Collaborators
Career artists Annette Blady and Al Van Mil are married and have been creating art for 40 years in Toronto, Canada. Their loyal clients across America and Europe include public, corporate and individual patrons who have collected many of their works.
Rising from the Canvas was their first collaboration on an entire series of artworks – a year-long project completed during Covid-19 isolation. Forty works, celebrating 40 years as collaborators in life and in art.
The success of this has inspired both artists to pursue their artwork further from such an experiential and playful point of view.
“Crisis and change within a society are deeply linked to personal human connection.
As natural collaborators, we explore that truth in our process and our art.”
– Annette Blady + Al Van Mil
CLICK this picture below to view a 28 minute interview of Blady + Van Mil
Blady & Van Mil are represented by The Denison, The Petroff, and Arta Galleries in Toronto Canada.
Annette Blady
Annette Blady will be teaching an art class called Mosaics at Loyalist College Bellville July 7—11 2025 loyalistcollege.com/art phone 613-332-1743 toll free 1877-309-0317 ext0
BIO:
Annette Blady was born in Toronto, Canada. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1980. In the following decade, partnering with Van Mil in an architectural model making company, she rose to international prominence as an interior designer. Her work included model suites for major condominium projects such as The Nieman Marcus Centre in Chicago, Harbourfront in Toronto, and The World Financial Centre in Battery Park, New York City. Blady moved on from design work in 1989 to pursue a full-time career in fine art.
Exhibiting internationally, Blady’s canvases can now be found in many prominent galleries and private collections in Canada, the United States and Europe. Her eclectic style uses textured exotic papers and fabrics, cut glass, and metallic acrylic, as mixed media collage painting. She links motifs from ancient symbolism with those of modern design and abstract expressionism.
Blady’s 3D encaustic works, incorporating paper and fabric, are unique and have sold internationally. These works informed the moulage technique co-invented for Rising from the Canvas, 2020.
Al Van Mil
Passionate Paint
Al Van Mil will be conducting an open studio for intermediate/advanced artists called Passionate Paint at Loyalist College Bellville July 7—11 2025
loyalistcollege.com/art 613-332-1743 toll free 1877-309-0317 ext0
Artist’s Statement: 2025
PEACES OF MINDS
“The Artistic truth? Your self, adopting a role as your character or image. Art is an evolving language of ways for us to be ourselves. As a culture we are all artistic role players as believers of some sort. However, culture is not necessarily some epic goal like a plot. Culture is a smorgasbord of roles created as collectable beliefs by artists. In the creation of each role, the artist must believe in that particular way of thinking unconditionally, even ecstatically, in order to make it believable enough to believe in. Only human authenticity will embrace life’s ambiguities and transform life’s heartbeats creatively and authentically enough to be adopted as believable truth. Beliefs resolve ambiguities over and over again, one artwork at a time, as roles that an artist has initially allowed themself to believe in, and shared. Art’s surcharge for each shared authenticity is vulnerability. Rick Rubin says this more succinctly in his book The Creative Act: ‘Sharing art is the price of making it; exposing your vulnerability is the fee.’ ” What is given then in exchange for the Artist’s vulnerability? The change, of course, but, change can also be taken as evolution. So, in the hindsight of its overview, all past Art becomes the history of ecstatic evolving beliefs exchanged throughout time, and all changed by now. Now ask yourself this, if you believe in this language of words, are you herein being the Artistic truth, as your self, adopting this way of thinking as part of your role, character, and image? So, for peace of mind, allow yourself some creative change.”
Bio:
Alphons Van Mil was born on the Isle of Texel, in the North Sea of the Netherlands. His was always a scholarly and artistic family. For most of the last 50 years, Al Van Mil has created visual artworks using a large variety of mediums, including acrylic or oil paint on large canvases. His works range from landscapes and portraits as abstracted expressions, to eclectic hybrids as conceptually appealing ideas.
Van Mil was at first inspired by the conceptual Canadian artists couple of Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow. He consequently received mentoring from Conceptual Artist Eric Cameron while studying Fine Art at the University of Guelph. Creating art full time since he graduated, Van Mil’s work has been exhibited in private and public galleries, including the Musee Des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, The National Gallery of Canada, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. His earlier paintings were also inspired by the mixed metaphors of Pop artists like James Rosenquist, which drove him to develop a broad vocabulary of original styles to juxtapose. Van Mil’s eclectic conceptual approach was further influenced by the poetry of E. E. Cummings, the lectures of Marshall McKluhan, and by the modal improvisations of BeBop Jazz artist Miles Davis. An experiential take on the architecture of Frank Gehry also influenced his later work.
Van Mil honed his techniques by painting onstage as a Performance Artist with the multi-genre improvisational arts group called Collaborations. He shared the stage with many prominent Canadian musicians, dancers and opera stars, and also co-designed sets for many performances.
Van Mil was commissioned to paint the portraits of the two MVP winners by the Toronto Blue Jays for the two years when they won their two consecutive baseball playoff titles. He also illustrated the CLA Book of the Year Award winning title, ‘The Tiny Kite of Eddy Wing,’ a children’s book written by Maxine Trottier.
Commercial as well as fine art projects broadened Van Mil’s interests over the years, producing works for international clientele chiefly from Chicago to Toronto, to New York, and down the eastern seaboard to Atlanta. Partnering with Blady and others, Van Mil founded and ran an architectural technology and model-making company for 6 years called Architectural Dimensions, named one of the top three in the world by New York magazine. Blady +Van Mil’s expertise gained in 3D modelling further informed the moulage technique they co-invented for the Rising from the Canvas collaborative series.