PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Jack Shadbolt, City of Vancouver, Public Art Registry, link, accessed March 12, 2013

Jack Shadbolt began to work with images of butterflies in 1974, using their delicate forms in both collage works and in paintings, and later, larger public installations. The image in this group is from a photograph of Shadbolt’s 1987 large-scale three-dimensional constructed work Primavera, commissioned for the MacMillan Bloedel Building in Vancouver, and completed in collaboration with Alan Wood and Greg Bullen. This work was subsequently acquired by Tantalus Vineyards in Kelowna.

Shadbolt intended this image to be “expansive and jubilant”, as he described – in contrast to the massive, grey building, and to uplift the public who would view it. He stated, “What better than a great ‘primavera’ for Spring to cheer the spirit? And what more impressive than a large sculptural relief in full colour? And what more poetically exuberant as a permanent symbol than two splendid butterflies breaking from the white cocoon of Spring - the one on the left an abstraction of pieces coming together to form the insect and the one on the right a full-fledged realization? It is hoped that once the mind is focussed in this direction a certain transformational process is suggested and with it certain mythological overtones might unfold. The cocoon may then become the violet and white mythic egg from which Spring is born. The symbolic bird and flowers now become the guardians of this ritual birth of new life, this PRIMAVERA.”

In this series of hand-painted posters of the Primavera theme, each has been hand-painted in a similar palette, but in a unique manner. Mounted as Shadbolt intended, they become a cloud of butterflies against a wall.

This work is comprised of 15 hand~painted posters and one title page of the original image. Each poster measures 20 x 26 inches. The group is meant to be installed with five works in a row and three in a column.

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