Toronto - The Canadian Aviation Artists’ Association (CAAA) presents a special exhibition of paintings that depict the finest historic achievements in aircraft and aviation events at the Toronto Aerospace Museum from Saturday, April 30 to Saturday, October 2, 2005.

The Art of Aviation exhibition features more than 30 original paintings as part of this unique project that commemorates outstanding aircraft that have made significant contributions to flight during the past 100 years. The colourful artwork graphically re-captures dramatic moments of flight from early balloons through the war years to state-of-the-art jet fighters and space vehicles.

The Canadian Aviation Artists’ Association is a collective of male and female artists from a broad range of backgrounds representing communities across North America from Alaska to Nova Scotia. As a Millennium project, the CAAA chose to immortalize on canvas the most important air vehicles of all time. A panel of knowledgeable experts, including historians, archivists, aviators and artists, undertook the daunting task of choosing the aircraft. Each CAAA artist was requested to select one or more candidates for a painting, while no more than three artists were permitted to choose the same aircraft. When completed, the paintings were judged and the best rending of each aircraft was selected to form part of this body of work that will be on display and are for sale as part of this cross-country touring exhibition.

The artists featured in the exhibition include: Geoff Bennett, Ron Carwardine, Don Connolly, Chris Driver, Charles Kadin, Layne Larsen, Ray Lawton, Darcy MacEachern, Priscilla Messner-Patterson, Martin Myers, Frank Oord, Dan Ryan, Tom Sinclair, Steve Tournay, Richard Wickens and John Walmsley.

Toronto’s only museum for air and space technology is located in the former de Havilland Canada aircraft factory established at Downsview in 1929. The site is the birthplace of many of this country’s most successful aircraft, and where Canada’s first spacecraft, the Alouette I satellite, was assembled.

Visitors to the museum can see several Toronto-built aircraft that made an important contribution to Canadian history, including a 1943 D.H.82C Tiger Moth training biplane, the City of Toronto’s Avro Lancaster Mk. X bomber under restoration, and a full-scale replica of the famous Avro CF-105 Arrow supersonic interceptor.