Pouch Cove August #2, 2001

Blaise is currently working and living in Rockport, Ontario. Her paintings explore and manipulate many color principles. Her art is within the Modernist tradition, DeLong welcomes the infusion of place and sentiment into her abstract matrix; she embraces a revitalizing mysticism and has more in common with European abstractionists, like Itten and Kandinsky.

DeLong’s paintings are complex and beautifully balanced color harmonies. The edges of her forms play an important role in defining the spatial feeling. The use of oils over acrylic brings luster to the colors. She balances control and chaos in her method, allowing the paint to drip in her oil.

Blaise DeLong was born in Niagara Falls Ontario. DeLong studied at the New School of Art in Toronto during it’s heyday in the late 1960’s with the leading artists of the period including the “Isaacs Gang”, Gordon Rayner, Dennis Burton and in particular Robert Markle. Jack Bush also offered enthusiastic encouragement to the young artist.

DeLong travelled extensively with her late husband, the painter David Bolduc, and set up studios in Paris, Essaouira, Zancudo and Biscay Bay NL as well as in Montreal and Toronto. Her work can be found in private and public collections in Toronto, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Los Angeles, New York, Calgary and Vancouver.

Blaise DeLong’s work has been critically described as “both thoughtful and intuitively sensuous. Her paintings have a sense of inevitability as if they had grown spontaneously from a long meditation.”

In the artist’s words, “I like to build up surfaces, to make a painting where planes of colours meet and animate each other and where evidence of previous decisions remains. Above all, my work is a meditation, an effort to distill experience.”