Marsha Lederman profiles Chris Cran collector Peter Boyd in the Globe and Mail:
As soon as he left the University of Western Ontario and landed a job, Peter Boyd bought a car, some furniture and his first work of art.
He has since spent “hundreds of thousands” of dollars on his art habit, running out of wall space at home and keeping much of his collection in storage (necessitated, in part, by the 2009 sale of his oil-field seismic-services company Arcis Corp., and the subsequent disappearance of office walls on which to hang the work).
Influenced by childhood trips to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., he began his collection with historical work by artists such as David Milne, but has sold or gifted most of it and now exclusively collects contemporary art. His collection of about 100 works (it peaked at about 200) is populated with artists connected to the Canadian West, including Chris Cran, Douglas Coupland, Attila Richard Lukacs and Geoffrey James, but he also owns work by Robert Mapplethorpe and Eric Fischl. “You’re always falling in love with art if you love art,” he says.
His latest entrepreneurial venture is Genius Wines; its first release a pricey Sonoma County cabernet sauvignon he calls Creo. “It comes from the Latin word for creativity,” he says. “It’s my tribute to artists who are geniuses.”