In his 50 years at the easel, esteemed Winnipeg artist Ivan Eyre had always been content to let his paintings speak for themselves.

But he recently had a change of mind. Or at least those close to him helped him change his mind.

The result is a massive new coffee-table book, Ivan on Eyre: The Paintings, more than 500 pages long.

In it, Eyre comments directly on individual paintings, some 233 of them reproduced in full colour plates on the right-hand pages, with small essays on each painting printed at left.

"Most of the talk is technical," says Eyre, who will turn 70 in April. "I think other painters and students will be most interested in knowing about how I went about doing each work."

The book, priced at a hefty $88 per copy, is being given a public launch at 8 tonight at McNally Robinson Booksellers in the Grant Park mall.

On Feb. 23 at 7 p.m., the book will receive a second launch at the Assiniboine Park's Pavilion Gallery, which houses a permanent collection of Eyre's paintings and drawings.

"I believe Ivan was thinking in terms of his legacy," says the gallery's curator, Stephanie Middagh. "He has lived his entire career without being really public. That's why the book is so revealing."

Eyre says he was persuaded to undertake the project by his wife, Brenda, and his longtime agent, David Loch,

who felt it was time he break his silence over his own paintings.

"It felt like a family reunion in a way," says Eyre, whose figurative and landscape work defies comparison (and often description).

"As I looked over the photographs, it called up some of the feelings I had when I made the paintings and my family was young."

The book is not expected to be a money maker, at least not in the short term. The Pavilion Gallery, which has underwritten much of the cost of printing the 2,500 copies, sees the book as an archival and promotional tool.

"No living artist has drawn better, more imaginatively or in as focused a way as has Eyre in Canadian art," says former Free Press visual arts critic Amy Karlinsky, who is curating a major Eyre retrospective opening May 4 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

"The art historian Dennis Reid suggested in 1988 that Eyre is likely to eclipse (L.L.) FitzGerald in terms of importance in Manitoba. He already has."

Eyre, who taught art at the University of Manitoba until his retirement in 1993, says he resisted temptation to "pronounce on visual art issues" in the book.

"A lot of things that get promoted as significant really aren't worthy," he says.

He points to American artist Christo's massive public art installation, The Gates, in New York City.

"Those standards are very plain, and conceptually didn't take very much to come up with," he says.

"They're a form of visual pollution."

By Morley Walker
The Winnipeg Free Press
Entertainment, Wednesday, February 16, 2005, p. c6