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
“The artistic truth? Only human authenticity can embrace life’s ambiguities. In order to transform life’s heartbeats creatively, art resolves itself over and over again, one small artwork at a time.
Artificial intelligence alone, lacks true heartfelt emotion: it can only use imitation as its truth; IT IS A MAXIMALIST way of thinking. For some applications this can be good, but not for ecstatically true art. True artists are not on some epic journey; they create one artwork at a time, each a single experiment with new personal parameters, thereby working in the present on a single pact between curiosity and ambition, trying to make one small vision fly. Thereby artists authentically transform life’s experiences creatively, for a single artistic purpose. Artificial Intelligence can never be more than a tool: only a means to an end, but ending is not the be all and end all either; it can only be a form of stasis. However, even in Art, resolution is temporary, a now and a then.
I believe that each step of life’s journey is as important as the end, for the very reason that time is change. There will always be new ambiguities and yearnings to resolve them. Hereby I embrace my time to create one other resolution, for now and again, even now using this chosen medium of writing, as authentically human as my heart, hand and mind will allow, this time.
A heart is felt as ecstatic rhythms in the mind; minds witness journeys as ecstatic memory ranging from comedy to beauty. Art’s hand strives to resolve beauty as significantly truth worthy. For all these reasons true artists authentically can make one experiment fly at a time”
Poem 2025:
AIN’T NO EPIC JOURNEY
Oh; Please —!
Pay witness to what we do
Is it to me or is it to you
Nobody knows who is talking to who
And I don’t have a clue
Nobody cares what we are praying for
As witnesses to our times
Saying yes and still pursuing
Moving on to better skies
While still misconstruing lies
As a magic ride
With many a thank you and goodbye
I say to the multi-mirrored minds
Why not lighten up your hell —?
Making just one small thing fly at a time
Ain’t no epic journey
— al van mil
Bio:
Alphons Van Mil was born on the Isle of Texel, in the Netherlands, to 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.