Rosemary Kilbourn is of one of Canada’s premier wood engravers. Trained at the Ontario College of Art in drawing and painting, Kilbourn is multi-dimensional in her practice; she is a painter, a stained glass artist, and a printmaker whose engravings can be found in several publications including Farley Mowat’s The Desperate People (1959), The Elements Combined: A History of the Steel Company of Canada (1960), and Florence Wyle’s The Shadow of the Year (1976).
In the mid 1950s, while still in her twenties, Kilbourn made a life-changing decision to purchase an 1872 schoolhouse in a remote region of Caledon Hills. Inspired by David Milne’s landscape work from the area, she was looking for a base from which to live and work. The Dingle Schoolhouse and its surrounding landscape became the heart of Kilbourn’s practice. The location has, over the last six decades, provided the artist with her primary subject matter; it is a landscape she has come to know and understand in profound and meaningful ways.