Toni Onley, the flying artist, is one of the most highly respected landscape artists working in Canada today. He is a modern day explorer with an insatiable curiosity to travel to all reaches of the world in search of line, shape and colour. While he is best known for his watercolours and prints, it is his unmistakable style and succinct vision that sets him apart from other artists.

Toni Onley was born in 1928 on the Isle of Man, off the west coast of Britain in the Irish Sea and died in a tragic plane crash on the Fraser River in British Columbia in 2004. The Isle of Man was a perfect setting for a perceptive youngster to explore the landscape. While loving to draw and paint from every early age, he credits the influence of his grandmother for instilling in him a love of the afternoons through glens and mountains, along coastal trails, she with her book of verse and me with my box of watercolours. We would rest on the brow of a hill, I would paint and she read to me Wordsworth or Keats and thus began a life long quest for the young artist. Following grade school at the age of 14, he enrolled in the Douglas School of Art and began a formal education which included an introduction to drawing, watercolour painting and etching. Difficult financial times following the Second World War forced the Onley family to emigrate to Canada in 1948 and, after a brief stay in southern Ontario, they settled in Penticton, British Columbia.

Toni Onley's quest for learning and creating the perfect painting has never subsided. While living in Ontario, he was fortunate to study with Carl Schaeffer and discovered the inspirational water colours of David Milne. Two years following his move to BC in 1955, his urge to travel and learn took him to the Instituto Allende in Mexico. It was there, fuelled by frustration and the challenges of abstraction, that he discovered amazing success with collages created with his torn paintings. In 1964 he received a Senior Canada Council Fellowship and returned to England to study etching. While in London at the time, he rediscovered his roots by frequenting art museums showing the nineteenth century watercolour paintings of J.M.W. Turner, Cotman and Cox.

He is a prolific painter and printmaker. Since his first one man show in the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1958, he has exhibited regularly across Canada, in Great Britain and in the United States. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Tate Museum, the Royal Albert & Victorian Museum in London, England, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The chine colle etching, Martin Frobisher's foolsgold was inspired by a forboding Artic landscape and the fascinating tale of the English explorer Martin Frobisher, who, while searching for the Northwest Passage in 1576, created a frenzy for gold exploration and false investment in the new land. The artist's adept brushwork captures the mystique of the northern landscape depicts his intrigue with the history of the Arctic exploration.