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PROVENANCE
A Prominent Montreal Family Estate

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Evan H. Turner, Contemporary Canadian Painting and Sculpture, Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, 1963, reproduced, unpaginated

EXPOSITION
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 79th Annual Spring Exhibition, 1962, titled as Otsatot
Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, New York, Contemporary Canadian Painting and Sculpture, January 25 - February 24, 1963, titled as Ostatot

Interest in the work of Marcelle Ferron, one of Canada’s most compelling contemporary painters, has grown steadily over the past few years. Her strict religious background – she was raised in a Catholic convent – was countered by the support of her liberal father, and it was his influence, along with the support of important teachers, that enabled Ferron to overcome the narrow societal expectations placed on a Catholic woman in the 1940s. She was, despite marriage, family and intense pressure to place those things first in her life, able to fully achieve her own aspirations as an artist.

Ferron initially trained in Quebec City under Jean Paul Lemieux, but was expelled from the École des beaux-arts as a result of her refusal to adhere to a suitably conservative subject and style. Her inclinations resonated much better with those of Paul-Émile Borduas, who suggested she become a student of his at l’École du meuble. There, her work flowered and her commitment to her ideals solidified. She would sign both the open letter to the Spring Salon of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Automatist manifesto Refus global in 1948. When Borduas lost his job as a result of the manifesto, support for the work of his compatriot painters, including Ferron, dwindled. They had been labeled radicals in the press, and when Ferron, now a mother of three, was refused by the Salon jury of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1950, she participated in a protest exhibition. In addition to being considered a radical, her struggle for acceptance as a serious artist chafed with Quebec society at large, which expected her to be a wife and mother instead. A small inheritance in 1953 came as an artistic salvation, and she moved her family to France where she was accepted into the creative ferment of post-war Paris. Her work at this time took a turn toward the joyous, and became filled with a sense of freedom, openness and the use of startlingly brilliant colour. The influence of Borduas is still apparent, as it was throughout her oeuvre, but the colour, tactile surface and composition is distinctly Ferron. In Paris, Ferron developed an interest in stained glass, training under a master glazer, eventually patenting her own technique in this medium and working with it to execute important public commissions. Her understanding and appreciation for the interaction of colour and light and how they work together underlines her paintings and marks them instantly as being by her hand. There are elements of regularity in her work too; paint is often applied in quadrants and she uses consistently large swatches of colour, sometimes creating motifs of flags or simple squared-off shapes. These geometric forms contrast beautifully with the open airiness of her paintings.

Ferron was an obsessive technician and ground her unique pigments by hand, using poppy-seed oil as a binder (linseed oil is generally used) because it gave her colours the luminosity she was seeking, making them reminiscent of the effect of coloured light coming through stained glass. She often used the high-chroma blue that we see here in Otsatot, which, when blended with less intense colours such as the oranges and greens she has used to set off the blue here, adds depth and movement to her compositions. There is a certain push-pull, a struggle for dominance of colour in her works that comes from the play of a wonderful, imagined light shining up through her colours and turning them into jewels.

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