Draft:Barry Oretsky
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Barry Oretsky | |
|---|---|
| Born | Barry Bernard Oretsky October 9, 1946 |
| Education | Central Technical School, Toronto Saint Martin's School of Art, London |
| Known for | Painting |
| Notable work | A Toll for William Blake (1989); The Wish (2025) |
| Movement | Realism |
| Elected | Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (2004) |
Barry Bernard Oretsky (born October 9, 1946) is a Canadian realist painter. Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, and based for most of his career in Toronto, he is known for meticulously detailed acrylic paintings inspired by his original photography. The critic Donald Kuspit has characterized him as a "New Old Master".[1] In 2004 he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.[1][2]
Early life and education
[edit]Oretsky was born in Owen Sound, Ontario, on October 9, 1946, to Frida and Abraham Oretsky into an Ashkenazi Jewish family connected to the fur trade; the family moved to downtown Toronto when he was three years old.[1][3] He has recalled childhood visits to a local public library, where paintings by the Canadian artist Tom Thomson made an early impression.[1] He attended an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva, where visual art was forbidden, and decided at the age of thirteen to become an artist - a path that required transferring to Central Technical School, a public high school in Toronto with an Art program. According to Fine Art Connoisseur, a rabbinical court permitted the move on the condition that he place first in his class each year, which he did.[1]
At Central Technical School, one of Oretsky’s teachers was the painter Doris McCarthy, who gave him a copy of Irving Stone's 1961 novel The Agony and the Ecstasy.[1][2] He graduated with a scholarship to study painting at Saint Martin's School of Art in London in 1965-66, where he was accepted directly into the post-graduate program.[1][4] He later earned a teacher's certificate through the Ontario College of Education and a visual arts specialist certificate from York University in 1982.[4]
Travels and early career
[edit]Following the catastrophic 1966 flood of Florence, Oretsky was among the international volunteers, the so-called "Mud Angels", who helped salvage and restore artworks, in his case at the Uffizi Gallery.[1] He subsequently traveled in North Africa and Europe before living on the Israeli kibbutz Ma'ayan Baruch.[1] He returned to Toronto in 1970, qualified as a teacher, and began teaching art in secondary schools.[1]
In 1973, Oretsky and his family returned to Israel and this time settled near Tel Aviv, where he taught at the University of Haifa. It was during this period that he abandoned abstract painting in favour of realism, first taking his own young children as subjects.[1] At this time, he also taught private art lessons, and among his students was the painter Naftali Golomb.[5] Oretsky later returned to Toronto and worked for many years as the head of the art department at Thornhill Secondary School.[1] For more than two decades, he supplemented his income by producing pastel portraits of visitors to the Canadian National Exhibition, reportedly completing as many as 1,000 per year.[1]
Transition to full-time painting
[edit]Oretsky has described a 1982 visit to an exhibition of Orientalist painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as a turning point, prompting him to work from his own photographs so that the source imagery would be his own.[1] By 1987 he had begun painting full-time.[1] He is represented by Rehs Contemporary in New York City and Plus One Gallery in London.[1][6]
Style and technique
[edit]Although Oretsky photographs his subjects and paints from the results, he has resisted the label "photorealist", distinguishing his aims from work intended primarily to imitate a photograph and preferring the term "high realism".[1][7] He works exclusively in acrylic on canvas, spending many months and up to two years on a single piece and painting up to ten hours a day; his later compositions have grown in scale.[1] Working in many successive layers of acrylic with gloss medium between glazes, he uses traditional glazing techniques to achieve the depth and luminosity associated with oil painting.[1][8] His work and technique are featured in Rheni Tauchid's The New Acrylics (2005).[8] Oretsky organizes much of his output into thematic series he calls "collections", and frequently works on commission, asking patrons to select from a set of his images.[1] Reflections in glass, a recurring motif, entered his work after a 1991 year-long stay in the south of France.[1] He has cited Edward Hopper as an influence.[1]
In a 2011 essay, the critic Donald Kuspit called Oretsky a "New Old Master". Kuspit argued that Oretsky commands Old Master skills rare among contemporary artists, and that he uses them not merely to copy appearances but to refresh them, so that they seem more real than reality. He also read Oretsky's solitary figures and still-life objects as implicit self-portraits, expressing the loneliness of the artist at work.[1]
Recognition
[edit]Oretsky was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004.[1] In 2005 was mentioned in Rheni Tauchid's book The New Acrylics as an exemplar of classical painting techniques using acrylic. In 2025, Oretsky was recognized in the Fine Art Connoisseur magazine as a "New Old Master".
