Sold for: $40,950

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Scott Watson, Jack Shadbolt, 1990, page 204

In a 1982 journal entry, Jack Shadbolt wrote: “What I am thinking of is a form which would seem to indicate the very live organic process, not imposed from the outside by the artist through stylization but in which nature itself seems to be yearning to reveal itself as reaching from an inchoate state toward a declaration of abstract structure.” Thus for Shadbolt, structure was emergent from matter which, in the case of Summer Garden, takes the form of a tangled and colourful abstracted web of vegetal and insect life, whether microcosmic or macrocosmic. Shadbolt sought intensity in organic form, which is certainly expressed here in the explosive, active shapes and the brilliant palette of charged primary colours. Shadbolt’s treatment of form was gestural and intuitive, expressing the force of nature. These activated forms create a psychologically resonant inner landscape that acts upon the viewer. For Shadbolt, the act of painting was paramount, and in Summer Garden his wielding of colour, composition and brush-stroke exhibits the power of this West Coast modernist master.

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