Returning the Favour: Vision for Vision

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

This is a relatively short but breathtakingly powerful presentation of
Forrestall’s images over the last quarter-century. In three sections,
the volume covers paintings, lithographs, notebooks, and a score of
photographs that range over 30 years of the artist’s life.

Although images predominate, a seven-page introduction by Nick Webb, a
professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, provides an
excellent aesthetic and philosophic background. Webb notes that the
title acknowledges both the gift of the natural world and the artistic
process of selection, synthesis, and interpretation.

Forrestall’s trademark is the medium of egg tempera, a slow studio
process of layering that produces a surface that hardens over time. It
provides a perfect medium for the artist’s unique vision—one that
synthesizes reflection into an eerie, humorous, and deeply symbolic
presentation of another world within the natural one.

The Notebooks section, subtitled “The Freedom to Fail,” affords a
look into the artist’s private world and method of working. Here
Forrestall feels free to “cut loose” with wild dreams in pursuit of
clear vision: “drawing is above all the end of the beginning.”

Returning the Favour attests to a significant body of work and to the
development and achievement of a major artist.