Sold for: $21,060

PROVENANCE
Laing Galleries, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
Sold sale of Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 28, 2013, lot 23
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Jack Shadbolt, The Canadian Architect, November 1959

EXHIBITED
Art Gallery of Hamilton, The Women's Committee Fourth Biennial Sale of Fine Arts, 1961 (label on verso)

When he returned from spending 1957 in Europe, primarily in the South of France, Jack Shadbolt noted that he began to “fuse the new impacts of colour, light, surface and image-motifs with my former preoccupations here - the dark rituals of the cycle of growth, flowering and dying of natural forms, and their evocation in...earth colours, flashing lights and darks and the seething under-rhythms which express the blind pervasions of growth energy.” Although its composition is reminiscent of Shadbolt’s Mediterranean townscapes, with their clusters of buildings surrounded by fields, Tapestry, with its darker, earthier colour palette and organic forms, reflects a return to his West Coast roots. In its richly woven imagery, it also includes intriguing symbols such as the heart form, perhaps included to convey a lyrical sense of joy. He wrote that in his work, “Forms can confront one another, oppose one another, extend one another, pick up one another’s rhythms, dance together…or confer together. The dialogue of interchange is endless.” Shadbolt’s rich interplay of symbols and the expression through his painterly gestures of a seething organic process give Tapestry a great sense of vitality.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars