Sold for: $34,250

PROVENANCE
Collection of Toronto-Dominion Bank, Calgary
Private Corporate Collection, Vancouver

Marion Nicoll is widely regarded as one of Alberta’s finest abstract painters. Known for her bold, simplified style, her work poetically captures the elemental aspects of the Albertan landscape and people. Nicoll studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and then the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary (now ACAD), before becoming their first female instructor of craft and design in 1933. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, she maintained a traditional approach to representation, and painted almost exclusively naturalistic landscapes. Nicoll’s conversion to abstraction in the later part of her career was the result of two main influences: automatic drawing - as introduced by Jock MacDonald, and the 1957 Emma Lake workshop led by Will Barnett. Automatic drawing was a creative revelation to Nicoll - the Surrealist practise of spontaneous creation opened her mind to alternative forms of representation. She later recognized Barnett’s clean and basic forms and colours as the optimal form for her abstract representation, and trips to New York (1958) and Sicily (1959) solidified her commitment to working abstractly.

Nicoll’s abstract works always began with an experience of a place, object or person. In contrast with the emotional spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism, she was extremely thoughtful in her process of conceptualization. She would meditate on the experience, sketching and experimenting to distill its essential aspects. By the 1960s, Nicoll had begun to establish her own visual vocabulary of carefully arranged spheres, totemic figures or hieroglyphic shapes. She avoided colour gradation, instead favouring interlocking forms, imbuing her work with a sense of sureness and clarity. In Calgary I, shapes of rich blue and maroon are contained within the stark neutral bands. Densely filling their boundaries, the action of the interlocking shapes seem to push to expand: Nicoll’s abstract representation of the experience of containment.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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