Notable works
[edit]Selected exhibitions
[edit]- City Hall and Carling O'Keefe, Toronto, 1964-67 (group)[4]
- Expo 67, portrait artist, 1967[4]
- Canadian Biennial, Winnipeg, 1967[4]
- Pollock Gallery, Toronto (solo), 1968[4]
- Beth Tikva Synagogue, Toronto, 1968[4]
- Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv (solo), 1970[4]
- Pollock Gallery, Toronto (group), 1972[4]
- Gallery Moos, Toronto, 1983[4]
- Beth Tzedec Museum, Toronto, 1986[4]
- Gallery Bau-Xi, Toronto, 1986–87[4]
- Vorpal Gallery, New York, 1987[4]
- Schillay & Rehs Gallery, New York, 1989[4]
- Rehs Galleries, New York (group), 1991[4]
- Odon Wagner Gallery, Toronto, 1992[4]
- Odon Wagner Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona, 1992[4]
- Drabinsky Gallery, Toronto (solo), 1992[4]
- Rehs Galleries, New York, 1993[4]
- James M. Haney Gallery, Amarillo, Texas, 1993[4]
- Galerie Michael, Beverly Hills, California, 1993[4]
- Drabinsky/Friedland Gallery, Toronto (group), 1994[4]
- Drabinsky/Friedland Gallery, Toronto (solo), 1995[4]
- Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, 1996[4]
- Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver, 1997[4]
- Exactitude III, Plus One Gallery, London (group), 2006[6]
- Chelsea Flower Show floral exhibition, Plus One Gallery, London (group), 2015[6]
- Battersea Reach opening exhibition, Plus One Gallery, London (group), 2016[6]
- Winter Show, Plus One Gallery, London (group), 2017[6]
Publications
[edit]- Barry Oretsky's Reality Principle (2012), a self-published monograph built around an essay by Donald Kuspit.[1]
References
[edit]- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 Trippi, Peter (November–December 2025). "Barry Oretsky: New Old Master". Fine Art Connoisseur. pp. 64–67.
- 1 2 Harris, Michael (Summer 2013). "Painter Barry Oretsky". NUVO. Retrieved June 1, 2026.
- ↑ "Ming & Silk – Barry Oretsky". Rehs Contemporary. Retrieved June 1, 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 "Barry Oretsky". ArtCloud. Retrieved June 1, 2026.
- ↑ "Naftali Golomb". Information Center for Israeli Art, Israel Museum. Retrieved June 7, 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 5 "Barry Oretsky". Plus One Gallery. Retrieved June 6, 2026.
- ↑ "The Barry Oretsky Principle". NUVO. Retrieved June 1, 2026.
- 1 2 Tauchid, Rheni (2005). The New Acrylics: Complete Guide to the New Generation of Acrylic Paints. New York: Watson-Guptill. p. 116.
External links
[edit]- Barry Oretsky Official Website
- Barry Oretsky at Rehs Contemporary
- Barry Oretsky at Plus One Gallery
Category:1946 births Category:Living people Category:Canadian male painters Category:Canadian contemporary artists Category:Jewish Canadian artists Category:Artists from Ontario Category:People from Owen Sound Category:Members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Category:Alumni of Saint Martin's School of Art Category:Academic staff of the University of Haifa Category:Canadian expatriates in Israel Category:20th-century Canadian painters Category:21st-century Canadian painters