Murray Favro

Murray Favro

Murray Favro, artist (b at Huntsville, Ont 24 Dec 1940). Favro began his career painting brightly coloured works on masonite. Around 1965 he abandoned painting for other-than-art interests - guitars, machines, airplanes, experiments with film images and inventions. A Canada Council Arts Bursary in 1970 allowed him to devote himself to his art. That year he developed his first successful "projected reconstruction," in which images on a slide are projected onto their wooden, white, life-sized counterparts, giving them colour, detail and identity. He later produced modified inventions (Windmill Electric Generator, 1975-76; Perpetual Motion Machine, 1976-77), evolved inventions (Propeller Engine, 1978), and material, 3-dimensional renderings of airplanes (Sabre Jet, 55% Size, 1979-83). Favro's work deals with the nature of perception, reality and art itself, as well as with the insistent presence of the machine environment. His art has its own language of form - a vocabulary of constituent properties, a grammar of particular functions. It has a tough presence, a poetic logic and an integrity of being.