[3] Gorman was born and grew up in Ottawa, a city where the National Gallery of Canada with its offering of Canadian art, particularly Tom Thomson, is an inescapable presence.
Having moved to Toronto to attend the Ontario College of Art and Design, Gorman was written about by Jock Macdonald, his teacher, who said that he had the greatest promise among all the young artists he knew.
[6] At first, his abstraction only evoked landscape references, internalized, then he turned to painting nature full scale, especially the foliage and sky around Limerick Lake area near Bancroft, where his brother John had a cabin.
[6] In 1998, Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto held his The Orpheus Series in which Gorman used an image of a single tree he found congenial.
This time it appeared as a loosely painted central icon in a dazzlingly lavish display of colour.