Promises Kept

Promises Kept transcends the typical art book, melding elements of autobiography, biography, and regional cultural history into a profound exploration of artistic meaning. Its unveiling has the potential to quietly, insistently, prompt a re-examination of Newfoundland Labrador’s (NL) cultural and artistic landscape.

At the symbolic heart of this contemplative volume, but holding out in Scott Fillier’s private back garden is an artist’s easel in steel, being slowly oxidised by the elements. Gifted him in 1998, the easel became less utilitarian and more a sculptural experience as it filtered the artist’s newly adopted Ontario landscape qualities through its brutally forged angles and joints.

In a moment of profound inspiration, c. 2000, Fillière draped the easel with a single link of rusting chain, elevating it instantly into austere metaphor, projecting something of the artist’s own Prometheus Bound fate, while retaining artistic commitments: promises faithfully fulfilled, wherever/whatever the circumstance.

Fillière, born in Roddickton, NL., Canada, 1939, is, despite a lifetime devoted to his art; despite his scores of superb artworks in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, poetry, and music as documented within these pages—is without the most modest recognition in his province, and, despite these polymath talents,without any regional or national presence whatsoever. Promises Kept addresses many of the reasons why.