John Boyle (artist)
John B. Boyle (John Bernard Boyle) is a Canadian painter and part of the London Regionalism art movement. Born on September 23, 1941 in London, Ontario, he is largely self-taught and has also worked as an activist, curator, and writer.
Boyle grew up in London and studied at the Ontario Teachers’ College and the University of Western Ontario. He taught elementary school in St. Catharines from 1962 to 1968, then became a full-time artist in 1968. He began painting in 1960 and was inspired to pursue art after seeing a Van Gogh show circulated by the Stedelijk Museum in 1962. He started exhibiting in 1964 and sparked controversy in 1966 with Seated Nude at the Western Ontario Exhibition.
A key moment for his career came with the Heart of London show in 1968 at the National Gallery of Canada, which helped bring London Regionalism to national attention. Boyle lived for many years in a converted church in Elsinore, Ontario (near Owen Sound) and moved to Peterborough in 2002.
Among his notable works is the enamelled steel mural Our Nell (1980) for the Queen subway station in Toronto, depicting Nellie McClung and William Lyon Mackenzie. He also designed sets for the play Buffalo Jump (1972) and curated early gallery shows in St. Catharines. From 1973 through the 1990s, he frequently exhibited at Nancy Poole’s Studio in Toronto.
Other activities include illustration and book design (The Port Dalhousie Stories, 1987), publishing a novel No Angel Came (1995), and playing kazoo in the Nihilist Spasm Band since 1965. He was the first president of the Niagara Artist’s Cooperative (now the Niagara Artists Centre) in 1970 and the founding spokesperson for Canadian Artists’ Representation Ontario in 1971.
Boyle is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and has served on boards such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canada Council Arts Advisory Panel, and the Canadian Conference of the Arts. His papers are held in the John Boyle Fonds at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
He is represented by Loch Gallery in Toronto.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 08:40 (CET).