Eric Cameron was born in England in 1935 and, following studies in Painting at Durham University and in Art History at London University, taught for ten years at Leeds University before moving to Canada as Chair of the Art Department at the University of Guelph in 1969.

It was his last three years at Guelph that saw his most intensive video activity as well as the beginnings of his critical writing. Two tapes were shown in Videoscape at the Art Gallery of Ontario, while the installation Keeping Marlene out of the Picture was presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery in a two-person exhibition with Noel Harding, which travelled to the National Gallery of Canada and the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax; it is presently on view in Traffic at the Blackwood Gallery in Mississauga.

In 1976 he took up a position at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where, under the influence of the layer paintings of colleagues such as Jeffrey Spalding, Garry Neil Kennedy and Mary Scott, he began the Thick Paintings for which he is best known. These continued after his final move to the University of Calgary in 1987. Meanwhile, video continued to feature in his installations, and his videotapes continued to be shown in Canada and overseas (Analogue at the Tate Britain). He remade one old "Contact Piece" in colour to accompany a small installation of Thick Paintings at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Eric Cameron was the recipient of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 1994 and a Governor General's Award in 2004. In 2007 he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada. He has completed fifty-one years of university-level teaching and continues to teach full-time. He is represented by the Trépanier Baer Gallery in Calgary, who have just sold one of his Thick Paintings to the French National Art Collection. Other works, including videotapes, are held in museum collections across Canada.

Artist Code: 201