Wild Tinkls - by Tom Smart (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In 1965, Viktor Tinkl, a sculptor and later a teacher at Ontario College of Art, bought a schoolhouse in the farmland near Vallentyne, Ontario. Judith Wild joined him a few months later.

Their combined vision created the Tinkl's spectacular home, galleries and sculpture gardens. Over 60 years, their work -- sculpture in found materials for Viktor, fabric and geometry for Judith -- has evolved into "a riot of Seussical cement" and "mosaics in fabric."

Visiting their environment and living with their artwork is a thrill that thousands have enjoyed.

This book is a celebration of Judith Wild Tinkl's fibre art, Viktor's imaginative people, animals and kinetic sculptures, and the monumental concrete sculptures, sluices and decorations that fill acres of their home.

It is also a history of 60 years of shared life and artistic achievement.

Viktor has spent the 60 years, after working with Inuit printmakers in Northern Quebec, embarking on a life of making sculptures from everyday objects: enormous figures from cement and glass that decorate their property, embossed sheet metal doors and walls, kinetic sculptures that whirr and clank, and smaller pieces (like his 40th birthday image) from scraps of wood and metal.

He built all of the structures on the property, and used the leftover cement to make fanciful faces, tableaus and creatures that are full of the juice of life.

Judith Wild Tinkl is fascinated by geometry, and her quilts and fabric art depict colors that seem to move, triangular forms that merge into large landscapes, and combinations of fabric and beads and buttons that depict a nightscape of galaxies.

This book is limited to 1000 copies.

This is a two-sided (or upside-down) book, with about half devoted to each of the Wild Tinkls.

About the Author

Viktor Tinkl was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and came to Canada as a child. His work, irreverent and free, is widely admired.

Judith Wild Tinkl was born in England. She too came to Canada at a young age and became Assistant Dean and Associate Professor at Ontario College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows around Canada and internationally.