Sold for: $46,250

PROVENANCE
Estate of the Artist
Private Collection, Alberta

LITERATURE
William Moore and Stuart Reid, Celebrating Life: The Art of Doris McCarthy, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1999, page 214

From her first trip to the region in 1937, to Edith and Maligne Lakes, Doris McCarthy was fascinated with the majesty and solitude of the Canadian Rockies. Much later, she returned yearly from 1974 to 1980, painting at such stunning locations as Banff, Golden and Jasper. This dramatic Jasper scene captures the bold shapes of towering mountains, their glaciers melting and running down channels in the rock surface. McCarthy’s admiration for the Group of Seven can be observed in her work, particularly for Lawren Harris, whose studio she visited in 1928. She was inspired by his use of sculpted forms pared to their essential shapes, as seen in her depiction of these peaks many decades later.

Paul Gauguin wrote: “Don’t copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it.” McCarthy does just that in her unique interpretation of this majestic scene, using simplified shape, colour and line. Glacial runoff is distilled to curves of blue running through featureless white snow, banks of trees are rendered as a ribbon of green, and clouds appear as oval shapes. The abstracted quality of Three Peaks Plus, Above Ice Shapes intensifies this landscape, giving it tremendous impact.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars