Sold for: $16,000

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, British Columbia
Sold sale of Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 6, 1997, lot 215
Private Collection, Vancouver
Sold sale of Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, September 26, 2016, lot 121
Private Collection, Vancouver

It was Jack Shadbolt’s practice to revisit and alter earlier works, evidence of his process of evolution, and here he updated a 1954 work in 1975. After his 1948 / 1949 trip to New York and exposure to the New York School and international painters such as Pablo Picasso, Shadbolt plunged into abstraction. However, this was an abstraction that still referenced landscape or living forms in some way, and Field Voices expresses Shadbolt’s deep interest in biomorphic form, something that was very present in his work in the mid-1970s, when this work was changed. This active tableau of forms is based on the natural world—such as seeds, grasses, growth of all sorts, and life teeming below the surface of the soil. It is a rich and vital explosion of forms, suggesting a myriad of associations—totemic columns on the right, cellular and vegetal forms on the left, all rising and floating in a soft, abstracted background. Densely arrayed across the surface, Shadbolt’s forms speak to us all at once, broadcasting their presence and vitality.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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