BIOGRAPHY

Born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1940, Ernest Garthwaite lived his boyhood in Windsor, Ontario. The oldest of four siblings, he moved to rural Wisconsin to live with his aunt after his parents died when he was a freshman in high school. The landscape of these same rolling hills, creek beds and hayfields where his father grew up became a healing ground for Garthwaite where he felt a strong emotional connection with the land during his teenage years.

After one term of study of philosophy and the classics at Holy Cross Seminary in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, he attended Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in painting. The old house of studios that comprised the art department was accessible to him at all times of day and night and became an experiential immersion for his dedicated painting time....a second home where he spent many long hours mastering his craft.

His early art training had varied dimensions with his experience beginning in a realistic direction. He received a scholarship for graduate studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he was awarded a Master of Arts degree in painting and sculpture.

For 42 years, from 1962 to 2004, Garthwaite takes great pride in his distinguished university teaching career in painting, drawing, film, design, sculpture and art history, as well as being a mentor and interlocutor for hundreds of graduating art students. He was an instructor at Loras College for three years after graduate school. In 1965 he moved to New York and taught for three years at the College of New Rochelle. Having initiated the Fine Arts Department at York College, City University of New York in 1968 as a professor until 2004, he is now Emeritus Professor of Fine Arts at York, CUNY.

While the past 48 years have seen Garthwaite’s landscape analysis move from realism through non-objective painting, his current work uniquely integrates the many dimensions of his artistic development. Particularly he feels there is a close tie between his paintings and his films. The cinematic movement of light and image he observed within his films inspired his quest to create a similar illusion of implied movement on his painted surfaces.

Ernest Garthwaite lives with his wife Candace and son Field in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. His two older daughters and three grandchildren live in Florida and Georgia.