| Walter
Bachinski was born in 1939 in Ottawa. He worked closely with
Frederick Hagan at the Ontario College of Art graduating in 1965 and
went on to complete his Master's Degree at the University of
Iowa under the direction of Mauricio Lasansky in 1967. Shortly
thereafter, he began teaching drawing and printmaking at the University
of Guelph, gaining tenure in 1970 and progressing through the ranks
to Full Professor in 1984. At that time he began reducing his
teaching, eventually leaving the University in 1994. Bachinski has travelled extensively throughout his career, at first studying the mural work of Orozco and Siquerios in Mexico and later the museums of Europe to see first hand the great works of the past. Eventually he focussed on the masterpieces( particularly French) of the late 19th and early 20th century art housed in collections in France and the United States. The very early work was primarily black and white and was concentrated in the areas of printmaking and drawing. He then began working on sculpture in the round and relief in the early seventies. In 1975 Bachinski introduced the Mother and Child theme and shortly thereafter the Artist and Model. His work became more classical in style and in 1978-79 he spent a year in France where he started to work seriously in colour with pastels and began to examine the idea of Still Life. Since 1994, Walter Bachinski has devoted himself exclusively to his art in his studio in Shanty Bay, Ontario. In 1996, with Janis Butler, he established Shanty Bay Press and divides his time evenly between working on book projects and pastels, prints and sculpture. | |