signed, titled, dated 1995 and numbered 13/75 in the lower margin
35.5 × 23.5 in (90.2 × 59.7 cm) (plate size)
(including Buyer's Premium)
Gallery One, Toronto
Private Collection, Ontario
Katharine Lochnan, Black Ice: David Blackwood Prints of Newfoundland, Toronto, 2011, unpaginated, a similar work illustrated plate 60
In Wesleyville Fleet in the Labrador Sea, David Blackwood renders the North Atlantic as both a physical and mythic space, where human enterprise appears fragile against the immensity of nature. The dramatic composition—dominated by the looming, shadowed body of a whale beneath a scattering of schooners—collapses multiple perspectives into a single, visionary image. Light filters through the water in striated beams, a hallmark of Blackwood’s technical mastery, while the restricted palette of blacks, greys, and cold blues evokes a landscape shaped by memory, oral tradition, and lived experience. The fleet itself, dwarfed by both sea and creature, underscores the precariousness of Newfoundland’s fishing culture, a recurring subject rooted in the artist’s upbringing in the community of Wesleyville.
Blackwood’s etchings function as narrative vessels, merging autobiography with collective history to produce images that are at once documentary and dreamlike. Here, the whale assumes an almost supernatural presence, embodying what critics have identified as the mythic dimension of his work—an expression of powerful forces that shape both environment and identity. The scene resists straightforward realism; instead, it operates as a visual legend, where memory, danger, and survival converge. Blackwood’s Wesleyville Fleet in the Labrador Sea exemplifies the artist’s lifelong devotion to preserving a disappearing maritime world, transforming the specific histories of the Labrador fishery into lasting symbols of human endurance within an unforgiving, elemental landscape.
