Black Ice

A lush tribute to an iconic artist and the vibrant culture his work depicts.

David Blackwood was engaged in telling stories about Newfoundland through his epic visual narratives for most of his career. Drawing on childhood memories, dreams, superstitions, oral tradition, and the political realities of the place where he was born and raised, he created an iconography of Newfoundland as universal as it is personal, as mythic as it is rooted in reality, as timeless as it is linked to specific events.

Now, the volume that brought together these narratives — and accompanied Blackwood's 2011 exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario — is back in print. The lavishly illustrated Black Ice features over seventy reproductions of Blackwood’s Newfoundland prints, in addition to contextual essays by artists, scholars, and curators from Canada and Ireland, including Sean Cadigan, Michael Crummey, Gary Michael Dault, and Caoimhe Ní Shúilleabháin. Together, they place his work within the changing social context of twentieth-century Newfoundland.