Sold for: $29,250

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, British Columbia
Sold sale of Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 9, 2001, lot 365
Private Collection, USA

LITERATURE
Scott Watson, Jack Shadbolt, 1990, page 193

During the 1980s Jack Shadbolt continued to work with a fertile and iconic motif, the butterfly. He wrote that the butterfly motif contained “the maximum decorative richness beneath which, as in the primitive arts, a deeper message could be launched that slips in under the viewer’s guard.” The butterfly became a metaphor, which is clearly manifested in this work. Shadbolt was aware of novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov’s use of the butterfly as a metaphor for sexual pursuit and conquest and the accessing of imaginary realms. This transformational image of the man / butterfly is a powerful one - it hovers in the central panel like a prince of the invisible world flanked by two acolytes, exuding a primal vitality. A central theme of Shadbolt’s butterfly images is that of transformation – here reflecting humankind’s fascination with the properties of living creatures utterly different from themselves. In this fusion of man and butterfly, both draw a strange power from each other. Butterfly Man is a fascinating example of Shadbolt’s shaman-like channeling of the power of nature through transformational images.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars