The Integrity Project  is the first of a series of forums on the subject of integrity in public and private life. It is designed to establish a public context in which people in the arts and professions will be able to step aside from their public roles and speak about their own efforts to cope with the pressures of contemporary society. 

Discussion of the experiences and strategies of those in public life will -
   -  indicate how the traditional moral and aesthetic ideal of integrity might adapt to social change, and thus survive;
   -  afford insight into the special relationship which serious artists have to themselves and to their work; and
   -  help to transform the deep personal concern for integrity into a public concern.

The speakers in the first forum are the artist Dennis Burton, the politician Graham Lea, and the novelist David Watmough. There will be ample opportunity for open discussion with the participants.  Barbara Fisher will perform, with a quartet, thematic music which she has composed for the Project.
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Dennis Burton was born in Lethbridge in 1933; his career in painting began in 1950 through scholarships to Pickering College, the Ontario College of Art, the Royal Canadian Academy, U.S.C., and the Skowhegan School in Maine. From 1957 to 1960 he was Senior Graphic Designer with CBC-TV in Toronto.  He is the founder of both the New School of Art  (1965) and Arts' Sake Inc. (1977), and he has been Director of the New School and Chairman of the painting department of the Ontario College of Art.  In 1979 he was Artist-in-Residence at the Emily Carr College of Art  and he has taught there for the past five years. He has been the recipient of ten Toronto Art Directors Club medals and numerous Canada Council Senior awards.  His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art N.Y., the Pasadena Art Museum, the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, and major Canadian universities and corporations.  Although he has worked in abstract expressionism for twenty-seven years, he is still best known for his avant-garde erotic art of the period 1965 to 1968. Dennis Burton passed away in July 2013.

For twenty-five years I have signed my artworks, in every medium, by printing my name in capital letters, including also the date of completion, with the day, month, and year in numerals.  1 sign cheques and other financial transactions always with a written signature.  To date, I cannot recall ever placing my written signature on anything (except employment contracts) that have a monetary value as high as any of my lowest priced artworks.  Such is the manner, gesture, or attitude I maintain to separate that which has integrity (my artwork) from that which has questionable, variable and speculative worth (money). Consequently, the printed artwork signature continues, and will continue, to appreciate.  Whereas my written signature often appears on worthless surfaces.  - Dennis Burton

David Watmough (b. 1926) was raised in Cornwall.  He was educated at London University and Stanford, majoring in theology.  He has lived in Vancouver for twenty-two years, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1963.  His six volumes of fiction comprise the fictional biography of a Cornish-Canadian protagonist, Davey Bryant, whose experiences are echoes of Mr. Watmough’s own life. He has given over a thousand dramatic readings of his work, in the United Kingdom and West Germany as well as across the United States and Canada, and he as contributed as a playwright and commentator to the C.B.C. and the B.B.C.. He is also an active literary critic and essayist. His most recent publications are Connecticut Countess  (1984) and The Reluctant Pioneer, on the early history of opera in western Canada.

I am currently working upon my seventh volume of fiction involving the life and times of Davey Bryant, entitled A Resonance of Echoes. This overlaps in time the ultimate chronicles about Davey in both The Connecticut Countess  and Fury,  which appeared respectively in the spring and fall of 1984, but draws more exclusively upon my Canadian experience in general and westcoast life in particular.  The same western Canadian living for the past twenty-two years has resulted in my first non-fiction book in three decades: The Unlikely Pioneer , which is scheduled for publication by Mosaic Press this summer.  It is an account of the opera companies in Vancouver, Edmonton, and Winnipeg In connection  with the life and work of their common founder, Irving Gutmann.  This year also sees my debut as an anthologist, with the centennial volume, The Vancouver Fiction Book,  which Polestar Press is publishing in September, to which I have also furnished an introduction. The other major activity on which I am currently engaged Is also a centennial observance.  It is an hour-long radio program for the C.B.C. on D.H. Lawrence, the author to whom I am most indebted as a writer and whose birth was in the same year as my adopted city of Vancouver. - David Watmough

John Banks was born in England in 1945 but he has resided in Canada, principally Victoria, since 1967, becoming a citizen in 1971.  His academic background is in philosophy (Ph.D. University of Calgary 1973), and he has taught in various capacities at the University of Victoria.  Since 1979 he has worked as a private scholar, mainly in the areas of philosophical psychology and the philosophy of literature. His published writings concern the manner in which the self is represented in fiction and autobiography, and The Integrity Project  is in many ways an extension of that enquiry.

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Barbara Fisher, born in Edmonton in 1952, has resided in Victoria-Vancouver since 1969.  Her early musical education was in classical piano, however in 1973 she turned to jazz, first attending a special program at Malaspina College and, later, workshops at the Banff School of Fine Art.  She has been composing and performing, as a pianist and vocalist, since 1976. She has made numerous television appearances, and her writing has been supported by the Canada Council.  In 1979 the band with which she had performed for three years, Elmo Whiggett, released the souvenir album Autograph Copy. In 1982 she was invited to present a concert in conjunction with the exhibition at the Burnaby Art Gallery, Palindromes: On Women Aging. Last year an album of live performances was released, Barbara Fisher Live. The pieces she has prepared for The Integrity Project are a fusion of jazz and classical styles, reflecting the diversity of her musical experience and interests.
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Programme

 Bossa Nouveau*    Barbara Fisher - piano; Rene Worst - bass; Blaine Dunaway - flugelhorn; Graham Boyle - percussion.
 Musicisum              A "musical palindrome"   
 Introduction, John Banks
 Dennis Burton
 Graham Lea

            Take Five, O Canada     - intermission -

 Soundness
 David Watmough
 Musicisum, au reverso
 Discussion

*All selections composed and arranged by Barbara Fisher, CAPAC, with the exception of Take Five  and O Canada , composed by D. Brubeck and C. Lavallee respectively.