Accession 87-94 - Claude Breeze

Claude Breeze, sometimes also known as cHerbert, was born in Nelson, British Columbia in 1938. He received early education and art training in Saskatoon studying under Ernest Lindner. He attended the School of Art at Regina College and graduated in 1958, receiving instruction from Roy Kiyooka, Ronald Bloore, Art McKay and Ken Lochhead. In 1959 he attended the Vancouver School of Art.

In 1967 Claude Breeze was employed as a Sessional Instructor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby and then at the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts in Banff, Alberta. Moving to Ontario he worked as the Artist-in-Residence from 1972 to 1975 at the University of Western Ontario and then moved back to Alberta to be a Sessional Visiting Instructor at the University of Calgary in 1975. Moving back to Toronto in the following year he became an Associate Professor at York University. In 1988 he was a Sessional Visiting Professor at the Emily Carr School of Art in Vancouver.

Breeze held his first one-man show in 1965, “Lovers in a Landscape” at the New Design Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia. Since then he has had many one-man exhibitions and has participated in group shows in Canada, the United States, England, France, Scotland and China. Breeze was an early pioneer in the use of digital technology in studio art making. His work is held in many private, corporate and public collections. His art deals mainly with social and political issues and is manipulated as a combination of expressionist figure to non-representational motifs.

Claude Breeze was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1974 and awarded the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal in 1978, he is a painter with a national reputation as well as Professor Emeritus at York University