Annette Blady

Annette Blady was born in Toronto, Canada. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1980. In the following decade, partnering with Van Mil in an architectural model making company, she rose to international prominence as an interior designer. Her work included model suites for major condominium projects such as The Nieman Marcus Centre in Chicago, Harbourfront in Toronto, and The World Financial Centre in Battery Park, New York City. Blady moved on from design work in 1989 to pursue a full-time career in fine art.

Exhibiting internationally, Blady’s canvases can now be found in many prominent galleries and private collections in Canada, the United States and Europe. Her eclectic style uses textured exotic papers and fabrics, cut glass, and metallic acrylic, as mixed media collage painting. She links motifs from ancient symbolism with those of modern design and abstract expressionism.

Blady’s 3D encaustic works, incorporating paper and fabric, are unique and have sold internationally. These works informed the moulage technique co-invented for Rising from the Canvas, with Van Mil.

Al Van Mil

Alphons Van Mil was born on the Isle of Texel, in the Netherlands, to a scholarly and artistic family. For most of the last 50 years, Al Van Mil has created visual artworks using a large variety of mediums, including acrylic or oil paint on large canvases. His works range from landscapes and portraits as abstracted expressions, to eclectic hybrids as conceptually appealing ideas.

Van Mil was at first inspired by the conceptual Canadian artists couple of Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow. He consequently received mentoring from Conceptual Artist Eric Cameron while studying Fine Art at the University of Guelph. Creating art full time since he graduated, Van Mil’s work has been exhibited in private and public galleries, including the Musee Des BeauxArts in Montreal, The National Gallery of Canada, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. His earlier paintings were also inspired by the mixed visual-metaphors of the Pop artists like James Rosenquist, which drove him to develop a broad vocabulary of original styles to juxtapose. Van Mil’s eclectic conceptual approach was further influenced by the poetry of E. E. Cummings, and by the modal improvisations of BeBop Jazz artist Miles Davis. An experiential take on the architecture of Frank Gehry also influenced his later work.

Van Mil honed his techniques by painting onstage as a Performance Artist with the multi-genre improvisational arts group called Collaborations. He shared the stage with many prominent Canadian musicians, dancers and opera stars, and also co-designed sets for many performances.

Van Mil was commissioned to paint the portraits of the two MVP winners by the Toronto Blue Jays for the two years when they won their two consecutive baseball playoff titles. He also illustrated the CLA Book of the Year Award winning title, ‘The Tiny Kite of Eddy Wing’, a children’s book written by Maxine Trottier.

Commercial as well as fine art projects broadened Van Mil’s interests over the years, producing works for international clientele chiefly from Chicago to Toronto, to New York, and down the eastern seaboard to Atlanta. Partnering with Blady and others, Van Mil founded and ran an architectural technology and model-making company for 6 years called Architectural Dimensions, named one of the top three in the world by New York magazine. Blady +Van Mil’s expertise gained in 3D modelling further informed the moulage technique they co-invented for the Rising from the Canvas collaborative series.