Beloved Nova Scotia artist and Atlantic realism pioneer Tom Forrestall dies at 88 – Winnipeg Free Press

HALIFAX – Tom Forrestall, the famed Nova Scotia artist known for pioneering the tradition of Atlantic realism, died Friday at the age of 88.

Forrestall’s art was widely acclaimed for sparking a renewed interest in realistic painting in the 1960s, and he was known, along with Mary and Christopher Pratt, as a pioneer of the Atlantic realism movement.

Ray Cronin, writer and art curator at the Beaverbrook Gallery of Art in Fredericton, says Forrestall was “a prolific painter,” a man who was very generous with his time and encouraged young artists.

“Tom was a very humble artist, but a very good and very dedicated artist,” Cronin said of Forrestall in a Saturday interview. He first met Forrestall in 2001 when they worked together at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

Forrestall was a lifelong painter and had been making a living from his paintings since the 1960s. While that’s a difficult feat for anyone in the art world, Cronin said it’s especially impressive for an artist in Atlantic Canada, where art buyers have an even smaller market.

“Tom was always very focused on the fact that painting is a job like any other, and it should be treated like a job,” Cronin said in an interview Saturday.

“Art at the highest level that Tom worked at is a profession, and he was very serious about it.”

Born in Middleton, N.S., in 1936, Forrestall attended Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., where he graduated in 1958. He studied under Alex Colville, the iconic Canadian painter known for his realist paintings.

Cronin said that Forrestall’s most admired painting style when he went to school was abstract painting, and that this preference was particularly influenced by the art of New York City and Paris, as well as Canadian painters Jack Bush and Alexander Luke.

But it was Colville’s focus on realistic representation that inspired Forrestall and Pratts’ pioneering of the Atlantic realist style.

“From the ’60s to the ’90s, it was the best-known form of art-making in Atlantic Canada, and that’s how the rest of the Canadian art world saw that what was coming out of Atlantic Canada was important and interesting,” Cronin said. He added that the realist works of Forrestall and his contemporaries were particularly well known because they appealed more to the general interests of the average art consumer and more Marines could appreciate them.