Response By
Harold Usher
Colette Urban I Can Tell Fortunes, 2012
ink and collage on paper Gift from the Estate of Colette Urban, 2014
American-born Colette Urban (1952-2013) was a longstanding artist in the London area. I Can Tell Fortunes was the last series of artwork she created, one year before succumbing to cancer.
Response
This emotive silhouette by Colette Urban displays her autobiography and illuminates beauty, amidst pain and agony of the inevitable. The organic line fragments accompany high-contrast collages of colourful tapestries, articulating pivotal awareness of stages. Happiness in the whimsical curves and hues preceding cancer diagnosis envisioned as pointy projectiles penetrating her core and knocking her off balance; disease shrouded with sharp spikes siphoning the essence of life; and geometric abstracts for life’s haunting burdens and death to keep at bay.
Harold Usher was the first person of African/Caribbean ancestry to serve on London City Council, from 2000 to 2018. A cancer survivor, Harold is the author of PROSTATE! PROSTATE! PROSTATE! A Problem of Men. Originally from Belize, he has been Honorary Consul of Belize to Canada with Jurisdiction for the Province of Ontario since 2019. Harold holds a Bachelor of Civil Engineering from Concordia University.