Hauling Job Sturge's House by David Blackwood. (Art Gallery of Ontario)

In a new exhibition Black Ice, Newfoundland artist David Blackwood chronicles the unflinching story of a vanished life in his home province, from a time when men and women struggled to survive against hostile elements.

Opening at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto on Saturday, the first retrospective of Blackwood's work showcases more than 70 prints and etchings that tap into the storytelling traditions the artist first learned as a child.

Now 69, he lives mainly in Port Hope, Ont., but maintains a studio in Wesleyville, N.L., the town where he was born and spends every summer.

"I never leave Newfoundland without having some kind of epiphany," he said in an interview with CBC News. His inspiration might be a story, the sight of the Newfoundland coast or even a small object, such as a set of mittens or an old lantern, that resonates with memory.

Blackwood is known for his dark etchings such as Fire Down on the Labrador, which centres on a few men in a small lifeboat, forced to leave their ship because of a fire on board. The ice looms around them and beneath them is an imagined horror conjured by the artist: a whale that could easily overturn the ship. This mix of dark fantasy and cold reality has run through his work since the early 1960s.

Blackwood says he was brought up — both in Wesleyville and in the outport on Bragg's Island — with a storytelling tradition that still underlies his images of sealers and ships, of mummers and waiting widows.

"There was no television. Radio was part of life, but it was only turned on at 8 o'clock at night for the weather report and messages to and fro from people at sea to their families," he recalled.

"In the evenings when people visited back and forth there was a communal storytelling, especially by the older people who had gone through various disasters and survived. People who had gone through the First World War and returned. There was a tremendous number of storytellers."

Seafaring stories

'That world on the ice ... is a metaphor for the whole world, where from the time of the last Ice Age to the present, mankind is out there literally all alone, trying to survive' —Katharine Lochnan, curator

The retrospective includes images that are memories of people Blackwood has known, their lives shaped by hard work and grief. Others are seafaring stories, such as the wreck of the Imogene in 1945. The craft was a sealing vessel in the winter months and a passenger ship between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in summer — but it wasn't rough weather that did her in. Several prints tell the story of the Imogene and her ailing captain.

"The captain was a drinker," Blackwood said. "He would start out in the morning. By noon hour, he was flattened and he'd lie down and have a nap. And the ship was under the command of the first mate, who ran it aground in the bright sun on a sandbank in the Strait of Canso [in Nova Scotia]."

Also darkly themed is The Lost Party, the series that brought him to the attention of the National Gallery of Canada and was included in its 1964 group exhibition, though Blackwood was still a student at Toronto's Ontario College of Art.

The Lost Party shows a group of sealers dropped off on the ice in 1914, but never retrieved due to confusion between two ship captains. More than 200 men froze to death, clinging to one another. Blackwood's images capture the hallucinations of their final hours.

Katharine Lochnan, the AGO curator who has assembled the retrospective, chose to title the show Black Ice because of the dark personal journey Blackwood relives in the creation of each work.

"That world on the ice — which, in David's work, is the whole world — is a metaphor for the whole world, where from the time of the last Ice Age to the present, mankind is out there literally all alone, trying to survive, not knowing at what moment a crack might appear that would lead him to fall through," Lochnan said.

Though his images are deeply rooted in Newfoundland outport life, she believes they carry a "vital message of surviving with few resources" that is universal.

"There is an evolution in David's work. I can see the confidence growing. I can see the sureness with which he wields his etching needle, but I'm not in any way fixated on his technique because [it] was developed to support his message and that is why the message is so intense," she said.

Wrong idea about Nfld., says Smallwood

That message has not always been well-received. Blackwood remembers a conversation with Joey Smallwood, in which the former premier disparaged his artistic vision.

"He said, ' You know, your work is awfully dark and it's giving the wrong idea about this place,'" Blackwood recalled.

He also resisted the push to create abstract and conceptual work that was the fashion in the 1950s and 1960s, which separated him from the art mainstream.

"He remained an outsider artist pursuing a topic in a medium that was considered inferior and of regional significance only," Lochnan said.

That may be why it's taken so long to have a major Canadian institution stage a retrospective, despite the fact that Blackwood's works are held in collections across the country.

Inspirational objects on show

The AGO has mounted Black Ice mainly with works drawn from its own collection, which includes more than 200 pieces the artist donated to the institution.

The prints and etchings featured in Black Ice are accompanied by sketches and many of the individual objects that inspired him — including a bell and flag from the Imogene and a sealers gaff.

There is also a low, wooden door with faded paint that Blackwood has worked into paintings in dozens of ways and hails from an incident when he was 17.

"There was a very eccentric family — three brothers — extraordinary people from a medieval world. None of their buildings were painted — the house, the outbuildings— and one of those brothers decided he was going to paint the door green. Then it became red, then white, black, silver. He was having fun expressing himself and it started to attract attention and people started to joke about this door and make fun of it and he stopped. Then we had the experience of watching all those layers of paint disintegrate," the artist recalled of the creative, but otherwise forgotten man.

Along with the undeniable beauty, a dignity underlies Blackwood's portraits of a resilient people living in the face of a harsh life. He's worried that these character traits are disappearing as the Newfoundland outport way of life fades. Many of these remote coastal communities were dismantled following Newfoundland's decision to join Canada in 1949, when he himself was just eight.

"There's tremendous disruption. A lot of the young people have no idea…of what their history is," Blackwood said.