THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY
1145 WEST GEORGIA STREET VANCOUVER 5 CANADA TELEPHONE 684-2488
January 27, 1970
Macmillan Bloedel Limited
Gentlemen:
I am writing to give whatever support I can to your serious consideration of a collaborative venture by your company with artists Michael de Courcy, Robert Arnold and Gary Lee Nova of Vancouver. I know all three artists and their work well and have on various occasions been in a position to give them conscientious and enthusiastic support: as reference for their separate applications for Canada Council grants, as an organizer or co-ordinator of contemporary exhibitions, in my contacts with other institutions elsewhere in Canada and in one or two cases abroad. They are responsible, dedicated and serious young artists, able technically and, most importantly, gifted in imagination.
But apart from wishing to recommend them personally I should like to endorse the idea of business / industry joint forces with art in some more free and creative relationship than the employment of the artist to package and advertise its products. I believe that the best artists of the present generation — who are broadly-informed, contemporary in outlook and often endowed with an intuitive sense of 'where things are at' — have much to contribute, as well as gain, in such a relationship. i know of at least one American artist — one of the most advanced on the continent— who has retained on several occasions by business corporations as a free-wheeling 'idea' person, for his fresh and creative approach to company problems. The probabilities of practical as well as imaginative innovations resulting from such use of the artist I should think are very good and I sincerely believe that the consideration of such a project as proposed by Michael de Courcy and his colleagues would be in the enlightened self – interest of your company, as well as providing an intelligent and enterprising example for other Canadian companies to emulate.
Yours sincerely,
(signed)
(Mrs) Doris Shadbolt,
Senior Curator.
Mr. Terry J. McDowell;
Advertising Manager
MacMillan Bloedel Limited
1075 West Georgia
Vancouver
B.C.
DS : cg