strong and positive effect on Canadian art He began drawing and painting at age ten and after graduating from Sault Collegiate Institute in 1958, enrolled at the Ontario College of Art, where he studied under Jock Macdonald. After two years, he quit school to experiment on his own, while working a TV set designer and as a commercial artist for the Toronto Telegram. He was a prolific serigrapher and lithographer In 1963, his first egg-tempera, Fur and Bricks, won the Jessie Dow Prize at the Spring Exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. At his first solo exhibition in 1964, all paintings were sold.

In 1975, Danby was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and, in 1976, was the first recipient of the National Sport and Recreation Centre's R. Tait McKenzie Chair for Sport. By this time he had conquered his feeling that sports was not a subject for a serious artist. He was also commissioned by the National Hockey League to paint portraits of players such as Gordie Howe, Tim Horton and Wayne Gretzky, A statue replicating the painting now stands in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

In 1983, Danby painted a number of watercolours to support Canada One, Canada's entry in the America's Cup, for which he spent a summer in Newport, Rhode Island, sailing on the Canada One. He then did a series of paintings of Canadian athletes at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. He designed a mechanized easel to orientate his painting surface towards the changing conditions of natural light,

Honors Danby's awards include the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal (1977), the 125th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada Medal (1992), an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Laurentian University (1997), the Order of Ontario (2001), the Order of Canada (2001), and the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (2002). He also served on the boards of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the National Gallery of Canada. In 2016, the Art Gallery of Hamilton organized a retrospective of Danby's work, entitled Beyond the Crease. That year, the Guelph Civic Museum presented Ken Danby: Five Decades, an exhibition which included his Gretzky portrait, The Great Farewell.

Personal life and death Many of Danby's early works were of scenes set on St. Joseph Island. It was there that Danby met his first wife, Judy Harcourt. The couple married in 1965. They had three sons, including actor Noah Danby, and divorced in 1984.

In 1985, Danby married Gillian Rumble, his muse and model.

On 23 September 2007, while on a canoe trip in Algonquin Park near North Tea Lake, Danby died of a heart attack, age 67.