Sold for: $93,600

PROVENANCE
Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver
Canadian Paraplegic Association, Ontario
Sold sale of Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, Thursday, November 9, 2000, lot 309
Private Collection, USA

LITERATURE
Scott Watson, Jack Shadbolt, 1990, page 149, a similar 1976 triptych entitled Transformations #5 reproduced page 148 and a similar 1977 - 1979 triptych entitled Evening Valley Flight reproduced page 178

Jack Shadbolt was an influential second-generation West Coast modernist. During the 1930s and 1940s, he had been keenly interested in emerging art movements in Europe and the United States, and had assimilated influences from Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, aspects of Surrealism and early Abstract Expressionism. After World War II, he emerged as a leader in Vancouver’s modernist community of artists, architects and planners. Shadbolt’s profound connection with nature in British Columbia, expressed through the use of biomorphic form, created a body of work that, considered as a whole, was an explosion of creative ideas that continued to evolve decade after decade. He was an artist intimately linked with the images of the West Coast while being connected to a world view of emerging art movements and theories. His work was universal in its merging of the conscious and unconscious, its infusion of psychological yearnings and potentialities and primitive potency.

One of Shadbolt’s most extraordinary and sought-after motifs is that of the butterfly or moth, which first made its appearance in the early 1970s. Shadbolt explained the genesis of his fascination with them: while in the Swiss Alps in 1969, he was standing in a meadow when there appeared “up from the gentians, in front of our eyeballs, two zig-zagging fritillaries flip-flopping out over the space. Nothing much, but their event seemed momentous – demented, dangerous, memorable.” The abstract design of their wings was a rich source of patterning for Shadbolt’s complex images of organic form. One prominent aspect of this motif was its life-affirming connection with freedom and celebration. In Leopard Moth, the insect’s gorgeous wings float over an abstracted background containing drifting fragmented shapes that echo elements of their patterning. Shadbolt uses soft, modulated colour fields, with the darker palette suggesting the nocturnes the moths inhabit. Moths are mysterious, associated with the moon, and often used as symbols of intuition and psychic perception. Through their soft and languorous flight over an open atmospheric background, these moths create a dream-like world devoid of tension. Their large scale contributes to the dream-like quality that pervades the work – it is as if we have gone through the looking glass like Alice in Wonderland and inbibed the pill that makes us smaller – and they loom before us.

In the 1970s, Shadbolt worked on his Butterfly Transformations series, which ranged from works such as this, with large forms on abstracted backgrounds, to complex planes of layered and entangled biomorphic forms through which the butterfly flitted. Shadbolt continued to work with this important motif of butterfly and moth through the 1980s.

Shadbolt’s fluid and evocative treatment of this iconic image and the abstract properties of the surface itself reveal an artist in assured command of his subject. This lyrical night world of the Leopard Moth is unforgettable – through Shadbolt’s vision, we experience an alternate dimension in which the very existence of these exotic creatures mesmerizes us.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars