He was recognized in the late 1950s and early 1960s as one of Canada's pioneering abstractionists, having been variously linked with the Toronto painters associated with The Isaacs Gallery and The Heart of London group that included Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe and Murray Favro.

[2] "When I was a child," Urquhart says, "there were creative people in my family: a great aunt who painted pottery; my mother who did little watercolours under instruction at school and my father who was a photographer at one time, and serious about his work.

She was an artist in the sense that she liked landscaping the grounds of our house, which were considerable, given the fact that we lived in the centre of the town of Niagara Falls on half an acre.

He also attended the Albright Art School (1955) with Seymore Drumlevitch, a painter in Western New York; Larry Calcagno who showed with the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York; advertising design teacher Don Nicholls; and Robert Bruce, a Canadian who taught illustration.

In 1956, Isaacs asked Urquhart to join his growing stable of artists, including Michael Snow, Joyce Weiland and Graham Coughtry.

Urquhart was one of a handful of artists responsible for generating the excitement and community engagement that garnered national acclaim for the growing London art scene during the late 1960s.

The organization successfully established a fee structure for public museum and gallery exhibitions of contemporary artists.

[1] He also worked on book illustration which put him in collaboration with such authors as his wife Jane, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Matt Cohen Stuart MacKinnon and Louis Dudek.

[1] In 1958 Urquhart embarked on the first of what would become annual, if not more frequent, stays in Europe, attracted to what he called the "otherness" of the visual experiences there, especially the landscape, architecture and pilgrimage sites such as Lourdes and Vimy Ridge in France.

Urquhart may have begun his career as a painter, but he later felt the need to prolong the time viewers spent looking at a work of art.

Such things as scarecrows in Spain or truck scales in France took on an excitement for me that many works in traditional galleries no longer had.

He had a collection of over 800 120 mm slides that he photographed of sites and cemetery artifacts (wreaths, wrought iron objects, etc.)

As Dorothy Cameron pointed out, its opening was just a mere "maddening" slit, but it was, nevertheless, "the first box to directly indicate an interior."

[8] In Fourteen Rings, a box sculpture in the MacKenzie Art Gallery collection, Urquhart presents an opening-box with an intriguing title.

With this exhibit, Urquhart reminds the viewer that exploring interior mysteries can be more rewarding than admiring familiar and predictable exteriors.