CARR, DON
Don Carr is a Canadian visual artist located in Toronto who has been professionally active since the early 1970s. He is a graduate of the Ontario Collage of Art and Design 1966, the University of Guelph BA and Studio Arts 1968, and the University of CHicago MFA Majoring in Printmaking 1970. He Joined the Studio Faculty of McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario in 1971 where he taught drawing and Printmaking. He Retired in 2006.
He has been featured in Art Exhibitions in Canada, USA, Japan, and Europe. Over the years, his exhibitions have been reviewed in the GLobe and MAil, Toronto Star, Hamilton Spectator, Vernon Star BC and La Nazione ( a national Newspaper in Italy).
He began his professional career as a print maker but over the years has expanded his art production into various media, including mixed media paintings and drawings, photography, photo-montage, and holography.
His focus on historical myths and their imagery is a longstanding source for his art. As a young art student, he spent many hours drawing from the historical art and artifacts found in the numerous cultures in the collections of the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum).In the early 1990s he began making yearly visits to Italy (his partner is of Italian heritage) and still divides his time between keeping a studio in Toronto and Umbria, Italy.
As a result of being in Italy, a series of ongoing drawings emerged called "Arco Organico" and a mixed media exhibit, "Sites of Civilization". The influence of historical artifacts and myths are still an influence in his art production. See "Mini Arco Organico" (Threshholds) .
Don Carr ponders the position of humanity as the architect of the world. He directs his art to what is now called the Anthropocene Epoch and creates a revealing view that allows us fewer self-delusions about our permanency. He is a something of a time traveler, (reaching into the past) with his feet firmly planted in the here and now. He challenges our stubborn insistence in defining ourselves solely in the present, while we obsessively project forward into the future. For him the concept of an entangled continuum of life is essential. His art combines past with present, suggesting an indivisible link between them and indeed the future.
Although Don Carr’s art has evolved over the years it is essentially eclectic. It verges on the borderline between the popular arts of posters, illustrations, and graphic art and design with classical and historical art. Don Carr calls himself a “symbolic imagist”, rejecting a surrealist label as inaccurate. Surrealism essentially stays with the irrational stream of consciousness. Whereas Carr starts from these inner realms, but creates a very conscious precise art, which is imaginary, yet subtly believable.
(doncarr.ca, 2025)