Before the Canadian Government ended the jet interceptor project Urquhart, then a young artist, was consumed by a wish to design a hood ornament for the new fighter aircraft. He was hard to console when he first learned that the plane would not have a hood and his melancholy deepened when the entire project was stopped.

Hypnosis has brought Urquhart to an new understanding that the Arrow calamity drove him from the medium of titanium alloys and back into the embrace of your more basic wood.

Tony Urquhart is a painter, a sculptor and draughtsman. In the early sixties Urquhart was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy, the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour and the Canadian Society of Graphic Arts. He later resigned from these organizations to found CAR (Canadian Artists Representation) with Jack Chambers and Kim Ondaatje. He has taught in the art departments of McMaster, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Waterloo. `Worlds Apart: The Symbolic Landscapes of Tony Urquhart`, a major retrospective curated by Joan Vastokas toured Canada in 1988-89.

Tony has been involved in the illustration of works by his wife, the writer Jane Urquhart, as well as those of Michael Ondaatje, Matt Cohen, Louis Dudek, and Rohinton Mistry. Named to the Order of Canada in in 1995, Tony Urquhart was named to the Order of Canada in 1995, he divides his time between Stratford, Ontario and Ireland.

Tony Urquhart's profile page

Michael Phillips was born in Saskatoon when Cokes were a nickel. He received all his formal education there and articled with a law firm before moving to Ottawa to join the Foreign Service. During his diplomatic career he served in Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Dublin, London, Stockholm and New York. He was Canadian Ambassador to Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia during the period 1991 to 1995. He was Ambassador to Ireland from 1996 to 1998 and Consul General in New York from 1998 to 2002. In Ottawa he served twice as an Assistant Deputy Minister responsible for US relations. Early on Michael's artistic life was confined to piano lessons and executing wall drawings using indelible crayons. Later, however, he was much involved in cultural diplomacy, particularly as Minister for Public Affairs in London and as Consul General in New York. Michael retired from the Foreign Service in 2002, and now lives with his wife, Oonagh, in Ireland where she was born.

Michael Phillips' profile page

• Short-listed, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year
• Runner-up, Alcuin Award for Excellence in Book Design

'The commentaries, or rightly so, ''captions'', are as imaginative, absurd, humourous and surreal as some of the drawings, prints and sculptures that grace the pages of this finely produced volume.

'My initial observations evoked images of pedestalled personal altars, cosmological or climatological devices, strange reliquaries, bizarre, surreal -- — la Remedios Varo -- objects with organic links between the terrestrial and the cosmological space-time continuum ... So how refreshing to come across Phillips's courageous captions such as this one on page 52:

''A box inspired by the Spanish puppeteer Senor Sergiao Wenches, a frequent guest on the Ed Sullivan Show. Any resemblance of the head-like object within the box to a former Prime Minister of Canada, or to Ed Sullivan himself, is probably a coincidence''.'

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